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\title{Anti-Oedipus}
\date{1972}
\author{Deleuze \& Guattari}
\subtitle{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}






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  {\usekomafont{title}{\huge Anti-Oedipus\par}}%
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  {\usekomafont{subtitle}{Capitalism and Schizophrenia\par}}%
  
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  {\usekomafont{author}{Deleuze \& Guattari\par}}%
  
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\tableofcontents
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% \#pubdate 2021-07-31T14:41:32
% \#source Retrieved on July 31, 2021 from https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf
\chapter{Contents}
\hyperdef{amuse}{toc}{}%
\label{textamuse:toc}%


\hyperref{}{amuse}{preface}{Preface} by Michel Foucault


\hyperref{}{amuse}{introduction}{Introduction} by Mark Seem


1. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1}{The Desiring-Machines}



\begin{quote}


1.
\hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-1}{Desiring-Production}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The schizo’s stroll • Nature and industry • The process •
Desiring-machine, partial objects and flows: and \dots{} and \dots{} • The first
synthesis: the connective synthesis or production of production •
The production of the body without organs •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-2}{The Body without
Organs}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Anti-production • Repulsion and the paranoiac machine •
Desiring-production and social production: how anti-production
appropriates the productive forces • Appropriation or attraction,
and the miraculating-machine—The second synthesis: the disjunctive
synthesis or production of recording • Either \dots{} or \dots{} • The
schizophrenic genealogy •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-3}{The Subject and
Enjoyment}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The celibate machine • The third synthesis: the conjunctive
synthesis or production of consumption-consummation • So it’s \dots{} •
Matter, egg, and intensities: I feel • The names in history •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-4}{A Materialist
Psychiatry}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The unconscious and the category of production • Theater or factory?
• The process as production process • The idealist conception of
desire as lack (fantasy) • The real and desiring-production: the
passive syntheses • One and the same production, social and desiring
• The reality of the group fantasy • The differences in régime
between desiring-production and social production • The socius and
the body without organs • Capitalism, and schizophrenia as its limit
(the counteracted tendency) • Neurosis, psychosis, and perversion •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


5. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-5}{The Machines}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Desiring-machines are machines, no metaphor • The first mode of
break: flows and selection from flows • The second mode: chains or
codes, and detachments from them • The third mode: subject and
residue •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


6. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-1-section-6}{The Whole and Its
Parts}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The status of multiplicities • The partial objects • The critique of
Oedipus, the Oedipal mystification • Already the child \dots{} • The
orphan-conscious • What is wrong with psychoanalysis? •



\end{quote}



\bigskip


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2}{Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family}



\begin{quote}


1. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-1}{The Imperialism of
Oedipus}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its modes • The Oedipal turning-point in psychoanalysis •
Desiring-production and representation • The abandonment of the
desiring-machines •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-2}{Three Texts of
Freud}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Oedipalization • The flattening-out of Judge Schreber’s delirium •
How psychoanalysis is still pious • The ideology of lack: castration
• Every fantasy is collective • The libido as flow • The rebellion
of the flows •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-3}{The Connective
Synthesis of Production}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its two uses, global and specific, partial and non-specific • The
family and the couple, filiation and alliance: triangulation • The
triangulation’s cause • The first paralogism of psychoanalysis:
extrapolation • The transcendent use and the immanent use •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-4}{The Disjunctive
Synthesis of Recording}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its two uses, exclusive and restrictive, inclusive, and
nonrestrictive • The inclusive disjunctions: genealogy • The
exclusive differentiations and the nondifferentiated • The second
paralogism of psychoanalysis: the Oedipal double-bind • Oedipus wins
at every turn • Does the borderline pass between the Symbolic and
the Imaginary?



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


5. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-5}{The Conjunctive
Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its two uses, segregative and biunivocal, nomadic and polyvocal •
The body without organs and intensities • Voyages, passages: I am
becoming • Every delirium is social, historical, and political •
Races • The meaning of identification • How psychoanalysis
suppresses sociopolitical content • An unrepentant familialism • The
family and the social field • Desiring-production and the investment
of social production • From childhood • The third paralogism of
psychoanalysis: Oedipus as a biunivocal “application” • The disgrace
of psychoanalysis with regard to history • Desire and the
infrastructure • Segregation and nomadism •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


6. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-6}{A Recapitulation of
the Three Syntheses}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Oedipus would make fools of us all • Oedipus and “belief” • Meaning
is use • The immanent criteria of desiring-production • Desire knows
nothing of the law, lack, and the signifier • “Were you born
Hamlet\dots{}?” •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


7. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-7}{Social Repression
and Psychic Repression}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The law • The fourth paralogism of psychoanalysis: the displacement,
or the disfiguration of the repressed • Desire is revolutionary •
The delegated agent of psychic repression • It is not psychoanalysis
that invents Oedipus •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


8. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-8}{Neurosis and
Psychosis}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Reality • The inverse relation • “Undecidable” Oedipus: resonance •
The meaning of actual factors • The fifth paralogism of
psychoanalysis: the afterward • The actuality of desiring-production
•



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


9. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-2-section-9}{The Process}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Leaving • The painter Turner • The interruptions of the process:
neurosis, psychosis, and perversion • The movement of
deterritorialization and territorialities •



\end{quote}



\bigskip


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3}{Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men}



\begin{quote}


1. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-1}{The Inscribing
Socius}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The recording process • In what sense capitalism is universal • The
social machine • The problem of the socius, coding the flows • Not
exchanging, but marking and being marked • The investment and the
disinvestment of organs • Cruelty: creating a memory for man •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-2}{The Primitive
Territorial Machine}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The full body of the earth • Filiation and alliance: their
irreducibility • The village pervert and local groups • Filiative
stock and blocks of alliance debt • Functional disequilibrium:
surplus value of code • It only works by breaking down • The
segmentary machine • The great fear of decoded flows • Death which
rises from within, but comes from without •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-3}{The Problem of
Oedipus}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Incest • The inclusive disjunctions on the full body of the earth •
From intensities to extension: the sign • In what sense incest is
impossible • The limit • The conditions of coding • The in-depth
elements of representation: the repressed representative, the
repressing representation, the displaced represented •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-4}{Psychoanalysis and
Ethnology}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Continuation of the Oedipal problem • A process of treatment in
Africa • The conditions of Oedipus and colonization • Oedipus and
ethnocide • Those who oedipalize don’t know what they’re doing • On
what is psychic repression brought to bear? • Culturalists and
universalists: their common postulates • In what sense Oedipus is
indeed universal: the five meanings of limit, Oedipus as one of them
• Use, or functionalism in ethnology • The desiring-machines do not
mean anything • Molar and molecular •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


5. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-5}{Territorial
Representation}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its surface elements • Debts and exchange • The five postulates of
the exchangist conception • Voice, graphism, and eye: the theater of
cruelty • Nietzsche • The death of the territorial system •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


6. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-6}{The Barbarian
Despotic Machine}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The full body of the despot • New alliance and direct filiation •
The paranoiac • Asiatic production • The bricks • The mystifications
of the State • Despotic deterritorialization and the infinite debt •
Overcoding the flows •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


7. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-7}{Barbarian or
Imperial Representation}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its elements • Incest and overcoding • The in-depth elements and the
migration of Oedipus: incest becomes possible • The surface
elements, the new voice-graphism relationship • The transcendent
object from on high • The signifier as the deterritorialized sign •
The despotic signifies and the signifieds of incest • Terror, the
law • The form of the infinite debt: latency, vengeance, and
\emph{ressentiment} • This is still not Oedipus \dots{} •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


8. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-8}{The Urstaat}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


A single State? • The State as a category • Beginning and origin •
The evolution of the State: becoming-concrete and becoming-immanent
•



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


9. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-9}{The Civilized
Capitalist Machine}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The full body of money-capital • Decoding and the conjunction of
decoded flows • Cynicism • Filiative capital and alliance capital •
The transformation of surplus value of code into a surplus value of
flux • The two forms of money, the two inscriptions • The falling
tendency • Capitalism and deterritorialization • Human surplus value
and machinic surplus value • Anti-production • The various aspects
of the capitalist immanence • The flows •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


10. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-10}{Capitalist
Representation}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Its elements • The figures or schizzes-flows • The two meanings of
the schiz-flow: capitalism and schizophrenia • The difference
between a code and an axiomatic • The capitalist State, its
relationship with the Urstaat • The class • Class bipolarity •
Desire and interest • Capitalist deterritorialization and
re-territorializations: their relationship, and the law of the
falling tendency • The two poles of the axiomatic: the despotic
signifier and the schizophrenic figure, paranoia and schizophrenia •
A recapitulation of the three great social machines: the
territorial, the despotic, and the capitalist (coding, overcoding,
decoding) •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


11. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-3-section-11}{Oedipus at Last}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Application • Social reproduction and human reproduction • The two
orders of images • Oedipus and its limits • Oedipus and the
recapitulation of the three states • The despotic symbol and
capitalist images • Bad conscience • Adam Smith and Freud •



\end{quote}



\bigskip


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4}{Introduction to Schizoanalysis}



\begin{quote}


1. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4-section-1}{The Social Field}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Father and child • Oedipus, a father’s idea • The unconscious as a
cycle • The primacy of the social investment: its two poles,
paranoia and schizophrenia • Molar and molecular •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


2. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4-section-2}{The Molecular
Unconscious}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Desire and machine • Beyond vitalism and mechanism • The two states
of the machine • Molecular functionalism • The syntheses • The
libido, the large aggregates and the micro-multiplicities • The
gigantism and the dwarfism of desire • The nonhuman sex: not one,
not two, but \emph{n} sexes.



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


3. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4-section-3}{Psychoanalysis and
Capitalism}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Representation • Representation and production • Against myth and
tragedy • The ambiguous attitude of psychoanalysis with regard to
myth and tragedy • In what sense psychoanalysis fractures
representation, in what sense it restores representation • The
requirements of capitalism • Mythic, tragic, and psychoanalytic
representation • The theater • Subjective representation and
structural representation • Structuralism, familialism, and the cult
of lack • The destructive task of schizoanalysis, cleansing the
unconscious: a malevolent activity • Deterritorialization and
re-territorialization: their relationship, and dreams • The machinic
indices • Politicization: social alienation and mental alienation •
Artifice and process, old earths and the new earth •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


4. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4-section-4}{The First Positive
Task of Schizoanalysis}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Desiring-production and its machines • The status of partial objects
• The passive syntheses • The status of the body without organs •
The signifying chain and codes • The body without organs, death, and
desire • Schizophrenizing death • The strange death cult in
psychoanalysis: the pseudo-instinct • The problem of affinities
between the molar and the molecular • The mechanic’s task of
schizoanalysis •



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


5. \hyperref{}{amuse}{chapter-4-section-5}{The Second Positive
Task}



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Social production and its machines • The theory of the two poles •
The first thesis: every investment is molar and social •
Gregariousness, selection, and the form of gregariousness • The
second thesis: distinguish in social investments the preconscious
investment of class or interest, from the unconscious libidinal
investment of desire or group • The nature of this libidinal
investment of the social field • The two groups • The role of
sexuality, the “sexual revolution” • The third thesis: the libidinal
investment of the social field is primary in relation to the
familial investments • The theory of “maids” in Freud, Oedipus and
universal familialism • The poverty of psychoanalysis: 4, 3, 2, 1, 0
• Even antipsychiatry \dots{} • What is the schizophrenic sick from? • The
fourth thesis: the two poles of the libidinal social investment •
Art and science • The task of schizoanalysis in relation to the
revolutionary movements.



\end{quote}



\bigskip


\hyperref{}{amuse}{appendix}{Appendix: Balancing-Sheet for Desiring-Machines}

\chapter{Preface}
\hyperdef{amuse}{preface}{}%
\label{textamuse:preface}%


During the years 1945–1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a
certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political
discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on
familiar terms with Marx, not let one’s dreams stray too far from Freud.
And one had to treat sign-systems—the signifier—with the greatest
respect. These were the three requirements that made the strange
occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and
one’s time acceptable.


Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the
gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the first major
blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was
taking place? An amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics? A
war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic
repression? A surge of libido modulated by the class struggle? Perhaps.
At any rate, it is this familiar, dualistic interpretation that has laid
claim to the events of those years. The dream that cast its spell,
between the First World War and fascism, over the dreamiest parts of
Europe—the Germany of Wilhelm Reich, and the France of the
surrealists—had returned and set fire to reality itself: Marx and Freud
in the same incandescent light.


But is that really what happened? Had the utopian project of the
thirties been resumed, this time on the scale of historical practice? Or
was there, on the contrary, a movement toward political struggles that
no longer conformed to the model that Marxist tradition had prescribed?
Toward an experience and a technology of desire that were no longer
Freudian. It is true that the old banners were raised, but the combat
shifted and spread into new zones.


**Anti-Oedipus* shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But
it does much more than that. It wastes no time in discrediting the old
idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud. Most
important, it motivates us to go further.



\bigskip


It would be a mistake to read \emph{Anti-Oedipus} as \emph{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: \emph{Anti-Oedipus} is not a
flashy Hegel. I think that \emph{Anti-Oedipus} can best be read as an “art,”
in the sense that is conveyed by the term “erotic art,” for example.
Informed by the seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows,
arrangements, and connections, the analysis of the relationship of
desire to reality and to the capitalist “machine” yields answers to
concrete questions. Questions that are less concerned with \emph{why} this or
that than with \emph{how} to proceed. How does one introduce desire into
thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its
forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process
of overturning the established order? \emph{Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars
politico}.


Whence the three adversaries confronted by \emph{Anti-Oedipus}. Three
adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying
degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways:


1. The political ascetics, the sad militants, the terrorists of theory,
those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political
discourse. 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. Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is
fascism (whereas \emph{Anti-Oedipus}’ opposition to the others is more of a
tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of
the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads
and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power,
to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.


I would say that \emph{Anti-Oedipus} (may its authors forgive me) is a book
of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a
long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a
particular “readership”: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a
way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even
(especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?
How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of
fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our
behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh
lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part,
pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.


Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales,\footnote{* A seventeenth-century priest and Bishop of Geneva, known for his \emph{Introduction to the Devout Life}.} one might say that
**Anti-Oedipus* is an \emph{Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life}.



\bigskip


This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already
present or impending, carries with it 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:


—Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.


—Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition,
and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.


—Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law,
limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held
sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is
positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities,
mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not
sedentary but nomadic.


—Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even
though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of
desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation)
that possesses revolutionary force.


—Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor
political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought.
Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a
multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political
action.


—Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the
individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the
product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of
multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must
not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant
generator of de-individualization.


—Do not become enamored of power.


It could even be said that Deleuze and Guattari care so little for power
that they have tried to neutralize the effects of power linked to their
own discourse. Hence the games and snares scattered throughout the book,
rendering its translation a feat of real prowess. But these are not the
familiar traps of rhetoric; the latter work to sway the reader without
his being aware of the manipulation, and ultimately win him over against
his will. The traps of \emph{Anti-Oedipus} are those of humor: so 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.



\bigskip


—\emph{Michel Foucault}

\chapter{Introduction}
\hyperdef{amuse}{introduction}{}%
\label{textamuse:introduction}%



\begin{quote}


“We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and
self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”\forcelinebreak 
—Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus}



\end{quote}

\section{The Anti-Ego}


“Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try
to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and
patience; every minute you detain him means money in his pocket\dots{}.
Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, cajole, pray or curse—he listens. He
is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious
to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him.
Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself,
then stick to him until you rot.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus} (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 429–30.} So concludes Henry Miller in
**Sexus*, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are quick to agree in
their attack on psychoanalysis’ own Oedipus complex (the holy family:
daddy-mommy-me), an attack that is at times brutal and without pity, at
other times sympathetic and full of a profound love of life, and often
enormously amusing. An attack on the ego, on what is all-too-human in
mankind, on oedipalized and oedipalizing analyses and neurotic modes of
living.


In confronting and finally overturning the Oedipal rock on which Man has
chosen to take his stand, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} comes as a kind of sequel to
another similar venture, the attack on Christ, Christianity, and the
herd in Nietzsche’s \emph{The AntiChrist}. For who would deny, \emph{Anti-Oedipus}
begins, that psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps
always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based
on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e.,
those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd
and defined in terms of common and external goals? But where do such
beliefs originate? What are they based on? For it is absolutely hopeless
to think in terms of security, as Miller states in \emph{Sexus}; “there is
none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man
who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will
give him no pain or trouble” (page 428). No pain, no trouble—this is the
neurotic’s dream of a tranquilized and conflict-free existence.


Such a set of beliefs, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate, such a herd
instinct, is based on the desire to be led, the desire to have someone
else legislate life. The very desire that was brought so glaringly into
focus in Europe with Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism; the desire that is
still at work, making us all sick, today. \emph{Anti-Oedipus} starts by
reviving Reich’s completely serious question with respect to the rise of
fascism: ‘How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?’
This is a question which the English and Americans are reluctant to deal
with directly, tending too often to respond: “Fascism is a phenomenon
that took place elsewhere, something that could only happen to others,
but not to us; it’s \emph{their} problem.” Is it though? Is fascism really a
problem for others to deal with? Even revolutionary groups deal gingerly
with the fascisizing elements we all carry deep within us, and yet they
often possess a rarely analyzed but overriding group ‘superego’ that
leads them to state, much like Nietzsche’s man of \emph{ressentiment}, that
the \emph{other} is evil (the Fascist! the Capitalist! the Communist!), \emph{and
hence that they themselves are good}. This conclusion is reached as an
afterthought and a justification, a supremely \emph{self}-righteous
rationalization for a politics that can only “squint” at life, through
the thick clouds of foul-smelling air that permeates secret meeting
places and “security” councils. The man of \emph{ressentiment}, as Nietzsche
explains, “loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything
covert entices him as \emph{his} world, \emph{his} security, \emph{his} refreshment; he
understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to
be provisionally self-deprecating and humble.”\footnote{Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), I, 17, p. 38.} Such a man, Nietzsche
concludes, needs very much to believe in some neutral, independent
“subject”—the ego—for he is prompted by an instinct of
**self*-affirmation and \emph{self}-preservation that cares little about
preserving or affirming life, an instinct “in which every lie is
sanctified.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 46.} This is the realm of the silent majority. And it is into
these back rooms, behind the closed doors of the analyst’s office, in
the wings of the Oedipal theater, that Deleuze and Guattari weave their
way, exclaiming as does Nietzsche that it smells bad there, and that
what is needed is “a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the
outside world.”


In examining the problem of the subject, the behind-the-scenes reactive
and reactionary man, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} develops an approach that is
decidedly \emph{diagnostic} (“What constitutes our sickness today?”) and
profoundly \emph{healing} as well. What it attempts to cure us of is the cure
itself. Deleuze and Guattari term their approach “schizoanalysis,” which
they oppose on every count to psychoanalysis. Where the latter measures
everything against neurosis and castration, schizoanalysis begins with
the schizo, his breakdowns and his breakthroughs. For, they affirm, “a
schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on
the analyst’s couch\dots{}.” Against the Oedipal and oedipalized
territorialities (Family, Church, School, Nation, Party), and especially
the territoriality of the individual, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} seeks to discover
the “deterritorialized” flows of desire, the flows that have not been
reduced to the Oedipal codes and the neuroticized territorialities, the
**desiring-machines* that escape such codes as \emph{lines of escape} leading
elsewhere.


Much like R. D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari aim to develop a
materialistically and experientially based analysis of the “breakdowns”
and the “breakthroughs” that characterize \emph{some} of those labeled
schizophrenic by psychiatry. Rather than view the creations and
productions of desire—all of desiring-production—from the point of view
of the norm and the normal, they force their analysis into the sphere of
extremes. From paranoia to schizophrenia, from fascism to revolution,
from breakdowns to breakthroughs, what is investigated is the process of
life flows as they oscillate from one extreme to the other, on a scale
of intensity that goes from 0 (“I never asked to be born \dots{} leave me in
peace”), \emph{the body without organs}, to the \emph{n}th power (“I am all
that exists, all the names in history”), \emph{the schizophrenic process of
desire}.

\section{The Experience of Delirium}


In order to carry out this ambitious undertaking, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} makes
joyously unorthodox use of many writers and thinkers. whose concepts
flow together with all the other elements in the book in what might well
be described as a carefully constructed and executed experiment in
delirium.


While Deleuze and Guattari quote frequently from Marx and Freud, it
would be an error to view \emph{Anti-Oedipus} as yet another attempt at a
Freud\Slash{}Marx synthesis. For such an attempt always treats political
economy (the flows of capital and interest) and the economy of the
libido (the flows of desire) as two separate economies, even in the work
of Reich, who went as far as possible in this direction. Deleuze and
Guattari, on the other hand, postulate one and the same economy, the
economy of flows. The flows and productions of desire will simply be
viewed as the unconscious of the social productions. Behind every
investment of time and interest and capital, an investment of desire,
and vice versa.


In order to reach this conclusion a new confrontation was required. Not
the standard confrontation between a bourgeois Freud and a revolutionary
Marx, where Freud ends up the loser, but a more radical confrontation,
between Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the madman. The result of
this confrontation, as the authors demonstrate convincingly, is that
Freud and psychoanalysis (and perhaps even Lacan, although they remain
ambiguous on this point) become “impossible.”


“Why Marx and Nietzsche? Now that’s really mixing things up!” one might
protest at this point. But there is really no cause for alarm. Readers
of Marx will be happy to learn that Marx fares quite well in this
confrontation. One might even say he is trimmed down to bare essentials
and improved upon from the point of view of use. Given Deleuze and
Guattari’s perspective, this confrontation was inevitable. If one wants
to do an analysis of the flows of money and capital that circulate in
society, nothing is more useful than Marx and the Marxist theory of
money. But if one wishes also to analyze the flows of desire, the fears
and the anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social
field as intensive notes from the underground (i.e., \emph{libidinal
economy}), one must look elsewhere. Since psychoanalysis is of no help,
reducing as it does every social manifestation of desire to the familial
complex, where is one to turn? To Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean theory
of affects and intensity, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} suggests. For here, and
especially in \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, is a theory of desire and
will, of the conscious and the unconscious forces, that relates desire
directly to the social field and to a monetary system based on profit.
What Nietzsche teaches, as a complement to Marx’s theory of alienation,
is how the history of mankind is the history of a \emph{becoming-reactive}.
And it is Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari stress, whose thought already
pointed a \emph{way out} for humanity, whereas Marx and Freud were too
ingrained in the culture that they were working against.


One could not really view \emph{Anti-Oedipus} as a purely Nietzschean
undertaking, however, for the book would be nothing without the tension
between Nietzsche and Marx, between philosophy and politics between
thought and revolution; the tension, in short, between Deleuze the
philosopher and Guattari the militant. This tension is quite novel, and
leads to a combination of the artistic “machine,” the revolutionary
“machine,” and the analytical “machine”; a combination of three modes of
knowledge—the \emph{intuitive}, the \emph{practical}, and the \emph{reflective}, which
all become joined as bits and pieces of one and the same strategical
machine whose target is the ego and the fascist in each of us. Extending
thought to the point of madness and action to the point of revolution,
theirs is indeed a politics of experience. The experience, however, is
no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires and
his forces: a politics of desire directed against all that is egoic—and
heroic—in man.


In addition to Nietzsche they also found it necessary to listen to
others: to Miller and Lawrence and Kafka and Beckett, to Proust and
Reich and Foucault, to Burroughs and Ginsberg, each of whom had
different insights concerning madness and dissension, politics and
desire. They needed everything they could get their hands on and they
took whatever they could find, in an eclectic fashion closer to Henry
Miller than it is to Marx or Freud. More poetic, undoubtedly, but also
more fun.


While Deleuze and Guattari use many authors and concepts, this is never
done in an academic fashion aimed at persuading the reader. Rather, they
use these names and ideas as effects that traverse their analyses,
generating ever new effects, as points of reference indeed, but also as
points of intensity and signs pointing a way out: \emph{points-signs} that
offer a multiplicity of solutions and a variety of directions for a new
style of politics. Such an approach carries much along with it, in the
course of its flow, but it also leaves much behind. Chunks of Marx and
Freud that cannot keep up with the fast current will be left behind,
buried or forgotten, while everything in Marx and Freud that has to do
with how things and people and desires actually flow will be kept, and
added to the infernal machine evoked above. This political analysis of
desire, this \emph{schizoanalysis}, becomes a mighty tool where schizophrenia
as a process—the schiz—serves as a point of departure as well as a point
of destination. Like Laing, they encourage mankind to take a journey,
the journey through \emph{ego-loss}. They go much further than Laing on this
point, however. They urge mankind to strip itself of \emph{all}
anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and
all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his
will and his forces, his transformations and mutations. The human and
social sciences have accustomed us to see the figure of Man behind every
social event, just as Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord
looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of
reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons
and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They blind us to other
realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us.
Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile
and obedient subjects.

\section{Schizoanalysis and Collectivity}


To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully
attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that
remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free
the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke.
For Oedipus is not a mere psychoanalytic construct, Deleuze and Guattari
explain. Oedipus is the figurehead of imperialism, “colonization pursued
by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even
here at home \dots{} it is our intimate colonial education.” This
internalization of man by man, this “oedipalization,” creates a new
meaning for suffering, \emph{internal suffering}, and a new tone for life:
the depressive tone. Now depression does not just come about one fine
day, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} goes on, nor does Oedipus appear one day in the
Family and feel secure in remaining there. Depression and Oedipus are
agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long
before being delegated to the family. Oedipus is the figure of power as
such, just as neurosis is the result of power on individuals. Oedipus is
everywhere.


For anti-oedipalists the ego, like Oedipus, is “part of those things we
must dismantle through the united assault of analytical and political
forces.”\footnote{Gilles Deleuze, “Trois problèmes de groupe” in Félix Guattari, \emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité} (Paris: Maspero, 1972, preface).} Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what
gives us faith as it robs us of power, \emph{it} is what teaches us to desire
our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at
home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist. Deleuze and
Guattari want to know how these beliefs succeed in taking hold of a
body, thereby silencing the productive machines of the libido. They also
want to know how the opposite situation is brought about, where a body
successfully wards off the effects of power. Reversing the Freudian
distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures everything
against the former, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} concludes: the neurotic is the one on
whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one
incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis.
The first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the
psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in
order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs.
Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the
kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces—the
schizzes-flows—forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee
in all directions: \emph{orphans} (no daddy-mommy-me), \emph{atheists} (no
beliefs), and \emph{nomads} (no habits, no territories).


A schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the holds of power
and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a
revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick, of our
**selves*!


It is actually not accurate to say that Deleuze and Guattari develop the
schizoanalytic approach, for, as they show, it has always been at work
in writers like Miller or Nietzsche or Artaud. Stoned thinking based on
intensely lived experiences: Pop Philosophy.


To put it simply, as does Miller, “everybody becomes a healer the moment
he forgets about himself.” And Miller continues: “Reality is here and
now, everywhere, gleaming through every reflection that meets the eye\dots{}.
Everybody is a neurotic, down to the last man and woman. The healer, or
the analyst, if you like, is only a super-neurotic\dots{}. To be cured we must
rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can
do it for another—it is a private affair which is best done
collectively.”\footnote{H. Miller, \emph{Sexus}, pp. 425–26.} Once we forget about our egos a non-neurotic form of
politics becomes possible, where singularity and collectivity are no
longer at odds with each other, and where collective expressions of
desire are possible. Such a politics does not seek to regiment
individuals according to a totalitarian system of norms, but to
de-normalize and de-individualize through a multiplicity of new,
collective arrangements against power. Its goal is the transformation of
human relationships in a struggle against power. And it urges militant
groups, as well as lone individuals, to analyze and fight against the
effects of power that subjugate them: “For a revolutionary group at the
preconscious level remains a \emph{subjugated group}, even in seizing power,
as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to
enslave and crush desiring-production\dots{}. A \emph{subject-group}, on the
contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves
revolutionary, it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and
subordinates the socius or the forms of power to desiring-production;
productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group
always invents mortal formations that exorcize the effusion in it of a
death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the
symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy
or a group superego.” There can be no revolutionary actions,
**Anti-Oedipus* concludes, where the the relations between people and
groups are relations of exclusion and segregation. Groups must multiply
and connect in ever new ways, freeing up territorialities for the
construction of new social arrangements. Theory must therefore be
conceived as a toolbox, producing tools that work; or as Ivan Illich
says, we must learn to construct \emph{tools for conviviality} through the
use of counterfoil research.\footnote{Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for Conviviality} (New York: Harper \& Row, 1973).} When Illich speaks of “convivial
reconstruction,” he is very close to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a
“desiring-revolution.” Like Deleuze and Guattari, Illich also calls for
a radical reversal of the relationships between individuals and tools or
machines: “This reversal would permit the evolution of a life-style and
of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum
use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally
distributed among all people: personal energy under personal
control.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 12–13.} All three authors agree that such a reversal must be
governed by a collective political process, and not by professionals and
experts. The ultimate answer to neurotic dependencies on professionals
is \emph{mutual self-care}.\footnote{Cf. in this respect Ivan Illich, \emph{Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health}, (New York: Pantheon, 1976).}


Freed from a psychoanalytic framework, the political group or collective
cannot, however, push aside the problem of desire. Nor can it leave
desire in the hands of new experts. It must analyze the function of
desire, in itself and in the groups with which it is involved. What is
the function of desire, \emph{Anti-Oedipus} asks, if not one of making
connections? For to be bogged down in arrangements from which escape is
possible is to be neurotic, seeing an irresolvable crisis where
alternatives in fact exist. And as Deleuze and Guattari comment,
“perhaps it will be discovered that the only incurable is the neurotic.”


We defend so cautiously against our egoically limited experiences,
states Laing in \emph{The Politics of Experience}, that it is not surprising
to see people grow defensive and panic at the idea of experiencing
ego-loss through the use of drugs or collective experiences. But there
is nothing pathological about ego-loss, Laing adds; quite the contrary.
Ego-loss is the experience of all mankind, “of the primal man, of Adam
and perhaps even [a journey] further into the beings of animals,
vegetables and minerals.”\footnote{R.D. Laing, \emph{The Politics of Experience} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), p. 126.} No age, Laing concludes, has so lost touch
with this healing process as has ours. Deleuze and Guattari’s
schizoanalytic approach serves to begin such a healing process. Its
major task is to destroy the oedipalized and neuroticized individual
dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a
nonfascist subject—anti-Oedipus. Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a
group that no longer functions in terms of beliefs and that comes to
redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that
weighed it down, “but also from that which was bound to grow out of it,
the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of
noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and
restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this AntiChrist and
antinihilist\dots{} \emph{He must come one day}.—”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 24, p. 96.}


Unlike Nietzsche’s antinihilist, however, Deleuze and Guattari’s
anti-Oedipus is not alone. \emph{Anti-Oedipus} is not the superman. It is not
transcendent. Where Nietzsche grew progressively more isolated to the
point of madness, Deleuze and Guattari call for actions and passions of
a collective nature, \emph{here and now}. Madness is a radical break from
power in the form of a disconnection. Militancy, in Deleuze and
Guattari’s framework, would learn from madness but then move beyond it,
beyond disconnections and deterritorializations, to ever new
connections. A politics of desire would see loneliness and depression as
the first things to go. Such is the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is
connected to the machines of the universe, if he is in tune with his
desires, if he is “anchored,” “he ceases to worry about the fitness of
things, about the behavior of his fellow-men, about right or wrong and
justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will
float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth
fruit\dots{}. The life that’s in him will manifest itself in growth, and
growth is an endless, eternal process. The process is everything.”\footnote{Miller, \emph{Sexus}, p. 427.}
It is this process—of desiring-production—that \emph{Anti-Oedipus} sets out
to analyze.


For if desire is repressed in a society, Deleuze and Guattari state,
this is hardly because “it is a desire for the mother or for the death
of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is
repressed, it takes that mask on under the reign of the repression that
models the mask for it and plasters it on its face\dots{}. The real danger is
elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of
desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the
established order of a society: not that desire is asocial; on the
contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of
being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors.”



\bigskip


Deleuze and Guattari conclude that desire, any desiring-machine, is
always a combination of various elements and forces of all types. Hence
the need to listen not only to revolutionaries but to all those who know
how to be truly objective: “Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are
content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps
life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way
all the more intense because it has few needs. And never mind those who
believe that this is very easy to say, or that it is the sort of idea to
be found in books.”



\bigskip


—\emph{Mark Seem}

\chapter{1. The Desiring-Machines}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1}%

\section{1. Desiring-Production}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-1}%


It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times
in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.
What a mistake to have ever said \emph{the} id. Everywhere \emph{it} is
machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other
machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the
necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an
energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other
interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a
machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several
functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an
eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a
breathing-machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with
his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the
time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber\footnote{* Daniel Paul Schreber was a German judge who began psychiatric treatment in 1884 at the age of forty-two, and spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in and out of mental institutions. In 1903, at the age of sixty-one, he published his \emph{Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken} (\emph{Memoirs of a Nervous Illness}), which Freud used as the basis of his influential 1911 study on paranoia, “Psycho-Analytic Notes” (reference note 7, page 384 of this volume), pp. 390–472. * (\emph{Translators’ note.})} has sunbeams in his
ass. \emph{A solar anus}. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber
feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the
process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine,
not mere metaphors.


A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying
on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the
outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Buchner.
This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself
closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in
relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his
father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other
hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods
or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a
mother, with nature. “What does my father want? Can he offer me more
than that? Impossible. Leave me in peace.”\footnote{See Georg Büchner, \emph{Lenz}, in \emph{Complete Plays and Prose}, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Hill \& Wang, 1963), p. 141.} Everything is a machine.
Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine
machines—all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr
of machines. “He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to
be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for
rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream,
every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and
waning of the moon.”\footnote{Ibid.} To be a chlorophyll- or a
photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as
one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time
before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on
this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature
as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as
either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within
the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines,
desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species
life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any
meaning whatsoever.


Now that we have had a look at this stroll of a schizo, let us compare
what happens when Samuel Beckett’s characters decide to venture
outdoors. Their various gaits and methods of self-locomotion constitute,
in and of themselves, a finely tuned machine. And then there is the
function of the bicycle in Beckett’s works: what relationship does the
bicycle-horn machine have with the mother-anus machine? “What a rest to
speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to
speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her
arse if my memory is correct.”\footnote{Samuel Beckett, \emph{Molloy}, in \emph{Three Novels by Samuel Beckett} (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 16. \emph{Molloy} was translated from the French by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} It is often thought that Oedipus\footnote{* As will be seen below, the term Oedipus has many widely varying connotations in this volume. It refers, for instance, not only to the Greek myth of Oedipus and to the Oedipus complex as defined by classical psychoanalysis, but also to Oedipal mechanisms, processes, and structures. The translators follow the authors’ use and employ the word “Oedipus” by itself, using the more traditional term “Oedipus complex” only when the authors do so. (\emph{Translators’ note.})}
is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a “given”
that is there from the very beginning. But that is not so at all:
Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines. And why
are they repressed? To what end? Is it really necessary or desirable to
submit to such repression? And what means are to be used to accomplish
this? What ought to go inside the Oedipal triangle, what sort of thing
is required to construct it? Are a bicycle horn and my mother’s arse
sufficient to do the job? Aren’t there more important questions than
these, however? Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of
producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for? Can
we possibly guess, for instance, what a knife rest is used for if all we
are given is a geometrical description of it? Or yet another example: on
being confronted with a complete machine made up of six stones in the
right-hand pocket of my coat (the pocket that serves as the source of
the stones), five stones in the right-hand pocket of my trousers, and
five in the left-hand pocket (transmission pockets), with the remaining
pocket of my coat receiving the stones that have already been handled,
as each of the stones moves forward one pocket, how can we determine the
effect of this circuit of distribution in which the mouth, too, plays a
role as a stone-sucking machine? Where in this entire circuit do we find
the production of sexual pleasure? At the end of \emph{Malone Dies}, Lady
Pedal takes the schizophrenics out for a ride in a van and a rowboat,
and on a picnic in the midst of nature: an infernal machine is being
assembled. “Under the skin the body is an over-heated factory,\Slash{} and
outside,\Slash{} the invalid shines,\Slash{} glows,\Slash{} from every burst pore.”\footnote{Antonin Artaud, \emph{Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society}, trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in \emph{Artaud Anthology} (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), p. 158.}


This does not mean that we are attempting to make nature one of the
poles of schizophrenia. What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an
individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one
specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production. What
do we mean here by process? It is probable that at a certain level
nature and industry are two separate and distinct things: from one point
of view, industry is the opposite of nature; from another, industry
extracts its raw materials from nature; from yet another, it returns its
refuse to nature; and so on. Even within society, this characteristic
man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship is responsible
for the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called
production, distribution, consumption. But in general this entire level
of distinctions, examined from the point of view of its formal developed
structures, presupposes (as Marx has demonstrated) not only the
existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false
consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of
itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an over-all process.
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 (\emph{enregistrement}\footnote{* The French term \emph{enregistrement} has a number of meanings, among them the process of making a recording to be played back by a mechanical device (e.g., a phonograph), the recording so made (e.g., a phonograph record or a magnetic tape), and the entering of births, deaths, deeds, marriages, and so on, in an official register. (\emph{Translators’ note.})}), without any sort of mediation,
and the recording process and consumption directly determine production,
though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything
is production: \emph{production of productions}, of actions and of passions;
**productions of recording processes*, of distributions and of
co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; \emph{productions of
consumptions}, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain.
Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately
consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly
reproduced.\footnote{* When Georges Bataille speaks of sumptuary, nonproductive expenditures or consumptions in connection with the energy of nature, these are expenditures or consumptions that are not part of the supposedly independent sphere of human production, insofar as the latter is determined by “the useful.” They therefore have to do with what we call the production of consumption. See Georges Bataille, \emph{La part maudite, précédé de La notion de dépense} (Paris: Editions de Minuit).} 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.


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. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic
point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its
fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.\footnote{On the identity of nature and production, and species life in general, according to Marx, see the commentaries of Gérard Granel, “L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la coupure,” in \emph{L’endurance de la pensée} (Paris: Plon, 1968), pp. 301–310.}
Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in
intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of
beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who
ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into
his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal
custodian of the machines of the universe. 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. Production as process overtakes
all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to
desire is that of an immanent principle. That is why desiring-production
is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of
and deals with the schizo as \emph{Homo natura}. 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. D.H. Lawrence
says of love: “We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any
process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion
thereof\dots{}. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of
intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately
perish.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, \emph{Aaron’s Rod} (New York: Penguin, 1976), ppl 200–201.} Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically
schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; 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. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is
inherently connective in nature: “and\dots{}” “and then\dots{}” This is because
there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected
to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the
mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another
whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is
linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows
and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.
Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the
flows. “I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that
carries away the seed unfecund.”\footnote{* Henry Miller, \emph{Tropic of Cancer}, Ch. 13. See in this same chapter the celebration of desire-as-flux expressed in the phrase: “\dots{} and my guts spilled out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute.”} Amniotic fluid spilling out of the
sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm,
shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut
off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows,
interrupted by other partial objects. Every “object” presupposes the
continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object.
Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the
perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that
flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding,
shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing. But a connection with another
machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one
machine interrupts the current of the other or “sees” its own current
interrupted.


Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow
connective synthesis also has another form: product\Slash{}producing. 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. We cannot accept the idealist
category of “expression” as a satisfactory or sufficient explanation of
this phenomenon. We cannot, we must not attempt to describe the
schizophrenic object without relating it to the process of production.
The \emph{Cahiers de l’art brut}\footnote{* A series of monographs, issued periodically, containing reproductions of art works created by inmates of the psychiatric asylums of Europe. \emph{L’Art brut} is edited by Jean Dubuffet.} are a striking confirmation of this
principle, since by taking such an approach they deny that there is any
such thing as a specific, identifiable schizophrenic entity. Or to take
another example, Henri Michaux describes a schizophrenic table in terms
of a process of production which is that of desire: “Once noticed, it
continued to occupy one’s mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going
about its own business\dots{}. The striking thing was that it was neither
simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or
constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been
desimplified in the course of its carpentering\dots{}. As it stood, it was a
table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics’ drawings,
described as ‘overstaffed,’ and if finished it was only in so far as
there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become
more and more an accumulation, less and less a table\dots{}. It was not
intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table.
Heavy, cumbersome, it was virtually immovable. One didn’t know how to
handle it (mentally or physically). Its top surface, the useful part of
the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with so
little relation to the clumsy framework that the thing did not strike
one as a table, but as some freak piece of furniture, an unfamiliar
instrument \dots{} for which there was no purpose. A dehumanized table,
nothing cozy about it, nothing ‘middle-class,’ nothing rustic, nothing
countrified, not a kitchen table or a work table. A table which lent
itself to no function, self-protective, denying itself to service and
communication alike. There was something stunned about it, something
petrified. Perhaps it suggested a stalled engine.”\footnote{Henri Michaux, \emph{The Major Ordeals of the Mind}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 125–27.}


The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to
distinguish here between producing and its product. We need merely note
that the pure “thisness” of the object produced is carried over into a
new act of producing. The table continues to “go about its business.”
The surface of the table, however, is eaten up by the supporting
framework. The nontermination of the table is a necessary consequence of
its mode of production. When Claude Lévi-Strauss defines
**bricolage*,\footnote{* \emph{bricolage}: The tinkering about of the \emph{bricoleur}, or amateur handyman. The art of making do with what’s at hand. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} 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.\footnote{* Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Savage Mind} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 17: “The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”} The satisfaction
the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket
or diverts a stream of water can scarcely be explained in terms of
“playing mommy and daddy,” or by the pleasure of violating a taboo. The
rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the
product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary
production: the production of production. A painting by Richard Lindner,
“Boy with Machine,” shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his
little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical
social machine—which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child
does.


Producing, a product: a producing\Slash{}product identity. It is this identity
that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous
undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything
freezes in place—and then the whole process will begin all over again.
From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked,
if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual
birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through. Will
the machines run so badly, their component pieces fall apart to such a
point that they will return to nothingness and thus allow us to return
to nothingness? It would seem, however, that the flows of energy are
still too closely connected, the partial objects still too organic, for
this to happen. What would be required is a pure fluid in a free state,
flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body.
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. “An incomprehensible,
absolutely rigid stasis” in the very midst of process, as a third stage:
“\emph{No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No
anus}.” The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they
once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the
unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin
Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form
whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct:
that is its name, and death is not without a model. 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 \emph{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.


Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually
breaking down. Judge Schreber “lived for a long time without a stomach,
without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus,
without a bladder, and with shattered ribs; he used sometimes to swallow
part of his own larynx with his food, etc.”\footnote{Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” \emph{Collected Papers: Authorized Translation under the Supervision of Joan Rivière} (New York: Basic Books, 1959), Vol. 3, p. 396.} The body without organs
is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a
certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing
and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The
body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is
it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection;
it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image
of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless
body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the
third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted
into the process of production. The catatonic body is produced in the
water of the hydrotherapy tub. The full body without organs belongs to
the realm of antiproduction; but yet another characteristic of the
connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples
production with antiproduction, with an element of antiproduction.

\section{2. The Body without Organs}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-2}%


An apparent conflict arises between desiring-machines and the body
without organs. Every coupling of machines, every production of a
machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the
body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and
loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by
organizing it. “The body is the body\Slash{}it is all by itself\Slash{}and has no need
of organs\Slash{}the body is never an organism\Slash{}organisms are the enemies of the
body.”\footnote{* Antonin Artaud, in \emph{84}, nos. 5–6 (1948). The French text reads: “Le corps est le corps\Slash{}il est seul\Slash{}et n’a pas besoin d’organe\Slash{}le corps n’est jamais un organisme\Slash{}les organismes sont les ennemis du corps.” (\emph{Translators’ note.}) (Throughout, all English translations of works cited in the text are by the translators, unless otherwise noted.)} Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of
torture. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs
presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In
order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a
counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist
using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps
and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the
opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as “primary repression”
means precisely that: it is not a “countercathexis,” but rather this
**repulsion* of desiring-machines by the body without organs. This is the
real meaning of the paranoiac machine: the desiring-machines attempt to
break into the body without organs, and the body without organs repels
them, since it experiences them as an over-all persecution apparatus.
Thus we cannot agree with Victor Tausk when he regards the paranoiac
machine as a mere projection of “a person’s own body” and the genital
organs.\footnote{Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia,” \emph{Psychoanalytic Quarterly}, no. 2 (1933), pp. 519–56.} The genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in the
opposition of the process of production of the desiring-machines and the
nonproductive stasis of the body without organs. The anonymous nature of
the machine and the nondifferentiated nature of its surface are proof of
this. Projection enters the picture only secondarily, as does
counterinvestment,\footnote{* We have adopted this term throughout, except when quoting directly from psychoanalytic literature, because it renders more faithfully the meaning of \emph{investissement}, which in French does service in libidinal as well as political economy. We have likewise chosen to translate \emph{investir} as “to invest” instead of “to cathect.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} as the body without organs invests a
counterinside or a counteroutside, in the form of a persecuting organ or
some exterior agent of persecution. But in and of itself the paranoiac
machine is merely an avatar of the desiring-machines: it is a result of
the relationship between the desiring-machines and the body without
organs, and occurs when the latter can no longer tolerate these
machines.


If we wish to have some idea of the forces that the body without organs
exerts later on in the uninterrupted process, we must first establish a
parallel between desiring-production and social production. We intend
such a parallel to be regarded as merely phenomenological: we are here
drawing no conclusions whatsoever as to the nature and the relationship
of the two productions, nor does the parallel we are about to establish
provide any sort of a priori answer to the question whether
desiring-production and social production are really two separate and
distinct productions. Its one purpose is to point out the fact that the
forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve
an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction
coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a \emph{socius}. This
socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital.
This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not
the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine
presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing
productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on (\emph{il se rabat
sur})\footnote{* The verb \emph{se rabattre sur} (and the noun \emph{rebattement}), used by the authors here and in numerous instances in the text below, has several different connotations, as for instance: in descriptive geometry, to describe the rotation of a plane so as to coincide with another plane, usually followed by a reverse rotation back into its original position; a retreat to a previously held position, as in a battle; and a reduction to a lower level. In the English text below, it will be translated in various ways, depending on the context, followed by the French expression in parentheses. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} all production, constituting a surface over which the forces
and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for
itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole
and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a
quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of
its own power: they appear to be “miraculated” (\emph{miraculés}) by it. 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. It produces surplus value, just
as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and
branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the
machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while
embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents
cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be
miraculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by
capital as quasi cause. As Marx observes, \emph{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
(\emph{se rabat sur}) all of production. (Furnishing or realizing surplus
value is what establishes recording rights.) “With the development of
relative surplus-value in the actual specifically capitalist mode of
production, whereby the productive powers of social labour are
developed, these productive powers and the social interrelations of
labour in the direct labour-process seem transferred from labour to
capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour’s
social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour
as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself.”\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Capital}, trans. Ernest Untermann (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Vol. 3, p. 827. See in Louis Althusser, \emph{Lire le capital} (Paris: Maspero, 1965), the commentaries of Etienne Balibar, Vol. 2, pp. 213ff., and of Pierre Macherey, Vol. 1, pp. 201 ff. (\emph{Translators’ note:} For the English text of Balibar’s commentaries, see Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, \emph{Reading Capital}, trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Pantheon, 1970], Part III, pp. 199–308. For contributions by Pierre Macherey, see footnotes in this edition on pp. 7, 30, and 251.)} What is
specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital
as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But
some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording
surface, an apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted,
bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant
of social reproduction.


The body without organs now falls back on (\emph{se rabat sur})
desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. The
organ-machines now cling to the body without organs as though it were a
fencer’s padded jacket, or as though these organ-machines were medals
pinned onto the jersey of a wrestler who makes them jingle as he starts
toward his opponent. An attraction-machine now takes the place, or may
take the place, of a repulsion-machine: a miraculating-machine
succeeding the paranoiac machine. But what is meant here by
“succeeding”? The two coexist, rather, and black humor does not attempt
to resolve contradictions, but to make it so that there are none, and
never were any. 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. The
organs are regenerated, “miraculated” on the body of Judge Schreber, who
attracts God’s rays to himself. Doubtless the former paranoiac machine
continues to exist in the form of mocking voices that attempt to
“de-miraculate” (\emph{démiraculer}) the organs, the Judge’s anus in
particular. But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted
recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the
productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a
quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them.
So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all
sexuality is a matter of economy.


Production is not recorded in the same way it is produced, however. Or
rather, it is not reproduced within the apparent objective movement in
the same way in which it is produced within the process of constitution.
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 \emph{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 \emph{distribution} in
relation to the nonproductive element as a “natural or divine
presupposition” (the disjunctions of capital). Machines attach
themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction,
between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking
the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid. The “either \dots{} or \dots{} or”
of the schizophrenic takes over from the “and then”: no matter what two
organs are involved, the way in which they are attached to the body
without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between
the two amount to the same on the slippery surface. Whereas the
“either\Slash{}or” claims to mark decisive choices between immutable terms (the
alternative: either this or that), the schizophrenic “either \dots{} or \dots{} or”
refers to the system of possible permutations between differences that
always amount to the same as they shift and slide about. As in the case
of Beckett’s mouth that speaks and feet that walk: “He sometimes halted
without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say, or while
having something to say he finally decided not to say it\dots{}. Other main
examples suggest themselves to the mind. Immediate continuous
communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed
redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate
redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate
discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with
delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate
redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture.”\footnote{Samuel Beckett, “Enough,” in \emph{First Love and Other Shorts} (New York: Grove Press, 1974).}


Thus the schizophrenic, the possessor of the most touchingly meager
capital—Malone’s belongings, for instance—inscribes on his own body the
litany of disjunctions, and creates for himself a world of parries where
the most minute of permutations is supposed to be a response to the new
situation or a reply to the indiscreet questioner. The disjunctive
synthesis of recording therefore comes to overlap the connective
syntheses of production. 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 server as its
miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of
its disjunctions. Hence the strange relationship that Schreber has with
God. To anyone who asks: “Do you believe in God?” we should reply in
strictly Kantian or Schreberian terms: “Of course, but only as the
master of the disjunctive syllogism, or as its a priori principle (God
defined as the \emph{Omnitudo realitatis}, from which all secondary realities
are derived by a process of division).”


Hence the sole thing that is divine is the nature of an energy of
disjunctions. Schreber’s divine is inseparable from the disjunctions he
employs to divide himself up into parts: earlier empires, later empires;
later empires of a superior God, and those of an inferior God. Freud
stresses the importance of these disjunctive syntheses in Schreber’s
delirium in particular, but also in delirium as a general phenomenon. “A
process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of
paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. \emph{Or rather},
paranoia resolves once more into their elements the products of the
condensations and identifications which are effected in the
unconscious.”\footnote{Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes,” p. 432 (emphasis added).} But why does Freud thus add that, on second thought,
hysterical neurosis comes first, and that disjunctions appear only as a
result of the projection of a more basic, primordial condensed material?
Doubtless this is a way of maintaining intact the rights of Oedipus in
the God of delirium and the schizoparanoiac recording process. And for
that very reason we must pose the most far-reaching question in this
regard: 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? For there is no doubting the
fact that the schizo is constantly subjected to interrogation,
constantly cross-examined. Precisely because his relationship with
nature does not constitute a specific pole, the questions put to him are
formulated in terms of the existing social code: your name, your father,
your mother? In the course of his exercises in desiring-production,
Beckett’s Molloy is cross-examined by a policeman: “Your name is Molloy,
said the sergeant. Yes, I said, now I remember. And your mother? said
the sergeant. I didn’t follow. Is your mother’s name Molloy too? said
the sergeant. I thought it over. Your mother, said the sergeant, is your
mother’s—Let me think! I cried. At least I imagine that’s how it was.
Take your time, said the sergeant. Was mother’s name Molloy? Very
likely. Her name must be Molloy too, I said. They took me away, to the
guardroom I suppose, and there I was told to sit down. I must have tried
to explain.”\footnote{Beckett, \emph{Molloy}, p. 29.}


We cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it
continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the
depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though
today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all
adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena. The psychoanalyst
says that we must \emph{necessarily} discover Schreber’s daddy beneath his
superior God, and doubtless also his elder brother beneath his inferior
God. At times the schizophrenic loses his patience and demands to be
left alone. Other times he goes along with the whole game and even
invents a few tricks of his own, introducing his own reference points in
the model put before him and undermining it from within (“Yes, that’s my
mother, all right, but my mother’s the Virgin Mary, you know”). One can
easily imagine Schreber answering Freud: “Yes, I quite agree, naturally
the talking birds are young girls, and the superior God is my daddy and
the inferior God my brother.” But little by little he will
surreptitiously “reimpregnate” the series of young girls with all
talking birds, his father with the superior God, and his brother with
the inferior God, all of them divine forms that become complicated, or
rather “desimplified,” as they break through the simplistic terms and
functions of the Oedipal triangle. As Artaud put it:



\begin{quote}



\end{quote}



\begin{verse}
\emph{I don’t believe in father} \\{}
                     \emph{in mother,} \\{}
\emph{got no} \\{}
\emph{papamummy}
\end{verse}


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\dots{}. The
series is completely refractory to a transcription that would transform
and mold it into a specifically ternary and triangular schema such as
Oedipus. The full body without organs is produced as antiproduction,
that is to say it intervenes within the process as such for the sole
purpose of rejecting any attempt to impose on it any sort of
triangulation implying that it was produced by parents. How could this
body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such
eloquent witness of its own self-production, of its own engendering of
itself? And it is precisely here on this body, right where it is, that
the Numen is distributed and disjunctions are established, independent
of any sort of projection. \emph{Yes, I have been my father and I have been
my son}. “I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and
myself.”\footnote{Antonin Artaud, “Here Lies,” trans. F. Teri Wehn and Jack Hirschman, in \emph{Artaud Anthology} (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), pp. 247 and 238 respectively.} The schizo has his own system of co-ordinates for situating
himself at his disposal, because, first of all, he has at his disposal
his very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social
code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it. The code of
delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might
be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that
he deliberately \emph{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.


Adolf Wölfli’s drawings reveal the workings of all sorts of clocks,
turbines, dynamos, celestial machines, house-machines, and so on. And
these machines work in a connective fashion, from the perimeter to the
center, in successive layers or segments. But the “explanations” that he
provides for them, which he changes as often as the mood strikes him,
are based on genealogical series that constitute the recording of each
of his drawings. What is even more important, the recording process
affects the drawings themselves, showing up in the form of lines
standing for “catastrophe” or “collapse” that are so many disjunctions
surrounded by spirals.\footnote{W. Morgenthaler, “Adolf Wölfli.” French translation in \emph{L’Art brut}, no. 2.} The schizo maintains a shaky balance for the
simple reason that the result is always the same, no matter what the
disjunctions. Although the organ-machines attach themselves to the body
without organs, the latter continues nonetheless to be without organs
and does not become an organism in the ordinary sense of the word. It
remains fluid and slippery. Agents of production likewise alight on
Schreber’s body and cling to it—the sunbeams, for instance, that he
attracts, which contain thousands of tiny spermatozoids. Sunbeams,
birds, voices, nerves enter into changeable and genealogically complex
relationships with God and forms of God derived from the godhead by
division. But all this happens and is all recorded on the surface of the
body without organs: even the copulations of the agents, even the
divisions of God, even the genealogies marking it off into squares like
a grid, and their permutations. The surface of this uncreated body
swarms with them, as a lion’s mane swarms with fleas.

\section{3. The Subject and Enjoyment}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-3}%


Conforming to the meaning of the word “process,” recording falls back on
(\emph{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 \emph{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\dots{}.” Even
suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment. Doubtless all
desiring-production is, in and of itself, immediately consumption and
consummation, and therefore, “sensual pleasure.” But this is not yet the
case for a subject that can situate itself only in terms of the
disjunctions of a recording surface, in what is left after each
division. Returning yet again to the case of Judge Schreber, we note
that he is vividly aware of this fact: the rate of cosmic sexual
pleasure remains constant, so that God will find a way of taking his
pleasure with Schreber, even if in order to do so Schreber must
transform himself into a woman. But Schreber experiences only a residual
share of this pleasure, as a recompense for his suffering or as a reward
for his becoming-woman. “On the other hand, God demands a \emph{constant
state of enjoyment} \dots{} and it is my duty to provide him with this \dots{} in
the shape of the greatest possible output of spiritual voluptuousness.
And if, in this process, a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I
feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the
inordinate measure of suffering and privation that has been mine for so
many past years.”\footnote{Cited in Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes,” p. 415.} Just as a part of the libido as energy of
production was transformed into energy of recording (Numen), a part of
this energy of recording is transformed into energy of consummation
(Voluptas).\footnote{* The French term here is \emph{énergie de consommation}. The word \emph{consommation} has a number of meanings in French, among them consummation (as of a marriage); an ultimate fulfillment or perfection; and consumption (as of raw material, fuel, or products). The term has therefore been translated variously below, depending on the context. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} It is this residual energy that is the motive force
behind the third synthesis of the unconscious: the conjunctive synthesis
“so it’s\dots{},” or the production of consumption.


We must examine how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is
produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between
desiring-machines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these
machines, as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave
way to an attraction in the miraculating machine. But the opposition
between attraction and repulsion persists. It would seem that a genuine
reconciliation of the two can take place only on the level of a new
machine, functioning as “the return of the repressed.” There are a
number of proofs that such a reconciliation does or can exist. With no
further details being provided, we are told of Robert Gie, the very
talented designer of paranoiac electrical machines: “Since he was unable
to free himself of these currents that were tormenting him, he gives
every appearance of having finally joined forces with them, taking
passionate pride in portraying them in their total victory, in their
triumph.”\footnote{\emph{L’Art brut}, no. 3, p. 63.} Freud is more specific when he stresses the crucial
turning point that occurs in Schreber’s illness when Schreber becomes
reconciled to becoming-woman and embarks upon a process of self-cure
that brings him back to the equation Nature =
Production (the production of a new humanity). As a matter of fact,
Schreber finds himself frozen in the pose and trapped in the
paraphernalia of a transvestite, at a moment when he is practically
cured and has recovered all his faculties: “I am sometimes to be found,
standing before the mirror or elsewhere, with the upper portion of my
body partly bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as
ribbons, trumpery necklaces, and the like. This occurs only, I may add,
when I am \emph{by myself}, and never, at least so far as I am able to avoid
it, in the presence of other people.”\footnote{Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes,” pp. 400–401.} Let us borrow the term
“celibate machine” to designate this machine that succeeds the paranoiac
machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between the
desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a
new humanity or a glorious organism. This is tantamount to saying that
the subject is produced as a mere residuum alongside the
desiring-machines, or that he confuses himself with this third
productive machine and with the residual reconciliation that it brings
about: a conjunctive synthesis of consummation in the form of a
wonderstruck “So \emph{that’s} what it was!”


Michel Carrouges has identified a certain number of fantastic
machines—“celibate machines”—that he has discovered in works of
literature. The examples he points to are of many very different sorts,
and at first glance do not seem to belong to a single category: Marcel
Duchamp’s painting “La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même”
(“The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”), the machine in
Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Raymond Roussel’s machines, those of
Jarry’s \emph{Surmâle} (\emph{Supermale}), certain of Edgar Allan Poe’s machines,
Villiers’s \emph{Eve future} (\emph{The Future Eve}), etc.\footnote{Michel Carrouges, \emph{Les machines célibataires} (Paris: Arcanes, 1954).} The characteristics
that allow us to classify all of them in this one category—though their
importance varies according to the example considered—are as follows:
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 possesses 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 \emph{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.


The question becomes: what does the celibate machine produce? what is
produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive
quantities. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities
in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable—a celibate
misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended
between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of
pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form. These are often
described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of
hallucination (\emph{I see, I hear}) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (\emph{I
think\dots{}}) presuppose an \emph{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.\footnote{* W.R. Bion is the first to have stressed this importance of the \emph{I feel}, but he places it in the realm of fantasy and makes it an affective parallel of the \emph{I think}. See \emph{Elements of Psycho-analysis} (London: Heinemann, 1963), pp. 94ff.}
Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two
preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of
these two forces. It must not be thought that the intensities themselves
are in opposition to one another, arriving at a state of balance around
a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive in relationship
to the zero intensity that designates the full body without organs. And
they undergo relative rises or falls depending on the complex
relationship between them and the variations in the relative strength of
attraction and repulsion as determining factors. In a word, the
opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open
series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an
expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of
an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a
subject passes. The Kantian theory according to which intensive
quantities fill up, to varying degrees, \emph{matter that has no empty
spaces}, is profoundly schizoid.


Further, if we are to believe Judge Schreber’s doctrine, \emph{attraction and
repulsion} produce intense \emph{nervous states} that fill up the body
without organs to varying degrees—states through which
Schreber-the-subject passes, becoming a woman and many other things as
well, following an endless circle of eternal return. The breasts on the
judge’s naked torso are neither delirious nor hallucinatory phenomena:
they designate, first of all, a band of intensity, a zone of intensity
on his body without organs. The body without organs is an egg: it is
crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and
geodesic lines, traversed by \emph{gradients} marking the transitions and the
becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these
particular vectors. Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all
life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts
does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a
predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be
stimulated to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity,
potentials, thresholds, and gradients. A harrowing, emotionally
overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to
matter, to a burning, living center of matter: “\dots{} this emotion, situated
outside of the particular point where the mind is searching for it \dots{}
one’s entire soul flows into this emotion that makes the mind aware of
the terribly disturbing sound of matter, and passes through its
white-hot flame.”\footnote{Antonin Artaud, \emph{Le pèse-nerfs}, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard), Vol. 1, p. 112.}


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? How
could the conjunctive synthesis of “So \emph{that’s} what it was!” and “So
it’s \emph{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. We merely see how very little the consumption
of pure intensities has to do with family figures, and how very
different the connective tissue of the “So it’s\dots{}” is from the Oedipal
tissue.


How can we sum up this entire vital progression? Let us trace it along a
first path (the shortest route): the points of disjunction on the body
without organs form circles that converge on the desiring-machines; then
the subject—produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an
appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine—passes through all
the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. This
subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine,
but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered,
**defined* by the states through which it passes. Thus the circles traced
by Beckett’s Unnamable: “a succession of irregular loops, now sharp and
short as in the waltz, now of a parabolic sweep,”\footnote{Samuel Beckett, \emph{The Unnamable}, in \emph{Three Novels by Samuel Beckett}, p. 452. \emph{The Unnamable} was translated from the French by the author. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} with Murphy, Watt,
Mercier, etc., as states, without the family having anything whatsoever
to do with all of this. Or, to follow a path that is more complex, but
leads in the end to the same thing: by means of the paranoiac machine
and the miraculating machine, the proportions of attraction and
repulsion on the body without organs produce, starting from zero, a
series of states in the celibate machine; and the subject is born of
each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state
that determines him at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these
states that cause him to be born and reborn (the lived state coming
first, in relation to the subject that lives it).


This is what Klossowski has admirably demonstrated in his commentary on
Nietzsche: the presence of the \emph{Stimmung} as a material emotion,
constitutive of the most lofty thought and the most acute perception.
“The centrifugal forces do not flee the center forever, but approach it
once again, only to retreat from it yet again: such is the nature of the
violent oscillations that overwhelm an individual so long as he seeks
only his own center and is incapable of seeing the circle of which he
himself is a part; for if these oscillations overwhelm him, it is
because each one of them corresponds to an individual other than the one
he believes himself to be, from the point of view of the unlocatable
center. As a result, an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series
of individualities must be undergone by each of these oscillations, so
that as a consequence the fortuitousness of this or that particular
individuality will render all of them necessary.”\footnote{Pierre Klossowski, \emph{Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux} (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969).} The forces of
attraction and repulsion, of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce
a series of intensive states based on the intensity
= 0 that designates the body without organs (“but
what is most unusual is that here again a new afflux is necessary,
merely to signify this absence”\footnote{Ibid.}). 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: “\emph{every name in
history is I}\dots{},”\footnote{Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Jakob Burckhardt, January 5, 1889, in \emph{Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche}, trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 347. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} 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 \emph{oeuvre} by Nietzsche.
“Nietzsche believes that he is now pursuing, not the realization of a
system, but the application of a program \dots{} in the form of residues of
the Nietzschean discourse, which have now become the repertory, so to
speak, of his histrionicism.”\footnote{Klossowski, op. cit.} 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 \emph{me}! So it’s \emph{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 in one fell swoop.
We began by defining him as \emph{Homo natura}, and lo and behold, he has
turned out to be \emph{Homo historia}. This long road that leads from the one
to the other stretches from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, and the pace becomes
faster and faster. “The euphoria could not be prolonged in Nietzsche for
as long a time as the contemplative alienation of Hölderlin\dots{}. The vision
of the world granted to Nietzsche does not inaugurate a more or less
regular succession of landscapes or still fifes, extending over a period
of forty years or so; it is, rather, a parody of the process of
recollection of an event: a single actor will play the whole of it in
pantomime in the course of a single solemn day—because the whole of it
reaches expression and then disappears once again in the space of just
one day—even though it may appear to have taken place between December
31 and January 6—in a realm above and beyond the usual rational
calendar.”\footnote{Klossowski, op. cit.}

\section{4. A Materialist Psychiatry}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-4}%


The famous hypothesis put forward by the psychiatrist G. de Clerambault
seems well founded: delirium, which is by nature global and systematic,
is a secondary phenomenon, a consequence of partial and local
automatistic phenomena. Delirium is in fact characteristic of the
recording that is made of the process of production of the
desiring-machines; and though there are syntheses and disorders
(\emph{affections}) that are peculiar to this recording process, as we see in
paranoia and even in the paranoid forms of schizophrenia, it does not
constitute an autonomous sphere, for it depends on the functioning and
the breakdowns of desiring-machines. Nonetheless Clerambault used the
term “(mental) automatism” to designate only athematic
phenomena—echolalia, the uttering of odd sounds, or sudden irrational
outbursts—which he attributed to the mechanical effects of infections or
intoxications. Moreover, he explained a large part of delirium in turn
as an effect of automatism; as for the rest of it, the “personal” part,
in his view it was of the nature of a reaction and had to do with
“character,” the manifestations of which might well precede the
automatism (as in the paranoiac character, for instance).\footnote{G. de Clerambault, \emph{Oeuvre psychiatrique} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).} Hence
Clerambault regarded automatism as merely a neurological mechanism in
the most general sense of the word, rather than a process of economic
production involving desiring-machines. As for history, he was content
merely to mention its innate or acquired nature. Clerambault is the
Feuerbach of psychiatry, in the sense in which Marx remarks: “Whenever
Feuerbach looks at things as a materialist, there is no history in his
works, and whenever he takes history into account, he no longer is a
materialist.” 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.


There is no very great difference between false materialism and typical
forms of idealism. 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.


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. But why try to
bring him back to what he has escaped from, why set him back down amid
problems that are no longer problems to him, why mock his truth by
believing that we have paid it its due by merely figuratively taking our
hats off to it? There are those who will maintain that the schizo is
incapable of uttering the word \emph{I}, and that we must restore his ability
to pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by
saying: they’re fucking me over again. “I won’t say \emph{I} any more. I’ll
never utter the word again; it’s just too damn stupid. Every time I hear
it, I’ll use the third person instead, if I happen to remember to. If it
amuses them. And it won’t make one bit of difference.”\footnote{Beckett, \emph{The Unnamable}.} And if he
does chance to utter the word \emph{I} again, that won’t make any difference
either. He is too far removed from these problems, too far past them.


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.”


The question as to how to deal analytically with the relationship
between drives (\emph{pulsions}) and symptoms, between the symbol and what is
symbolized, has arisen again and again. Is this relationship to be
considered \emph{causal}? Or is it a relationship of \emph{comprehension}? A mode
of \emph{expression}? The question, however, has been posed too
theoretically. 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.


Every time that the problem of schizophrenia is explained in terms of
the ego, all we can do is “sample” a supposed essence or a presumed
specific nature of the schizo, regardless of whether we do so with love
and pity or disgustedly spit out the mouthful we have tasted. We have
“sampled” him once as a dissociated ego, another time as an ego cut off
from the world, and yet again—most temptingly—as an ego that had not
ceased to be, who was there in the most specific way, but in his very
own world, though he might reveal himself to a clever psychiatrist, a
sympathetic superobserver—in short, a phenomenologist. Let us remember
once again one of Marx’s caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of
wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the
relations of production. The product appears to be all the more
specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely
the theoretician relates it to \emph{ideal forms of causation, comprehension,
or expression}, rather than to \emph{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 \dots{} extremity
wherein the soul and body ultimately perish”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, \emph{Aaron’s Rod}, p. 162.} (the autist).
Kraepelin’s celebrated terminal state \dots{} But the moment that one
describes, on the contrary, the material process of production, the
specificity of the product tends to evaporate, while at the same time
the possibility of another outcome, another end result of the process
appears. 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. How does one
get from one to the other, and is this transition inevitable? This
remains the crucial question. Karl Jaspers has given us precious
insights, on this point as on so many others, because his “idealism” was
remarkably atypical. Contrasting the concept of process with those of
reaction formation or development of the personality, he views process
as a rupture or intrusion, having nothing to do with an imaginary
relationship with the ego; rather, it is a relationship with the
“demoniacal” in nature. The one thing Jaspers failed to do was to view
process as material economic reality, as the process of production
wherein Nature = Industry, Nature
= History.


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 \emph{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. It is true that the other side,
the “production” side, has not been entirely ignored. Kant, for
instance, must be credited with effecting a critical revolution as
regards the theory of desire, by attributing to it “the faculty of
being, through its representations, the cause of the reality of the
objects of these representations.”\footnote{Immanuel Kant, \emph{The Critique of Judgment}, Introduction, §3.} But it is not by chance that Kant
chooses superstitious beliefs, hallucinations, and fantasies as
illustrations of this definition of desire: as Kant would have it, we
are well aware that the real object can be produced only by an external
causality and external mechanisms; nonetheless this knowledge does not
prevent us from believing in the intrinsic power of desire to create its
own object—if only in an unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form—or
from representing this causality as stemming from within desire itself.
The reality of the object, insofar as it is produced by desire, is thus
a \emph{psychic reality}. Hence it can be said that Kant’s critical
revolution changes nothing essential: this way of conceiving of
productivity does not question the validity of the classical conception
of desire as a lack; rather, it uses this conception as a support and a
buttress, and merely examines its implications more carefully.


In point of fact, if desire is the lack of the real object, its very
nature as a real entity depends upon an “essence of lack” that produces
the fantasized object. 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. This conception does not
necessarily compel psychoanalysis to engage in a study of gadgets and
markets, in the form of an utterly dreary and dull psychoanalysis of the
object: psychoanalytic studies of packages of noodles, cars, or
“thingumajigs.” But even when the fantasy is interpreted in depth, not
simply as an object, but as a specific machine that brings desire itself
front and center, this machine is merely theatrical, and the
complementarity of what it sets apart still remains: it is now need that
is defined in terms of a relative lack and determined by its own object,
whereas desire is regarded as what produces the fantasy and produces
itself by detaching itself from the object, though at the same time it
intensifies the lack by making it absolute: an “incurable insufficiency
of being,” an “inability-to-be that is life itself.” Hence the
presentation of desire as something \emph{supported} by needs, while these
needs, and their relationship to the object as something that is lacking
or missing, continue to be the basis of the productivity of desire
(theory of an underlying support). 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.
Clément Rosset puts it very well: every time the emphasis is put on a
lack that desire supposedly suffers from as a way of defining its
object, “the world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in
accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that
desire feels the lack of; hence the world does not contain each and
every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one
that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that
contains the key to desire (missing in this world).”\footnote{Clément Rosset, \emph{Logique du pire} (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1970), p. 37.}


If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can
be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality.
Desire is the set of \emph{passive syntheses} that engineer partial objects,
flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. 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 \emph{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 is another machine connected to it.
Hence the product is something removed or deducted from the process of
producing: between the act of producing and the product, something
becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum.
The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself.\footnote{* Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two poles: one related to “the object small \emph{a}” as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond both any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the “great Other” as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack. In Serge Leclaire’s article “La réalité du désir” (Ch. 4, reference note 26), the oscillation between these two poles can be seen quite clearly.} There is
no particular form of existence that can be labeled “psychic reality.”
As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a
“natural and sensuous object.” Desire is not bolstered by needs, but
rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are
counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a
countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within
a real that is natural and social. Desire always remains in close touch
with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows
them, shifts when they shift, and does not outlive them. For that reason
it so often becomes the desire to die, whereas need is a measure of the
withdrawal of a subject that has lost its desire at the same time that
it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions. This is precisely
the significance of need as a search in a void: hunting about, trying to
capture or become a parasite of passive syntheses in whatever vague
world they may happen to exist in. It is no use saying: We are not green
plants; we have long since been unable to synthesize chlorophyll, so
it’s necessary to eat\dots{}. Desire then becomes this abject fear of lacking
something. But it should be noted that this is not a phrase uttered by
the poor or the dispossessed. On the contrary, such people know that
they are close to grass, almost akin to it, and that desire “needs” very
few things—\emph{not those leftovers that chance to come their way, but the
very things that are continually taken from them}—and that what is
missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere deep down
inside himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being
of man, for whom to desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of
the real.


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 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. And never mind
those who believe that this is very easy to say, or that it is the sort
of idea to be found in books. “From the little reading I had done I had
observed that the men who were most \emph{in} life, who were moulding life,
who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing.
They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and
kin, or the preservation of the State\dots{}. The phantasmal world is the
world which has never been fully conquered over. It is the world of the
past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like
dragging a ball and chain.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus} (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 262, 430.} The true visionary is a Spinoza in the
garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary. We know very well where lack—and its
subjective correlative—come from. Lack (\emph{manque})\footnote{* The French word \emph{manque} may mean both lack and need in a psychological sense, as well as want or privation or scarcity in an economic sense. Depending upon the context, it will hence be translated in various ways below. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} 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 (\emph{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 (\emph{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.\footnote{* Maurice Clavel remarks, apropos of Jean-Paul Sartre, that a Marxist philosophy cannot allow itself to introduce the notion of scarcity as its initial premise: “Such a scarcity antedating exploitation makes of the law of supply and demand a reality that will remain forever independent, since it is situated at a primordial level. Hence it is no longer a question of including or deducing this law within Marxism, since it is immediately evident at a prior stage, at a level from which Marxism itself derives. Being a rigorous thinker, Marx refuses to employ the notion of scarcity, and is quite correct to do so, for this category would be his undoing.” In \emph{Qui est aliéné}? (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 330.} 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 (\emph{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.


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 had their precise counterpart in introjected or
internal mental 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. As long as we are
content to establish a perfect parallel between money, gold, capital,
and the capitalist triangle on the one hand, and the libido, the anus,
the phallus, and the family triangle on the other, we are engaging in an
enjoyable pastime, but the mechanisms of money remain totally unaffected
by the anal projections of those who manipulate money. 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 \emph{social production is purely and simply
desiring-production itself under determinate conditions}. We maintain
that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it 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. \emph{There is only desire and the social, and
nothing else}.


Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social
reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the
consequence of such production under various conditions that we must
analyze. 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 \emph{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 \emph{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
formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes;
at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they \emph{wanted}
fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that
needs to be accounted for.\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, \emph{The Mass Psychology of Fascism}, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (London: Souvenir Press, 1970).}


Yet Reich himself never manages to provide a satisfactory explanation of
this phenomenon, because at a certain point he reintroduces precisely
the line of argument that he was in the process of demolishing, by
creating a distinction between rationality as it is or ought to be in
the process of social production, and the irrational element in desire,
and by regarding only this latter as a suitable subject for
psychoanalytic investigation. Hence the sole task he assigns
psychoanalysis is the explanation of the “negative,” the “subjective,”
the “inhibited” within the social field. He therefore necessarily
returns to a dualism between the real object rationally produced on the
one hand, and irrational, fantasizing production on the other.\footnote{* We find in the case of culturalists a distinction between rational systems and projective systems, with psychoanalysis applying only to these latter (as for example in Abram Kardiner). Despite their hostility to culturalism, we find in both Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse certain traces of this same dualism, even though they define the rational and the irrational in a completely different way and assign them quite different roles.} He
gives up trying to discover the \emph{common denominator or the coextension
of the social field and desire}. In order to establish the basis for a
genuinely materialistic psychiatry, there was a category that Reich was
sorely in need of: that of desiring-production, which would apply to the
real in both its so-called rational and irrational forms.


The fact there is massive social repression that has an enormous effect
on desiring-production in no way vitiates our principle: 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 \emph{group fantasy}—as institutional
analysis\footnote{* \emph{Institutional analysis} is the more political tendency of institutional psychotherapy, begun in the late 1950s as an attempt to collectively deal with what psychoanalysis so hypocritically avoided, namely the psychoses. La Borde Clinic, established in 1955 by Jean Oury of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, served as the locus for discussions on institutional psychotherapy, and Jacques Lacan’s seminars served as the intellectual basis for these discussions “in the beginning.” Felix Guattari joined the clinic in 1956, as a militant interested in the notions of desire under discussion—a topic rarely dealt with by militants at that time. Preferring the term “institutional analysis” over “institutional psychotherapy,” Guattari sought to push the movement in a more political direction, toward what he later described as a political analysis of desire. In any case this injection of a psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan’s version) into a custodial institution led to a collectivization of the analytical concepts. Transference came to be seen as institutional, and fantasies were seen to be collective: \emph{desire was a problem of groups and for groups}. See Jacques Donzelot’s excellent article on \emph{Anti-Oedipus}, “Une anti-sociologie” in \emph{Esprit}, December 1972, and Gilles Deleuze’s detailed discussion of Guattari’s notion of groups and desire, “Trois problèmes de groupe” in Felix Guattari, \emph{Psychanalyse el transversalité} (Paris: Maspero, 1972). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} 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 a basis for them.
Hence in group fantasy the libido may invest all of an existing social
field, including the latter’s most repressive forms; or on the contrary,
it may launch a counterinvestment whereby 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.) But there is never any difference in
nature between the desiring-machines and the technical social machines.
There is a certain distinction between them, but it is merely a
distinction of \emph{régime},\footnote{* The word \emph{régime} has a number of different meanings in French, including: regimen or form of government; a set of laws, rules, or regulations; rate of flow, as of a current; rate or speed of operation, as of a motor or engine. Since the authors use the word in several senses, the French word \emph{régime} has been retained throughout the English text. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} depending on \emph{their} relationships of size.
Except for this difference in régime, they are the same machines, as
group fantasies clearly prove.


When in the course of our discussion above, we laid down the broad
outlines of a parallelism between social production and
desiring-production, in order to show that in both cases there is a
strong tendency on the part of the forces of antiproduction to operate
retroactively on (\emph{se rabattre sur}) productive forms and appropriate
them, this parallelism was in no way meant as an exhaustive description
of the relationship between the two systems of production. It merely
enables us to point to certain phenomena having to do with the
difference in régime between them. In the first place, technical
machines obviously work only if they are not out of order; they
ordinarily stop working not because they break down but because they
wear out. Marx makes use of this simple principle to show that the
régime of technical machines is characterized by a strict distinction
between the means of production and the product; thanks to this
distinction, the machine transmits value to the product, but only the
value that the machine itself loses as it wears out. Desiring-machines,
on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and in fact run
only when they are not functioning properly: the product is always an
offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at
the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run.


Art often takes advantage of this property of desiring-machines by
creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring-production is used
to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the
reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of
dysfunction. Arman’s charred violins, for instance, or César’s
compressed car bodies. More generally, Dali’s method of critical
paranoia assures the explosion of a desiring-machine within an object of
social production. But even earlier. Ravel preferred to throw his
inventions entirely out of gear rather than let them simply run down,
and chose to end his compositions with abrupt breaks, hesitations,
tremolos, discordant notes, and unresolved chords, rather than allowing
them to slowly wind down to a close or gradually die away into
silence.\footnote{Vladimir Jankelevitch, \emph{Ravel}, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 73–80.} 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.


From this, a second difference in régime results: desiring-machines
produce antiproduction all by themselves, whereas the antiproduction
characteristic of technical machines takes place only within the
extrinsic conditions of the reproduction of the process (even though
these conditions do not come into being at some “later stage”). That is
why technical machines are not an economic category, and always refer
back to a socius or a social machine that is quite distinct from these
machines, and that conditions this reproduction. 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. For desiring-machines are the fundamental category of the
economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves,
and make no distinction between agents and their own parts, or between
the relations of production and their own relations, or between the
social order and technology. Desiring-machines are both technical and
social. It is in this sense that desiring-production is the locus of a
primal psychic repression,\footnote{See J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, \emph{The Language of Psycho-Analysis}, trans. Donald Micholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} whereas social production is where social
repression takes place, and it is between the former and the latter that
there occurs something that resembles secondary psychic repression in
the “strictest” sense: the situation of the body without organs or its
equivalent is the crucial factor here, depending on whether it is the
result of an internal process or of an extrinsic condition (and thus
affects the role of the death instinct in particular).


But at the same time they are the same machines, despite the fact that
they are governed by two different regimes—and despite the fact that it
is admittedly a strange adventure for desire to desire repression. There
is only one kind of production, the production of the real. And
doubtless we can express this identity in two different ways, even
though these two ways together constitute the autoproduction of the
unconscious as a cycle. We can say that social production, under
determinate conditions, derives primarily from desiring-production:
which is to say that \emph{Homo natura} comes first. But we must also say,
more accurately, that desiring-production is first and foremost social
in nature, and tends to free itself only at the end: which is to say
that \emph{Homo historia} comes first. The body without organs is not an
original primordial entity that later projects itself into different
sorts of socius, as though it were a raving paranoiac, the chieftain of
the primitive horde, who was initially responsible for social
organization. The social machine or socius may be the body of the Earth,
the body of the Despot, the body of Money. It is never a projection,
however, of the body without organs. On the contrary: 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 \emph{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. Capitalism does not confront this situation from the outside,
since it experiences it as the very fabric of its existence, as both its
primary determinant and its fundamental raw material, its form and its
function, and deliberately perpetuates it, in all its violence, with all
the powers at its command. Its sovereign production and repression can
be achieved in no other way. 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 deterritorialization of the
socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will
destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash
the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it
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?\footnote{* On hysteria, schizophrenia, and their relationships with social structures, see the analyses by Georges Devereux in his \emph{Essais d’ethnopsychiatrie générate} (Paris: Gallimard), p. 67ff., and the wonderful pages in Karl Jaspers’ \emph{Strindberg und Van Gogh} (Berlin: J. Springer, 1926). (English translation, \emph{Strindberg and Van Gogh}, trans. Oskar Grunow [Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.]) The question has been asked: is madness in our time “a state of total sincerity, in areas where in less chaotic times one would have been capable of honest experience and expression without it?” Jaspers reformulates this question by adding: “We have seen that in former times human beings attempted to drive themselves into hysteria; and we might say that today many human beings attempt to drive themselves into madness in much the same way. But if the former attempt was to a certain extent psychologically possible, the latter is not possible at all, and can lead only to inauthenticity.”}


The decoding of flows and the deterritorialization of the socius thus
constitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of
capitalism. It continually draws near to its limit, which is a genuinely
schizophrenic limit. It tends, with all the strength at its command, to
produce the schizo as the subject of the decoded flows on the body
without organs—more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian
than the proletariat. This tendency is being carried further and
further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch
itself straight to the moon: we really haven’t seen anything yet! When
we say that schizophrenia is our characteristic malady, the malady of
our era, we do not merely mean to say that modern life drives people
mad. It is not a question of a way of life, but of a process of
production. Nor is it merely a question of a simple parallelism, even
though from the point of view of the failure of codes, such a
parallelism is a much more precise formulation of the relationship
between, for example, the phenomena of shifting of meaning in the case
of schizophrenics and the mechanisms of ever increasing disharmony and
discord at every level of industrial society.


What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process
of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy
or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to
bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For
capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent
tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually
seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward
that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and
artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting,
as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in
terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States,
nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a
motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.” The real is
not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial. Marx termed the
twofold movement of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, and the
increase in the absolute quantity of surplus value, the law of the
counteracted tendency. As a corollary of this law, there is the twofold
movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and
their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. The more
the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing
flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its
ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces
of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the
process a larger and larger share of surplus value.


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 (\emph{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 artificial than the ones that society offers us, totally
artificial new families, secret lunar societies. As for the schizo,
continually wandering about, migrating here, there, and everywhere as
best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of
deterritorialization, 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. The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the
very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to
fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating
angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded
flows of desire. The real continues to flow. In the schizo, the two
aspects of \emph{process} are conjoined: the metaphysical process that puts
us in contact with the “demoniacal” element in nature or within the
heart of the earth, and the historical process of social production that
restores the autonomy of desiring-machines in relation to the
deterritorialized social machine. Schizophrenia is desiring-production
as the limit of social production. Desiring-production, and its
difference in régime as compared to social production, are thus end
points, not points of departure. Between the two there is nothing but an
ongoing process of becoming that is the becoming of reality. 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.

\section{5. The Machines}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-5}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-5}%


In what respect are desiring-machines really machines, in anything more
than a metaphorical sense? A machine may be defined as a \emph{system of
interruptions} or breaks (\emph{coupures}). These breaks should in no way be
considered as a separation from reality; rather, they operate along
lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them we are considering.
Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material
flow (\emph{hylè}) that it cuts into. It functions like a ham-slicing
machine, removing portions\footnote{* The authors’ word for this process is \emph{prélèvement}. The French word has a number of meanings, including: a skimming or a draining off; a removal of a certain quantity as a sample or for purposes of testing; a setting apart of a portion or share of the whole; a deduction from a sum of money on deposit. In the English text that follows, in a number of cases the noun \emph{prélèvement} or the corresponding verb \emph{prélever} will be indicated in parentheses following its translation. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} from the associative flow: the anus and
the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance; the mouth that cuts off not
only the flow of milk but also the flow of air and sound; the penis that
interrupts not only the flow of urine but also the flow of sperm. Each
associative flow must be seen as an ideal thing, an endless flux,
flowing from something not unlike the immense thigh of a pig. The term
**hylè* in fact designates the pure continuity that any one sort of
matter ideally possesses. When Robert Jaulin describes the little balls
and pinches of snuff used in a certain initiation ceremony, he shows
that they are produced each year as a sample taken from “an infinite
series that theoretically has one and only one origin,” a single ball
that extends to the very limits of the universe.\footnote{Robert Jaulin, \emph{La mort sara} (Paris: Plon, 1967), p. 122.} Far from being the
opposite of continuity, the break or interruption conditions this
continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal
continuity. This is because, as we have seen, every machine is a machine
of a machine. The machine produces an interruption of the flow only
insofar as it is connected to another machine that supposedly produces
this flow. And doubtless this second machine in turn is really an
interruption or break, too. But it is such only in relationship to a
third machine that ideally—that is to say, relatively—produces a
continuous, infinite flux: for example, the anus-machine and the
intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine, the
stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth-machine and the flow of
milk of a herd of dairy cattle (“and then \dots{} and then \dots{} and then\dots{}”). 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. That
is why, at the limit point of all the transverse or transfinite
connections, the partial object and the continuous flux, the
interruption and the connection, fuse into one: everywhere there are
breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its
productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto the
product. (It is very curious that Melanie Klein, whose discovery of
partial objects was so far-reaching, neglects to study flows from this
point of view and declares that they are of no importance; she thus
short-circuits all the connections.)\footnote{* “Children of both sexes regard urine in its positive aspect as equivalent to their mother’s milk, in accordance with the unconscious, which equates all bodily substances with one another.” Melanie Klein, \emph{The Psycho-Analysis of Children}, trans. Alix Strachey, The International Psycho-Analytic Library, no. 22 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1954), p. 291. (First edition, 1932.)}


“Connecticut, Connect-I-cut!” cries little Joey. In his study \emph{The Empty
Fortress}, Bruno Bettelheim paints the portrait of this young child who
can live, eat, defecate, and sleep only if he is plugged into machines
provided with motors, wires, lights, carburetors, propellers, and
steering wheels: an electrical feeding machine, a car-machine that
enables him to breathe, an anal machine that lights up. There are very
few examples that cast as much light on the regime of
desiring-production, and the way in which breaking down constitutes an
integral part of the functioning, or the way in which the cutting off is
an integral part of mechanical connections. Doubtless there are those
who will object that this mechanical, schizophrenic life expresses the
absence and the destruction of desire rather than desire itself, and
presupposes certain extremely negative attitudes on the part of his
parents to which the child reacts by turning himself into a machine. But
even Bettelheim, who has a noticeable bias in favor of Oedipal or
pre-oedipal causality, admits that this sort of causality intervenes
only in response to autonomous aspects of the productivity or the
activity of the child, although he later discerns in him a nonproductive
stasis or an attitude of total withdrawal. Hence there is first of all,
according to Bettelheim, an autonomous reaction to the total life
experience, of which the mother is only a part. 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 the 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 or 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.


In the second place, every machine has a sort of code built into it,
stored up inside it. This code is inseparable not only from the way in
which it is recorded and transmitted to each of the different regions of
the body, but also from the way in which the relations of each of the
regions with all the others are recorded. An organ may have connections
that associate it with several different flows; it may waver between
several functions, and even take on the regime of another organ—the
anorectic mouth, for instance. All sorts of functional questions thus
arise: What flow to break? Where to interrupt it? How and by what means?
What place should be left for other producers or antiproducers (the
place of one’s little brother, for instance)? Should one, or should one
not, suffocate from what one eats, swallow air, shit with one’s mouth?
The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form
a grid of disjunctions of a type that differs from the previous
connections. We owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile
domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain—or
several chains—of meaning: a discovery thus totally transforming
analysis. (The basic text in this connection is his \emph{La lettre volée}
[\emph{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 \emph{one} chain or even of \emph{one} code of desire. The
chains are called “signifying chains” (\emph{chaînes signifiantes}) because
they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves
signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargon, 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.


The disjunctions characteristic of these chains still do not involve any
exclusion, however, since exclusions can arise only as a function of
inhibiters and repressers that eventually determine the support and
firmly define a specific, personal subject.\footnote{* See Jacques Lacan, “Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache,” in \emph{Ecrits} (reference note 36), of “an exclusion having its source in these signs as such being able to come about only as a condition of consistency within a chain that is to be constituted; let us also add that the one dimension limiting this condition is the translation of which such a chain is capable. Let us consider this game of lotto for just a moment more. We may then discover that it is only because these elements turn up by sheer chance within an ordinal series, in a truly unorganized way, that their appearance makes us draw lots” (p. 658).} No chain is homogeneous;
all of them resemble, rather, a succession of characters from different
alphabets in which an ideogram, a pictogram, a tiny image of an elephant
passing by, or a rising sun may suddenly make its appearance. In a chain
that mixes together phonemes, morphemes, etc., without combining them,
papa’s mustache, mama’s upraised arm, a ribbon, a little girl, a cop, a
shoe suddenly turn up. 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.


These chains are the locus of continual detachments—schizzes\footnote{* A coined word (French \emph{schize}), based on the Greek verb \emph{schizein}, “to split,” “to cleave,” “to divide.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} on
every hand that are valuable in and of themselves and above all must not
be filled in. This is thus the second characteristic of the machine:
breaks that are a detachment (\emph{coupures-détachements}), which must not
be confused with breaks that are a slicing off
(\emph{coupures-prélèvements}). The latter have to do with continuous fluxes
and are related to partial objects. Schizzes have to do with
heterogeneous chains, and as their basic unit use detachable segments or
mobile stocks resembling building blocks or flying bricks. We must
conceive of each brick as having been launched from a distance and as
being composed of heterogeneous elements: containing within it not only
an inscription with signs from different alphabets, but also various
figures, plus one or several straws, and perhaps a corpse. Cutting into
the flows (\emph{le prélèvement du flux}) involves detachment of something
from a chain; and the partial objects of production presuppose stocks of
material or recording bricks within the coexistence and the interaction
of all the syntheses.


How could part of a flow be drawn off without a fragmentary detachment
taking place within the code that comes to inform the flow? 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 the 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. Every composition, and also every decomposition, uses
mobile bricks as the basic unit. \emph{Diaschisis} and \emph{diaspasis}, as
Monakow put it: either a lesion spreads along fibers that link it to
other regions and thus gives rise \emph{at a distance} to phenomena that are
incomprehensible from a purely mechanistic (but not a machinic) point of
view; or else a humoral disturbance brings on a shift in nervous energy
and creates broken, fragmented paths within the sphere of instincts.
These bricks or blocks are the essential parts of desiring-machines from
the point of view of the recording process: they are at once component
parts and products of the process of decomposition that are spatially
localized only at certain moments, by contrast with the nervous system,
which is a great chronogeneous machine: a melody-producing machine of
the “music box” type, with a nonspatial localization.\footnote{C. von Monakow and Mourgue, \emph{Introduction biologique à l’étude de la neurologie et de la psycho-pathologie} (Paris: Alcan, 1928).} What makes
Monakow and Mourgue’s study an unparalleled one, going far beyond the
entire Jacksonist philosophy that originally inspired it, is the theory
of bricks or blocks, their detachment and fragmentation, and above all
what such a theory presupposes: the introduction of desire into
neurology.


The third type of interruption or break characteristic of the
desiring-machine is the residual break (\emph{coupure-reste}) or residuum,
which produces a subject alongside the machine, functioning as a part
adjacent to the machine. And if this subject has no specific or personal
identity, if it traverses the body without organs without destroying its
indifference, it is because it is not only a part that is peripheral to
the machine, but also a part that is itself divided into parts that
correspond to the detachments from the chain (\emph{détachements de chaine})
and the removals from the flow (\emph{prélèvements de flux}) brought about by
the machine. Thus this subject consumes and consummates each of the
states through which it passes, and is born of each of them anew,
continuously emerging from them as a part made up of parts, each one of
which completely fills up the body without organs in the space of an
instant. This is what allows Lacan to postulate and describe in detail
an interplay of elements that is more machinic than etymological:
**parere*: to procure; \emph{separare}: to separate; \emph{se parere}: to engender
oneself. At the same time he points out the intensive nature of this
interplay: the part has nothing to do with the whole; “it performs its
role all by itself. In this case, only after the subject has partitioned
itself does it proceed to its parturition \dots{} that is why the subject can
procure what is of particular concern to it here, a state that we would
label a legitimate status within society. Nothing in the life of any
subject would sacrifice a very large part of its interests.”\footnote{Jacques Lacan, “Position de l’inconscient,” in \emph{Ecrits} (Paris: Editions du Seuil), p. 843.}


Like all the other breaks, the subjective break is not at all an
indication of a lack or need (\emph{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. Let us consider, for example,
the milk the baby throws up when it burps; it is at one and the same
time the restitution of something that has been levied from the
associative flux (\emph{restitution de prélèvement sur le flux associatif});
the reproduction of the process of detachment from the signifying chain
(\emph{reproduction de détachement sur la chaîne signifiante}); and a
residuum (résidu) that constitutes the subject’s share of the whole. 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 synthesis, and mobilizes libido as withdrawal
energy (\emph{énergie de prélèvement}). The second has to do with the
disjunctive synthesis, and mobilizes the Numen as detachment energy
(\emph{énergie de détachement}). The third has to do with the conjunctive
synthesis, and mobilizes Voluptas as residual energy (\emph{énergie
résiduelle}). 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.

\section{6. The Whole and Its Parts}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-1-section-6}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-1-section-6}%


In desiring-machines everything functions at the same time, but amid
hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short
circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds
in bringing its various parts together so as to form a whole. That is
because the breaks in the process are productive, and are reassemblies
in and of themselves. Disjunctions, by the very fact that they are
disjunctions, are inclusive. Even consumptions are transitions,
processes of becoming, and returns. 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?\footnote{Maurice Blanchot, \emph{L’entretien infini} (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 451–52.}
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.


We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been
shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of
the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are
merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be
glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the
original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once
existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We
no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless
dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of
heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in
totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality
alongside various separate parts, it is a whole \emph{of} these particular
parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity \emph{of} all of these
particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as
a new part fabricated separately.


“It comes into being, but applying this time to the whole as some
inspired fragment composed separately\dots{}.” So Proust writes of the unity
of Balzac’s creation, though his remark is also an apt description of
his own \emph{oeuvre}.\footnote{All quotes from Proust are translated by Richard Howard. We also retain the title \emph{In Search of Lost Time}, used by Richard Howard in his translation of Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Proust and Signs} (New York: Braziller, 1972), p. 1. This title stresses the notion of search and voyage. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} In the literary machine that Proust’s \emph{In Search
of Lost Time} constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts
are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an
end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight
compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are
contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not
to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a
certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges
violently bent out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to
interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. It is a schizoid
work par excellence: it is almost as though the author’s guilt, his
confessions of guilt are merely a sort of joke. (In Kleinian terms, it
might be said that the depressive position is only a cover-up for a more
deeply rooted schizoid attitude.) For the rigors of the law are only an
apparent expression of the protest of the One, whereas their real object
is the absolution of fragmented universes, in which the law never unites
anything in a single Whole, but on the contrary measures and maps out
the divergences, the dispersions, the exploding into fragments of
something that is innocent precisely because its source is madness. This
is why in Proust’s work the apparent theme of guilt is tightly
interwoven with a completely different theme totally contradicting it;
the plantlike innocence that results from the total compartmentalization
of the sexes, both in Charlus’s encounters and in Albertine’s slumber,
where flowers blossom in profusion and the utter innocence of madness is
revealed, whether it be the patent madness of Charlus or the supposed
madness of Albertine.


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.
Thus in the trip on the train in \emph{In Search of Lost Time}, there is
never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of the points of view,
except along the transversal that the frantic passenger traces from one
window to the other, “in order to draw together, in order to re weave
intermittent and opposite fragments.” This drawing together, this
reweaving is what Joyce called \emph{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. And when it operates on them, when it turns back upon them
(\emph{se rabat sur elles}), it brings about transverse communications,
transfinite summarizations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions on
its own surface, on which the functional breaks of partial objects are
continually intersected by breaks in the signifying chains, and by
breaks effected by a subject that uses them as reference points in order
to locate itself. 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. Geneticists have noted
the same phenomenon in the particular language of their science: “\dots{}
amino acids are assimilated individually into the cell, and then are
arranged in the proper sequence by a mechanism analogous to a template
onto which the distinctive side chain of each acid keys into its proper
position.”\footnote{J.H. Rush, \emph{The Dawn of Life} (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957), p. 148.} As a general rule, the problem of the relationships
between parts and the whole continues to be rather awkwardly formulated
by classic mechanism and vitalism, so long as the whole is considered as
a totality derived from the parts, or as an original totality from which
the parts emanate, or as a dialectical totalization. Neither mechanism
nor vitalism has really understood the nature of desiring-machines, nor
the twofold need to consider the role of production in desire and the
role of desire in mechanics.


There is no sort of evolution of drives that would cause these drives
and their objects to progress in the direction of an integrated whole,
any more than there is an original totality from which they can be
derived. 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. She does not relate these partial objects to a real
process of production—of the sort carried out by desiring-machines, for
instance. 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). Partial objects hence appear to her to be derived from
(\emph{prélevés sur}) global persons; not only are they destined to play a
role in totalities aimed at integrating the ego, the object, and drives
later in life, but they also constitute the original type of object
relation between the ego, the mother, and the father. And in the final
analysis that is where the crux of the matter lies. 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. The question that thus arises here is not at all
that of the relative importance of what might be called the
**pre-oedipal* in relation to Oedipus itself, since “pre-oedipal” still
has a developmental or structural relationship to Oedipus. The question,
rather, is that of the absolutely \emph{anoedipal} nature of the production
of desire. But because Melanie Klein insists on considering desire from
the point of view of the whole, of global persons, and of complete
objects—and also, perhaps, because she is eager to avoid any sort of
contretemps with the International Psycho-Analytic Association that
bears above its door the inscription “Let no one enter here who does not
believe in Oedipus”—she does not make use of partial objects to shatter
the iron collar of Oedipus; on the contrary, she uses them—or makes a
pretense of using them—to water Oedipus down, to miniaturize it, to find
it everywhere, to extend it to the very earliest years of life.


If we here choose the example of the analyst least prone to see
everything in terms of Oedipus, we do so only in order to demonstrate
what a forcing was necessary for her to make Oedipus the sole measure of
desiring-production. And naturally this is all the more true in the case
of run-of-the-mill practitioners who no longer have the slightest notion
of what the psychoanalytic “movement” is all about. It is no longer a
question of suggestion, but of sheer terrorism. Melanie Klein herself
writes: “The first time Dick came to me \dots{} he manifested no sort of
affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys
I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took
a big train and put it beside a smaller one \emph{and called them}
‘Daddy-train’ and ‘Dick-train.’ Thereupon he picked up the train I
called ‘Dick’ and made it roll to the window and said ‘Station.’ \emph{I
explained}: ‘The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.’ He left
the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the
room, shutting himself in, saying ‘dark,’ and ran out again directly. He
went through this performance several times. \emph{I explained to him}: ‘It
is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.’ Meantime he picked up
the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors.
While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a
questioning way: ‘Nurse?’ \dots{} \emph{As his analysis progressed} \dots{} \emph{Dick had
also discovered} the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother’s body, and he
displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water.”\footnote{Melanie Klein, \emph{Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, with an Introduction by Ernest Jones} (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 242–43 (emphasis added).} Say
that it’s Oedipus, or you’ll get a slap in the face. 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. So the entire
process of desiring-production is trampled underfoot and reduced to
(\emph{rabuttu sur}) parental images, laid out step by step in accordance
with supposed pre-oedipal stages, totalized in Oedipus, and the logic of
partial objects is thereby reduced to nothing. Oedipus thus becomes at
this point the crucial premise in the logic of psychoanalysis. For as we
suspected at the very beginning, partial objects are only apparently
derived from (\emph{prélevés sur}) global persons; they are really produced
by being drawn from (\emph{prélevés sur}) a flow or a nonpersonal \emph{hylè},
with which they re-establish contact by connecting themselves to other
partial objects. 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.


When the break between Freud and Jung is discussed, the modest and
practical point of disagreement that marked the beginning of their
differences is too often forgotten: Jung remarked that in the process of
transference the psychoanalyst frequently appeared in the guise of a
devil, a god, or a sorcerer, and that the roles he assumed in the
patient’s eyes went far beyond any sort of parental images. They
eventually came to a total parting of the ways, yet Jung’s initial
reservation was a telling one. The same remark holds true of children’s
games. A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing only
at being daddy-and-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a
cop or a robber, a train, a little car. The train is not necessarily
daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy. The problem has to do
not with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family
nature of this sexuality. Admittedly, once the child has grown up, he
finds himself deeply involved in social relations that are no longer
familial relations. But since these relations supposedly come into being
at a later stage in life, there are only two possible ways in which this
can be explained: it must be granted either that sexuality is sublimated
or neutralized in and through social (\emph{and} metaphysical) relations, in
the form of an analytic “afterward”; or else that these relations bring
into play a nonsexual energy, for which sexuality has merely served as
the symbol of an anagogical “beyond.”


It was their disagreement on this particular point that eventually made
the break between Freud and Jung irreconcilable. Yet at the same time
the two of them continued to share the belief that the libido cannot
invest a social or metaphysical field without some sort of mediation.
This is not the case, however. Let us consider a child at play, or a
child crawling about exploring the various rooms of the house he lives
in. He looks intently at an electrical outlet, he moves his body about
like a machine, he uses one of his legs as though it were an oar, he
goes into the kitchen, into the study, he runs toy cars back and forth.
It is obvious that his parents are present all this time, and that the
child would have nothing were it not for them. But that is not the real
matter at issue. The matter at issue is to find out whether everything
he touches is experienced as a representative of his parents. Ever since
birth his crib, his mother’s breast, her nipple, his bowel movements are
desiring-machines connected to parts of his body. It seems to us
self-contradictory to maintain, on the one hand, that the child lives
among partial objects, and that on the other hand he conceives of these
partial objects as being his parents, or even different parts of his
parents’ bodies. Strictly speaking, it is not true that a baby
experiences his mother’s breast as a separate part of her body. It
exists, rather, as a part of a desiring-machine connected to the baby’s
mouth, and is experienced as an object providing a nonpersonal flow of
milk, be it copious or scanty. A desiring-machine and a partial object
do not represent anything. A partial object is not representative, even
though it admittedly serves as a basis of relations and as a means of
assigning agents a place and a function; but these agents are not
persons, any more than these relations are intersubjective. They are
relations of production as such, and agents of production and
antiproduction. Ray Bradbury demonstrates this very well when he
describes the nursery as a place where desiring-production and group
fantasy occur, as a place where the only connection is that between
partial objects and agents.\footnote{Ray Bradbury, \emph{The Illustrated Man} (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951).} The small child lives with his family
around the clock; but within the bosom of this family, and from the very
first days of his life, he immediately begins having an amazing
nonfamilial experience that psychoanalysis has completely failed to take
into account. Lindner’s painting attracts our attention once again.


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 (\emph{rabattre tout
le jeu des machines désirantes dans}) the restricted code of Oedipus.
How does the child first come to define the places and the functions
that the parents are going to occupy as special agents, closely related
to other agents? From the very beginning Oedipus exists in one form and
one form only: open in all directions to a social field, to a field of
production directly invested by libido. It would seem obvious that
parents indeed make their appearance on the recording surface of
desiring-production. But this is in fact the crux of the entire Oedipal
problem: What are the precise forces that cause the Oedipal
triangulation to close up? Under what conditions does this triangulation
divert desire so that it flows across a surface within a narrow channel
that is not a natural conformation of this surface? How does it form a
type of inscription for experiences and the workings of mechanisms that
extend far beyond it in every direction? It is in this sense and this
sense only that the child \emph{relates} the breast as a partial object to
the person of his mother, and constantly watches the expression on his
mother’s face. The word “relate” in this case does not designate a
natural productive relationship, but rather a \emph{relation} in the sense of
a report or an account, an inscription within the over-all process of
inscription, within the Numen. From his very earliest infancy, the child
has a wide-ranging life of desire—a whole set of nonfamilial relations
with the objects and the machines of desire—that is not related to the
parents from the point of view of immediate production, but that is
ascribed to them (with either love or hatred) from the point of view of
the recording of the process, and in accordance with the very special
conditions of this recording, including the effect of these conditions
upon the process itself (feedback).


It is amid partial objects and within the nonfamilial relations of
desiring-production that the child lives his life and ponders what it
means to live, even though the question must be “related” to his parents
and the only possible tentative answer must be sought in family
relations. “I remember that ever since I was eight years old, and even
before that, I always wondered who I was, what I was, and why I was
alive; I remember that at the age of six, on a house on the Boulevard de
la Blancarde in Marseilles (number 29, to be precise), just as I was
eating my afternoon snack—a chocolate bar that a certain woman known as
my mother gave me—I asked myself what it meant to exist, to be alive,
what it meant to be conscious of oneself breathing, and I remember that
I wanted to inhale myself in order to prove that I was alive and to see
if I liked being alive, and if so why.”\footnote{Antonin Artaud, “Je n’ai jamais rien étudié\dots{},” \emph{84}, December 1950.} That is the crucial point: a
question occurs to the child that will perhaps be “related” to the woman
known as mommy, but that is not formulated in terms of her, but rather
produced within the interplay of desiring-machines—at the level, for
example, of the mouth-air machine or the tasting-machine: What does it
mean to be alive? What does it mean to breathe? What am I? What sort of
thing is this breathing-machine on my body without organs?


The child is a metaphysical being. As in the case of the Cartesian
**cogito*, parents have nothing to do with these questions. And we are
guilty of an error when we confuse the fact that this question is
“related” to the parents, in the sense of being recounted or
communicated to them, with the notion that it is “related” to them in
the sense of a fundamental connection with them. 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 the unconscious: in
particular, the entire interplay between primal psychic repression, the
desiring-machines, and the body without organs. For \emph{the unconscious is
an orphan}, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man.
The autoproduction of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the
subject of the Cartesian \emph{cogito} realized that it had no parents, when
the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the
process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence
from an indefinite parental regression. To quote Artaud once again: “I
got no\Slash{}papamummy.”


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.” The role of such relations must
be recognized in all psychopathological processes, and their importance
will be all the greater when we are dealing with psychotic syndromes
that would appear to be the most animal-like and the most desocialized.
It is in the child’s very first days of life, in the most elementary
behavior patterns of the suckling babe, that these relations with
partial objects, with the agents of production, with the factors of
antiproduction are woven, in accordance with the laws of
desiring-production as a whole. By failing from the beginning to see
what the precise nature of this desiring-production is, and how, under
what conditions, and in response to what pressures, the Oedipal
triangulation plays a role in the recording of the process, we find
ourselves trapped in the net of a diffuse, generalized oedipalism that
radically distorts the life of the child and his later development, the
neurotic and psychotic problems of the adult, and sexuality as a whole.
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 artifical 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. And though psychoanalysis may
perhaps have managed to “disinfect the dirty little secret,” the dreary,
dirty little secret of Oedipus-the-modern-tyrant benefited very little
from having been thus disinfected.


Is it possible that, by taking the path that it has, psychoanalysis is
reviving an age-old tendency to humble us, to demean us, and to make us
feel guilty? Foucault has noted that the relationship between madness
and the family can be traced back in large part to a development that
affected the whole of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century: the
family was entrusted with functions that became the measuring rod of the
responsibility of its members and their possible guilt. 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: \emph{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.”\footnote{Michel Foucault, \emph{Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1971). The English version is an edition, abridged by the author himself, of his French text: Michel Foucault, \emph{Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique} (Paris: Plon, 1961).} 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 \emph{making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all}.

\chapter{2. Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2}%

\section{1. The Imperialism of Oedipus}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-1}%


Oedipus restrained is the figure of the daddy-mommy-me triangle, the
familial constellation in person. But when psychoanalysis makes of
Oedipus its dogma, it is not unaware of the existence of relations said
to be pre-oedipal in the child, exo-oedipal in the psychotic,
para-oedipal in others. The function of Oedipus as dogma, or as the
“nuclear complex,” is inseparable from a forcing by which the
psychoanalyst as theoretician elevates himself to the conception of a
generalized Oedipus. On the one hand, for each subject of either sex, he
takes into consideration an intensive series of instincts, affects, and
relations that link the normal and positive form of the complex to its
inverse or negative form: a standard model Oedipus, such as Freud
presents in \emph{The Ego and the Id}, which makes it possible to connect the
pre-Oedipal phases with the negative complex when this seems called for.
On the other hand, he takes into consideration the coexistence in
extension of the subjects themselves and their multiple interactions: a
group Oedipus that brings together relatives, descendants, and
ascendants. (It is in this manner that the schizophrenic’s visible
resistance to oedipalization, the obvious absence of the Oedipal link,
can be obscured in a grandparental constellation, either because an
accumulation of three generations is deemed necessary in order to
produce a psychotic, or because an even more direct mechanism of
intervention by the grandparents in the psychosis is discovered, and
Oedipuses of Oedipus are constituted, to the second power: neurosis,
that’s father-mother, but grandma, that’s psychosis.) Finally, the
distinction between the Imaginary\footnote{* In capitalizing these terms, we have followed the suggestion of Jacques Lacan’s translator, Anthony Wilden; see \emph{The Language of the Self} (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. xv.} and the Symbolic\footnote{* In capitalizing these terms, we have followed the suggestion of Jacques Lacan’s translator, Anthony Wilden; see \emph{The Language of the Self} (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. xv.} permits the
emergence of an Oedipal structure as a system of positions and functions
that do not conform to the variable figure of those who come to occupy
them in a given social or pathological formation: a structural Oedipus
(3 + 1) that does not conform to a triangle, but performs all the
possible triangulations by distributing in a given domain desire, its
object, and the law.


It is certain that the two preceding modes of generalization attain
their full scope only in structural interpretation. Structural
interpretation makes Oedipus into a kind of universal Catholic symbol,
beyond all the imaginary modalities. It makes Oedipus into a referential
axis not only for the pre-oedipal phases, but also for the para-oedipal
varieties, and the exo-oedipal phenomena. The notion of “foreclosure,”
for example, seems to indicate a specifically structural deficiency, by
means of which the schizophrenic is of course repositioned on the
Oedipal axis, set back into the Oedipal orbit in the perspective, for
example, of the three generations, where the mother was not able to
posit her desire toward her own father, nor the son, consequently,
toward the mother. One of Lacan’s disciples writes: we are going to
consider “the means by which the Oedipal organization plays a role in
psychoses; next, what the forms of psychotic pregenitality are and how
they are able to maintain the Oedipal reference.” Our preceding
criticism of Oedipus therefore risks being judged totally superficial
and petty, as if it applied solely to an imaginary Oedipus and aimed at
the role of parental figures, without at all penetrating the structure
and its order of symbolic positions and functions.


For us, however, the problem is one of knowing if, indeed, that is where
the difference enters in. Wouldn’t the real difference be between
Oedipus, structural as well as imaginary, and something else that all
the Oedipuses crush and repress: desiring-production—the machines of
desire that no longer allow themselves to be reduced to the structure
any more than to persons, and that constitute the Real in itself, beyond
or beneath the Symbolic as well as the Imaginary? We in no way claim to
be taking up an endeavor such as Malinowski’s, showing that the figures
vary according to the social form under consideration. We even believe
what we are told when Oedipus is presented as a kind of invariant. But
the question is altogether different: is there an equivalence between
the productions of the unconscious and this invariant—between the
desiring-machines and the Oedipal structure? Or rather, does not the
invariant merely express the history of a long mistake, throughout all
its variations and modalities; the strain of an endless repression? What
we are calling into question is the frantic Oedipalization to which
psychoanalysis devotes itself, practically and theoretically, with the
combined resources of image and structure. And despite some fine books
by certain disciples of Lacan, we wonder if Lacan’s thought really goes
in this direction. Is it merely a matter of oedipalizing even the
schizo? Or is it a question of something else, and even the
contrary?\footnote{* “Nevertheless, it is not because I preach a return to Freud that I am not able to say that \emph{Totem and Taboo} is a twisted story. It is in fact for that reason that we must return to Freud. No one helped me to make this known: \emph{the formations of the unconscious}\dots{}. I am not saying Oedipus serves no purpose, nor that it (\emph{ça}) bears no relationship with what we do. It serves no purpose for the psychoanalysts, that is indeed true! But since psychoanalysts are assuredly not psychoanalysts, that proves nothing\dots{}. These are things I set forth in their appropriate time and place: that was a time when I was speaking to people who had to be dealt with tactfully—psychoanalysts. On that level, I spoke of the paternal metaphor, I have never spoken of an Oedipus complex.” (Jacques Lacan in a seminar, 1970.)} Wouldn’t it be better to schizophrenize—to schizophrenize
the domain of the unconscious as well as the sociohistorical domain, so
as to shatter the iron collar of Oedipus and rediscover everywhere the
force of desiring-production; to renew, on the level of the Real, the
tie between the analytic machine, desire, and production? For the
unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it does not
symbolize any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is
machinic. Neither imaginary nor symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the
“impossible real” and its production.


But what is this long history, if we consider it only during the period
of psychoanalysis? It does not take place without doubts, detours, and
repentances. Laplanche and Pontalis note that Freud “discovers” the
Oedipus complex in 1897 in the course of his self-analysis, but that he
doesn’t give a generalized theoretical form to it until 1923, in \emph{The
Ego and the Id}, and that, between these two formulations, Oedipus leads
a more or less marginal existence, “confined for example to a separate
chapter on object-choice at puberty (\emph{Three Essays}), or to a chapter on
typical dreams (\emph{The Interpretation of Dreams}).” They say that this is
because a certain abandonment by Freud of the theory of traumatism and
seduction leads not to a univocal determination of Oedipus, but to the
description as well of a spontaneous infantile sexuality of an
endogenous nature. It is as if “Freud never managed to articulate the
interrelations of Oedipus and infantile sexuality,” the latter referring
to a biological reality of development, the former to a psychic fantasy
reality. Oedipus is what all but got lost “for the sake of a biological
realism.”\footnote{J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines et origine du fantasme,” \emph{Les Temps Modernes}, no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1844–46.}


But is it correct to present things in this way? Did the imperialism of
Oedipus require only the renunciation of biological realism? Or wasn’t
something else sacrificed to Oedipus, something infinitely stronger? For
what Freud and the first analysts discover is the domain of free
syntheses where everything is possible: endless connections,
nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects and
flows. The desiring-machines pound away and throb in the depths of the
unconscious: Irma’s injection, the Wolf Man’s ticktock, Anna’s coughing
machine, and also all the explanatory apparatuses set into motion by
Freud, all those neurobiologico-desiring-machines. And the discovery of
the productive unconscious has what appear to be two correlates: on the
one hand, the direct confrontation between desiring-production and
social production, between symptomological and collective formations,
given their identical nature and their differing régimes; and on the
other hand, the repression that the social machine exercises on
desiring-machines, and the relationship of psychic repression with
social repression. This will all be lost, or at least singularly
compromised, with the establishment of a sovereign Oedipus. Free
association, rather than opening onto polyvocal connections, confines
itself to a univocal impasse. All the chains of the unconscious are
biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. The
whole of desiring-\emph{production} is crushed, subjected to the requirements
of \emph{representation}, and to the dreary games of what is representative
and represented in representation. And there is the essential thing: the
reproduction of desire gives way to a simple representation, in the
process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes
way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself—express
itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream.


But who says that dream, tragedy, and myth are adequate to the
formations of the unconscious, even if the work of transformation is
taken into account? Groddeck remained more faithful than Freud to an
autoproduction of the unconscious in the coextension of man and Nature.
It is as if Freud had drawn back from this world of wild production and
explosive desire, wanting at all costs to restore a little order there,
an order made classical owing to the ancient Greek theater. For what
does it mean to say that Freud discovered Oedipus in his own
self-analysis? Was it in his self-analysis, or rather in his Goethian
classical culture? In his self-analysis he discovers something about
which he remarks: Well now, that looks like Oedipus! And at first he
considers this something as a variant of the “familial romance,” a
paranoiac recording by which desire causes precisely the familial
determinations to explode. It is only little by little that he makes the
familial romance, on the contrary, into a mere dependence on Oedipus,
and that he neuroticizes everything in the unconscious at the same time
as he oedipalizes, and closes the familial triangle over the entire
unconscious. The schizo—there is the enemy! Desiring-production is
personalized, or rather personologized (\emph{personnologisée}), imaginarized
(\emph{imaginarisée}), structuralized. (We have seen that the real difference
or frontier did not lie between these terms, which are perhaps
complementary.) Production is reduced to mere fantasy production,
production of expression. The unconscious ceases to be what it is—a
factory, a workshop—to become a theater, a scene and its staging. And
not even an avant-garde theater, such as existed in Freud’s day
(Wedekind), but the classical theater, the classical order of
representation. The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private
theater, rather than the engineer or mechanic who sets up units of
production, and grapples with collective agents of production and
antiproduction.


Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we don’t know when it
started going bad. We have to keep going back further. To the Americans?
To the First International? To the secret Committee? To the first
ruptures, which signify renunciations by Freud as much as betrayals by
those who break with him? To Freud himself, from the moment of the
“discovery” of Oedipus? Oedipus is the idealist turning point. Yet it
cannot be said that psychoanalysis set to work unaware of
desiring-production. The fundamental notions of the \emph{economy} of
desire—work and investment—keep their importance, but are subordinated
to the forms of an expressive unconscious and no longer to the
formations of the productive unconscious. The \emph{anoedipal} nature of
desiring-production remains present, but it is fitted over the
co-ordinates of Oedipus, which translate it into “pre-oedipal,”
“para-oedipal,” “quasi-oedipal,” etc. The desiring-machines are always
there, but they no longer function except behind the consulting-room
walls. Behind the walls or in the wings, such is the place the primal
fantasy concedes to desiring-machines, when it reduces everything to the
Oedipal scene.\footnote{On the existence of a little machine in the “primal fantasy,” an existence nevertheless always in the wings, see Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease” (1915).} They continue nevertheless to make a hellish racket.
Even the psychoanalyst can’t ignore them. He tends therefore to maintain
an attitude of denial: all of that is surely true, but it is still
daddy-mommy. Over the consulting-room door is written, “Leave your
desiring-machines at the door, give up your orphan and celibate
machines, your tape recorder and your little bike, enter and allow
yourself to be oedipalized.” Everything follows from that, beginning
with the untenable character of the cure, its interminable and highly
contractual nature, flows of speech in exchange for flows of money. All
that is needed is what is called a psychotic episode: after a
schizophrenic flash, one day we bring our tape recorder into the
analyst’s office—stop!—with this insertion of a desiring-machine
everything is reversed: we have broken the contract, we are not faithful
to the major principle of the exclusion of a third party, we have
introduced a third element—the desiring-machine in person.\footnote{* Jean-Jacques Abrahams. “L’homme au magnétophone, dialogue psychanalytique,” \emph{Les Temps modernes}, no. 274 (April 1969): “\emph{A}: You see, it really isn’t so serious; I’m not your father, and I can still shout, of course not! There, that’s enough.—\emph{Dr. X}: You are imitating your father at this moment?—\emph{A}: Of course not, come off it. I’m imitating \emph{your} father! The one I see in your eyes.—\emph{Dr. X}: You are trying to take the role\dots{}.—\emph{A}:\dots{} You can’t cure people, you can only palm off your father problems on them—problems you can’t get away from. And from session to session you drag along your victims that way with your father problem\dots{}. \emph{I} was the sick one, \emph{you} were the doctor. You’d finally reversed your childhood problem of being the child to your father\dots{}.—\emph{Dr. X}: I was just telephoning extension 609 to make you leave—609, the police, to have you thrown out.\emph{—A}: The police? That’s it—Daddy! Your father’s a policeman! And you were going to call your father to come get me\dots{}. What insanity! You got all unnerved, excited, just because I brought out a little device that’ll let us understand what’s going on here.”} Yet every
psychoanalyst should know that, underneath Oedipus, through Oedipus,
behind Oedipus, his business is with desiring-machines. At the
beginning, psychoanalysts \emph{could not be unaware} of the forcing employed
to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious. Then Oedipus
fell back on and appropriated desiring-production as if all the
productive forces emanated from Oedipus itself. The psychoanalyst became
the carrier of Oedipus, the great agent of antiproduction in desire. The
same history as that of Capital, with its enchanted, “miraculated”
world. (Also at the beginning, said Marx, the first capitalists could
not be unaware of\dots{})

\section{2. Three Texts of Freud}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-2}%


It is easy to see that the problem is first of all practical, that it
concerns above all else the practice of the cure. For the frenzied
oedipalization process takes form precisely at the moment when Oedipus
has not yet received its full theoretical formulation as the “nuclear
complex” and leads a marginal existence. The fact that Schreber’s
analysis was not \emph{in vivo} detracts nothing from its exemplary value
from the point of view of practice. In this text (1911) Freud encounters
the most formidable of questions: how does one dare reduce to the
paternal theme a delirium so rich, so differentiated, so “divine” as the
Judge’s—since the Judge in his memoirs makes only very brief references
to the memory of his father. On several occasions Freud’s text marks the
extent to which he felt the difficulty: to begin with, it appears
difficult to assign as cause of the malady—even if only an occasional
cause—an “outburst of homosexual libido” directed at Dr. Flechsig’s
person.\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{Three Case Studies} (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970).} But when we replace the doctor with the father and
commission the father to explain the God of delirium, we ourselves have
trouble following this ascension; we take liberties that can be
justified only by the advantages they afford us in our attempt to
understand the delirium.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 150–51.} Yet the more Freud states such scruples,
the more he thrusts them aside and sweeps them away with a firm and
confident response. And this response is double: it is not my fault if
psychoanalysis attests to a great monotony and encounters the father
everywhere—in Flechsig, in the God, in the sun; it is the fault of
sexuality and its stubborn symbolism.\footnote{Ibid., p. 154.} Furthermore, it is not
surprising that the father returns constantly in current deliriums in
the most hidden and least recognizable guises, since he returns in fact
everywhere and more visibly in religions and ancient myths, which
express forces or mechanisms eternally active in the unconscious.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 152, 184–86.} It
should be noted that Judge Schreber’s destiny was not merely that of
being sodomized, while still alive, by the rays from heaven, but also
that of being posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous
political, social, and historical content of Schreber’s delirium, \emph{not
one word is retained}, as though the libido did not bother itself with
such things. Freud invokes only a sexual argument, which consists in
bringing about the union of sexuality and the familial complex, and a
mythological argument, which consists in positing the adequation of the
productive force of the unconscious and the “edifying forces of myths
and religions.”


This latter argument is very important, and it is not by chance that
here Freud declares himself in agreement with Jung. In a certain way
this agreement subsists after their break. If the unconscious is thought
to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into
account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of
reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that
measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start
substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations. The
basic question is never asked, but cast aside: \emph{Why return to myth?} Why
take it as the model? The supposed adequation can then be interpreted in
what is termed anagogical fashion, toward the “higher.” Or inversely, in
analytical fashion, toward the “lower,” relating the myth to the drives.
But since the drives are transferred from myth, traced from myth with
the transformations taken into account\dots{} What we mean is that, starting
from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and
spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most
rigorous atheism. Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as
Jung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret
the commonly postulated adequation. But to render religion unconscious,
or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something
religious into the unconscious. (And what would Freudian analysis be
without the celebrated guilt feelings ascribed to the unconscious?)


What came to pass in the history of psychoanalysis? Freud held to his
atheism in heroic fashion. But all around him, more and more, they
respectfully allowed him to speak, they let the old man speak, ready to
prepare behind his back the reconciliation of the churches and
psychoanalysis, the moment when the Church would train its own
psychoanalysts, and when it would become possible to write in the
history of the movement: so even we are still pious! Let us recall
Marx’s great declaration: he who denies God does only a “secondary
thing,” for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put
man in God’s place (the transformation taken into account).\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844}, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 145. See also the excellent commentary by François Chatelet on this point: “La question de l’athéisme de Marx,” \emph{Etudes philosophiques}, July 1966.} But the
person who knows that the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not
even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning “an alien
being, a being placed above man and nature”: he no longer needs the
mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation—the
negation of the existence of God—since he has attained those regions of
an autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less
atheist than orphan—immediately atheist, immediately orphan. And
doubtless an examination of the first argument would lead us to a
similar conclusion. By joining sexuality to the familial complex, by
making Oedipus into the criterion of sexuality in analysis—the test of
orthodoxy par excellence—Freud himself posited the whole of social \emph{and}
metaphysical relations as an afterward or a beyond that desire was
incapable of investing immediately. He then became rather indifferent to
the fact that this beyond derives from the familial complex through the
analytical transformation of desire, or is signified by it in an
anagogical symbolization.


Let us consider another text of Freud’s, a later one, where Oedipus is
already designated as the “nuclear complex”: “A Child Is Being
Beaten.”\footnote{Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919),” in \emph{Collected Papers}, Vol. 2, Hogarth Press, London, pp. 172–202. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} The reader cannot escape the impression of a disquieting
strangeness. Never was the paternal theme less visible, and yet never
was it affirmed with as much passion and resolution. The imperialism of
Oedipus is founded here on an absence. After all, of the three supposed
phases of the girl’s fantasy, the first is such that the father does not
yet appear, while in the third the father no longer appears: that leaves
the second, then, where the father shines forth in all his brilliance,
“clearly without doubt”—but indeed, “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.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 180.}


What is at issue in this fantasy? Some boys are beaten by someone—the
teacher, for example—in the presence of the little girls. We are present
from the start at a double Freudian reduction, which is in no way
imposed by the fantasy, but is required by Freud in the manner of a
presupposition. On the one hand Freud wants to deliberately reduce the
**group* character of the fantasy to a purely individual dimension: the
beaten children must in a way be the ego (“substitutes for the subject
himself”) and the one who does the beating must be the father (“father
substitute”). On the other hand it is necessary for the variations of
the fantasy to be organized in disjunctions whose use must be strictly
exclusive. Hence there will be a girl-series and a boy-series, but
dissymmetrical, the female fantasy having three phases, the last of
which is “boys are beaten by the teacher,” while the male fantasy has
only two, the last of which is “my mother beats me.” The only common
phase—the second for the girls and the first for the boys—affirms
without doubt the prevalence of the father in both cases, but this is
the famous nonexistent phase.


Such is always the case with Freud. Something common to the two sexes is
required, but something that will be lacking in both, and that will
distribute the lack in two nonsymmetrical series, establishing the
exclusive use of the disjunctions: you are girl or boy! Such is the case
with Oedipus and its “resolution,” different in boys and in girls. Such
is the case with castration, and its relationship to Oedipus in both
instances. Castration is at once the common lot—that is, the prevalent
and transcendent Phallus, and the exclusive distribution that presents
itself in girls as desire for the penis, and in boys as fear of losing
it or refusal of a passive attitude. This something in common must lay
the foundation for the exclusive use of the disjunctions of the
unconscious—and teach us resignation. Resignation to Oedipus, to
castration: for girls, renunciation of their desire for the penis; for
boys, renunciation of male protest—in short, “assumption of one’s
sex.”\footnote{* Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), in \emph{Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud}, ed. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan; London: Hogarth Press, 1964), Vol. 23, pp. 250–52: “The two corresponding themes are in the female, an \emph{envy for the penis}—a positive striving to possess a male genital—and, in the male, a struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male\dots{}. At no other point \dots{} does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that one has been ‘preaching to the winds,’ than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life. The rebellious overcompensation of the male produces one of the strongest transference-resistances. He refuses to subject himself to a father-substitute, or to feel indebted to him for anything, and consequently he refuses to accept his recovery from the doctor.” (\emph{Translators’ note:} Hereafter this source will be cited as \emph{Standard Edition}.)} This something in common, the great Phallus, the Lack with two
nonsuperimposable sides, is purely mythical; it is like the One in
negative theology, it introduces lack into desire and causes exclusive
series to emanate, to which it attributes a goal, an origin, and a path
of resignation.


The contrary should be said: neither is there anything in common between
the two sexes, nor do they cease communicating with each other in a
transverse mode where each subject possesses both of them, but with the
two of them partitioned off, and where each subject communicates with
**one sex or the other in another subject*. Such is the law of partial
objects. Nothing is lacking, nothing can be defined as a lack; nor are
the disjunctions in the unconscious ever exclusive, but rather the
object of a properly inclusive use that we must analyze. Freud had a
concept at his disposal for stating this contrary notion: the concept of
bisexuality; and it was not by chance that he was never able or never
wanted to give this concept the analytical position and extension it
required. Without even going that far, a lively controversy developed
when certain analysts, following Melanie Klein, tried to define the
unconscious forces of the female sexual organ by positive
characteristics in terms of partial objects and flows. This slight
shift—which did not suppress mythical castration but made it depend
secondarily on the organ, instead of the organ’s depending on it—met
with great opposition from Freud.\footnote{On the importance of this controversy, see André Green, “Sur la mère phallique,” \emph{Revue française de psychanalyse}, January 1968, pp. 8–9.} He maintained that the organ, from
the viewpoint of the unconscious, could not be understood except by
proceeding from a lack or a primal deprivation, and not the opposite.


Here we have a properly analytical fallacy (which will be found again,
to a considerable degree, in the theory of the signifier) that consists
in passing from the detachable partial object to the position of a
complete object as the thing detached (phallus). This passage implies a
subject, defined as a fixed ego of one sex or the other, who necessarily
experiences as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete
object. This is perhaps no longer the case when the partial object is
posited for itself on the body without organs, with—as its sole
subject—not an “ego,” but the drive that forms the desiring-machine
along with it, and that enters into relationships of connection,
disjunction, and conjunction with other partial objects, at the core of
the corresponding multiplicity whose every element can only be defined
**positively*. We must speak of “castration” in the same way we speak of
oedipalization, whose crowning moment it is: castration designates the
operation by which psychoanalysis castrates the unconscious, injects
castration into the unconscious. Castration as a practical operation on
the unconscious is achieved when the thousand breaks-flows of
desiring-machines—all positive, all productive—are projected into the
same mythical space, the unary stroke of the signifier.


We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the
unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows
nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women’s Liberation
movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get
fucked.\footnote{See for example the (moderate) protest of Betty Friedan against the Freudian and psychoanalytic conception of “feminine problems,” sexual as well as social: \emph{The Feminine Mystique} (New York: Norton, 1963).} And far from being able to get by with anything like the
wretched maneuver where men answer that this itself is proof that women
are castrated—or even console women by saying that men are castrated,
too, all the while rejoicing that they are castrated the other way, on
the side that is not superimposable—it should be recognized that Women’s
Liberation movements contain, in a more or less ambiguous state, what
belongs to all requirements of liberation: the force of the unconscious
itself, the investment by desire of the social field, the disinvestment
of repressive structures. Nor are we going to say that the question is
not that of knowing if women are castrated, but only if the unconscious
“believes it,” since all the ambiguity lies there. What does belief
applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no
longer does anything but “believe,” rather than produce? What are the
operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with “beliefs”
that are not even irrational, but on the contrary only too reasonable
and consistent with the established order?


Let us return to the fantasy, “a child is being beaten, children are
beaten”—a typical group fantasy where desire invests the social field
and its repressive forms. If there is a \emph{mise en scène}, it is directed
by a social desiring-machine whose product should not be considered
abstractly, separating the girl’s and the boy’s cases, as if each were a
little ego taking up its own business with daddy and mommy. On the
contrary, we should consider the complementary emsemble made up of
boy-girl and parents-agents of production and antiproduction, this
ensemble being present at the same time in each individual and in the
socius that presides over the organization of the group fantasy.
Simultaneously the boys are beaten-initiated by the teacher on the
little girl’s erotic stage (seeing-machine), and obtain satisfaction in
a masochistic fantasy involving the mother (anal machine). The result is
that the boys are able to see only by becoming little girls, and the
girls cannot experience the pleasure of punishment except by becoming
boys. It is a whole chorus, a montage: back in the village after a raid
in Vietnam, in the presence of their weeping sisters, the filthy Marines
are beaten by their instructor, on whose knees the mommy is seated, and
they have orgasms for having been so evil, for having tortured so well.
It’s so bad, but also so good!


Perhaps one will recall a sequence from the film \emph{Hearts and Minds}: we
see Colonel Patton, the general’s son, saying that his guys are great,
that they love their mothers, their fathers, and their country, that
they cry at the religious services for their dead buddies, fine boys;
then the colonel’s face changes, grimaces, and reveals a big paranoiac
in uniform who shouts in conclusion; but still, they’re a bloody good
bunch of killers! It is obvious that when traditional psychoanalysis
explains that the instructor is the father, and that the colonel too is
the father, and that the mother is nonetheless the father too, it
reduces all of desire to a familial determination that no longer has
anything to do with the social field actually invested by the libido. Of
course there is always something from the father or the mother that is
taken up in the signifying chain—daddy’s mustache, the mother’s raised
arm—but it comes furtively to occupy a place among the collective
agents. The terms of Oedipus do not form a triangle, but exist shattered
into all corners of the social field—the mother on the instructor’s
knees, the father next to the colonel. Group fantasy is plugged into and
machined on the socius. Being fucked by the socius, wanting to be fucked
by the socius, does not derive from the father and mother, even though
the father and mother have their roles there as subordinate agents of
transmission or execution.


When the notion of group fantasy was elaborated in the perspective of
institutional analysis—in the works of the team at La Borde Clinic,
assembled around Jean Oury—the first task was to show how it differed
from individual fantasy. It became evident that group fantasy was
inseparable from the “symbolic” articulations that define a social field
insofar as it is real, whereas the individual fantasy fitted the whole
of this field over “imaginary” givens. If this first distinction is
drawn out, we see that the individual fantasy is itself plugged into the
existing social field, but apprehends it in the form of imaginary
qualities that confer on it a kind of transcendence or immortality under
the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo
destiny; what does it matter if I die, says the general, since the Army
is immortal? The imaginary dimension of the individual fantasy has a
decisive importance over the death instinct, insofar as the immortality
conferred on the existing social order carried into the ego all the
investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of
“superegoization” and castration, all the resignation-desires (becoming
a general; acquiring low, middle, or high rank), including the
resignation to dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive
itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the others
(death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our own ranks!). The
revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in
the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy
them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the
social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable
institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion—at least
the formal criterion—that distinguishes the revolutionary institution
from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in
an established order. As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States—which
of all these dogs wants to die?


There results a third difference between group fantasy and the so-called
individual fantasy. The latter has as subject the ego, insofar as it is
determined by the legal and legalized institutions in which it “imagines
itself,” to the point where, even in its perversions, the ego conforms
to the exclusive use of the disjunctions imposed by the law (for
example, Oedipal homosexuality). But group fantasy no longer has
anything but the drives themselves as subject, and the desiring-machines
formed by them with the revolutionary institutions. The group fantasy
**includes* the disjunctions, in the sense that each subject, discharged
of his personal identity but not of his singularities, enters into
relations with others following the communication proper to partial
objects: everyone passes into the body of the other on the body without
organs.


In this respect Klossowski has convincingly shown the inverse
relationship that pulls the fantasy in two directions, as the economic
law establishes perversion in the “psychic exchanges,” or as the psychic
exchanges on the contrary promote a subversion of the law:
“Anachronistic, relative to the institutional level of gregariousness,
the singular state can, according to its more or less forceful
intensity, bring about a deactualization of the institution itself and
denounce it in turn as anachronistic.”\footnote{Pierre Klossowski, \emph{Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux} (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), p. 122. Klossowski’s meditation on the relationship between drives and institutions, and on the presence of the drives in the economic infrastructure itself, is developed in his article “Sade et Fourier,” \emph{Topique}, no. 4–5, and especially in \emph{La monnaie vivante} (Paris: Losfeld, 1970).} The two kinds of fantasy, or
rather the two régimes, are therefore distinguished according to whether
the social production of “goods” imposes its rule on desire through the
intermediary of an ego whose fictional unity is guaranteed by the goods
themselves, or whether the desiring-production of affects imposes its
rule on institutions whose elements are no longer anything but drives.
If we must still speak of utopia in this sense, a la Fourier, it is most
assuredly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and
passion. In his recent works Klossowski indicates to us the only means
of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and
Marx: by discovering how social production and relations of production
are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the
infrastructure itself. For \emph{they are part of it, they are present there
in every way} while creating within the economic forms their own
repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression.


The development of distinctions between group and individual fantasy
shows sufficiently well, at last, that there is no individual fantasy.
Instead there are two types of groups, subject-groups and subjugated
groups, with Oedipus and castration forming the imaginary structure
under which members of the subjugated groups are induced to live or
fantasize individually their membership in the group. It must still be
said that the two types of groups are perpetually shifting, a
subject-group always being threatened with subjugation, a subjugated
group capable in certain cases of being forced to take on a
revolutionary role. It is therefore all the more disturbing to see to
what extent Freudian analysis retains from the fantasy only its lines of
exclusive disjunction, and flattens it into its individual or
pseudoindividual dimensions, which by their very nature refer the
fantasy to subjugated groups, rather than carrying out the opposite
operation and disengaging in the fantasy the underlying element of a
revolutionary group potential. When we learn that the instructor, the
teacher, is daddy, and the colonel too, and also the mother—\emph{when all
the agents of social production and antiproduction are in this way
reduced to the figures of familial reproduction}—we can understand why
the panicked libido no longer risks abandoning Oedipus, and internalizes
it. The libido internalizes it in the form of a castrating duality
between the subject of the statement (\emph{l’énoncé}) and the subject of the
enunciation, as is characteristic of the pseudoindividual fantasy (“I,
as a man, understand you, but as judge, as boss, as colonel or general,
**that is to say as the father*, I condemn you”). But this duality is
artificial, derived, and supposes a direct relationship proceeding from
the statement to the collective agents of enunciation in the group
fantasy.


Institutional analysis tries to trace its difficult path between the
repressive asylum and the legalistic hospital on the one hand, and
contractual psychoanalysis on the other. From the outset, the
psychoanalytic relationship modeled itself after the contractual
relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned
exclusion of a third party; the hypocritical role of money, to which
psychoanalysis brought farcical new justifications; the pretended time
limitation that contradicts itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by
feeding an inexhaustible transference, and by always nursing new
“conflicts.” We are astonished when we hear that a terminated analysis
is by that very fact a failure, even if this proposition is accompanied
by the analyst’s little smile. We are surprised when we hear a
knowledgeable analyst mention, in passing, that one of his “patients”
still dreams of being invited to eat or have a drink at his place, after
several years of analysis, as if this were not a tiny sign of the abject
dependence to which analysis reduced the patients. How can we ward off,
in the practice of the cure, this abject desire that makes us bend our
knees, lays us on the couch, and makes us remain there?


Let us consider a third and final text of Freud’s, “Analysis Terminable
and Interminable” (1937).\footnote{In \emph{Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud}, ed. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan; London: Hogarth Press, 1974), Vol. 23. (\emph{Translators’ note:} Hereafter this source will be cited as \emph{Standard Edition}.)} We prefer not to follow a recent
suggestion that it would be better to translate “Analysis Finite,
Analysis Infinite,” since finite-infinite is almost mathematics or
logic, whereas the problem is particularly practical and concrete. Does
this story have an ending? Can an analysis be ended, can the process of
analysis be terminated, yes or no? Can it be completed, or is it
condemned to a constant self-perpetuation? As Freud says, can a
currently given “conflict” be exhausted, can the one who is sick be
forewarned against ulterior conflicts, can even new conflicts be
awakened for a preventive purpose? A great beauty animates this text of
Freud’s: an undefined something that is hopeless, disenchanted, tired,
and at the same time a serenity, a certitude in the finished work. It is
Freud’s testament. He is going to die, and knows it. He knows something
is wrong in psychoanalysis. The cure tends to be more and more
interminable! He knows that soon he will no longer be there to see how
things are going. So he takes stock of the obstacles to treatment, with
the serenity of the person who senses what a treasure his work is, but
senses too the poisons that have already filtered in. Everything would
be fine if the economic problem of desire were merely quantitative; it
would be a matter of reinforcing the ego against the drives. The
celebrated strong, mature ego, the “contract,” the “pact” between the
analyst and an ego that is normal in spite of everything \dots{} Except that
there are \emph{qualitative factors} in the desiring-economy that indeed
present an obstacle to treatment, and Freud reproaches himself for not
having taken them sufficiently into account.


The first of these factors is the “rock” of castration, the rock with
two nonsymmetrical faces, which creates in us an incurable alveous, and
against which the analyst stumbles. The second is a qualitative aptitude
for conflict, which means that the quantity of libido does not branch
into two variable forces corresponding to heterosexuality and
homosexuality, but creates in most people irreducible oppositions
between the two forces. Finally, the third factor—of such economic
importance that it outweighs the dynamic and topical
considerations—concerns a type of resistance that is nonlocalizable. It
would seem that certain subjects have such a \emph{viscous} libido, or on the
contrary such a \emph{liquid} one, that nothing succeeds in “taking hold.” It
would be a mistake to see in this remark of Freud’s nothing more than an
observation of detail, a mere anecdote. In fact, it concerns what is
most essential in the phenomenon of desire: the qualitative flows of the
libido.


In some fine pages, André Green recently took up the question again by
making up a list of three types of “sessions,” the first two of which
comprise counterindications, the third alone constituting the ideal
session in analysis. According to Type I (viscosity, resistance of a
hysterical form), “the session is dominated by a heavy, weighty, boggy
climate. The silences are leaden, the discourse is dominated by the
events of the day,\dots{} is uniform, it is a descriptive narration where no
reference to the past is disclosable, it unfolds along a continuous
thread, unable to allow itself any break\dots{}. Dreams are narrated,\dots{} the
enigma of dream is taken up in the secondary elaboration that makes
dream as narration and as event take precedence over dream as a working
over of thoughts\dots{}. Sticky transference\dots{}.”\footnote{André Green, \emph{L’affect} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 154–68.} According to Type II
(liquidity, resistance of an obsessional form), “here the session is
dominated by an extreme mobility of representations of all sorts,\dots{} the
language is unfettered, rapid, almost torrential,\dots{} everything enters
here,\dots{} the patient could just as easily say the opposite of everything
he is uttering without changing anything fundamental to the analytic
situation\dots{}. All of this is without consequence, since the analysis
slides off the couch like water off a duck’s back. The unconscious does
not cause anything to ‘stick,’ there is no anchoring in the
transference. Here the transference is volatile\dots{}.” Only the third type
remains, whose characteristics define a \emph{good} analysis. The patient
“speaks in order to constitute the process of a chain of signifiers. The
meaning is not attached to the signified to which each of the enunciated
signifiers refers, but is constituted by process, suture, the
concatenation of bound elements\dots{}. Every interpretation furnished by [the
patient] can offer itself as an already-signified awaiting its meaning.
For this reason interpretation is always retrospective, as the perceived
meaning. \emph{So that was what this meant}\dots{}.”


What is serious is that Freud never questions the process of the cure.
Of course it is too late for him, but is it too late for those who come
after him? He interprets these things as obstacles to the cure, and not
as shortcomings of the treatment itself, or as effects or countereffects
of his method. For castration as an analyzable state—or nonanalyzable;
the ultimate rock—is the effect of castration as a psychoanalytic act.
And Oedipal homosexuality—the qualitative aptitude for conflict—is
rather the effect of oedipalization, which the treatment does not
invent, but precipitates and accentuates within the artificial
conditions of its exercise (transference). And inversely, when flows of
libido resist therapeutic practice, rather than being a resistance of
the ego, this is the intense outcry of all of desiring-production. We
already knew that the pervert resisted oedipalization: why should he
surrender, since he has invented for himself other territorialities,
more artificial still and more lunar than that of Oedipus? We knew the
schizo was not oedipalizable, because he is beyond territoriality,
because he has carried his flows right into the desert. But what
remains, once we learn that “resistances” of an hysterical or an
obsessional form bear witness to the anoedipal quality of the flows of
desire on the very terrain of Oedipus? That is precisely what
qualitative economy shows: flows ooze, they traverse the triangle,
breaking apart its vertices. The Oedipal wad does not absorb these
flows, any more than it could seal off a jar of jam or plug a dike.
Against the walls of the triangle, toward the outside, flows exert the
irresistible pressure of lava or the invincible oozing of water.


What are the most favorable conditions for the cure, it is asked? A
**flow* that lets itself be plugged by Oedipus; \emph{partial objects} that
let themselves be subsumed under the category of a complete object, even
if absent—the phallus of castration; \emph{breaks-flows} that let themselves
be projected onto a mythical space; polyvocal chains that let themselves
be biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a signifier; an
unconscious that lets itself be expressed; connective syntheses that let
themselves be taken in a global and specific use; disjunctive syntheses
that let themselves be taken in an exclusive, restrictive use;
conjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in a personal and
segregative use. For what is the meaning of “so \emph{that} was what \emph{this}
meant”? The crushing of the “so” onto Oedipus and castration. The sigh
of relief: you see, the colonel, the instructor, the teacher, the boss,
all of \emph{this} meant \emph{that}: Oedipus and castration, “all history in a
new version.”


We are not saying that Oedipus and castration do not amount to anything.
We are oedipalized, we are castrated; psychoanalysis didn’t invent these
operations, to which it merely lends the new resources and methods of
its genius. But is this sufficient to silence the outcry of
desiring-production: We are all schizos! We are all perverts! We are all
libidos that are too viscous and too fluid—and not by preference, but
wherever we have been carried by the deterritorialized flows. What
neurotic, provided he is somewhat serious, is not leaning against the
rock of schizophrenia, a rock in this case mobile, aerolitic? Who does
not haunt the perverse territorialities, beyond the kindergartens of
Oedipus? Who does not feel in the flows of his desire both the lava and
the water? And above all, what brings about our sickness? Schizophrenia
itself, as a process? Or is it brought about by the frantic
neuroticization to which we have been delivered, and for which
psychoanalysis has invented new means—Oedipus and castration? Is it
schizophrenia as a process that makes us sick, or is it the
self-perpetuation of the process in the void—a horrible exasperation
(the production of the schizophrenic-as-entity)? Or is it the confusion
of the process with a goal (the production of the pervert-artifice), or
the premature interruption of the process (the production of the
neurotic analysis)? We are forcibly confronted with Oedipus and
castration, we are reduced to them: either so as to measure us against
that cross, or to establish that we cannot measure up to it. But in any
case the harm has been done, the treatment has chosen the path of
oedipalization, all cluttered with refuse, instead of the
schizophrenization that must cure us of the cure.

\section{3. The Connective Synthesis of Production}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-3}%


Given the syntheses of the unconscious, the practical problem is that of
their use, legitimate or not, and of the conditions that define a use of
synthesis as legitimate or not. Take the example of homosexuality—though
it is something more than an example. We noted how, in Proust, the
famous pages of \emph{Sodom and Gomorrah} (\emph{Cities of the Plain}) interlaced
two openly contradictory themes; the fundamental guilt of the “accursed
races” and the radical innocence of flowers. The diagnosis of Oedipal
homosexuality with a mother fixation, of a dominant depressive nature
and a sadomasochistic guilt, was quickly applied to Proust. In a more
general way still, some critics were too quick in discovering
contradictions, either in order to declare them irreducible, or to
resolve them, or to show that they were merely apparent, according to
preference. In truth, there are never contradictions, apparent or real,
but only degrees of humor. And inasmuch as reading itself has its
degrees of humor, from black to white, with which it evaluates the
coexisting degrees of what it reads, the sole problem is always one of
allocation on a scale of intensities that assigns the position and use
of each thing, each being, or each scene: there is this and then that,
and let’s make do with it, too bad if it doesn’t suit us.


In this regard it is possible that Charlus’s coarse admonition is
prophetic: “A lot we care about our old grandmother, you little shit!”
For what does in fact take place in \emph{In Search of Lost Time}, one and
the same story with infinite variations? It is clear that the narrator
sees nothing, hears nothing, and that he is a body without organs, or
like a spider poised in its web, observing nothing, but responding to
the slightest sign, to the slightest vibration by springing on its prey.
Everything begins with nebulae, statistical wholes whose outlines are
blurred, \emph{molar} or collective formations comprising singularities
distributed haphazardly (a living room, a group of girls, a landscape).
Then, within these nebulae or these collectives, “sides” take shape,
series are arranged, \emph{persons} figure in these series, under strange
laws of lack, absence, asymmetry, exclusion, noncommunication, vice, and
guilt. Next, everything becomes blurred again, everything comes apart,
but this time in a \emph{molecular} and pure multiplicity, where the partial
objects, the “boxes,” the “vessels” all have their positive
determinations, and enter into aberrant communication following a
transversal that runs through the whole work; an immense flow that each
partial object produces and cuts again, reproduces and cuts at the same
time. More than vice, says Proust, it is madness and its innocence that
disturb us. If schizophrenia is the universal, the great artist is
indeed the one who scales the schizophrenic wall and reaches the land of
the unknown, where he no longer belongs to any time, any milieu, any
school.


Such is the case in an illustrative passage, the first kiss given
Albertine. Albertine’s face is at first a nebula, barely extracted from
the collective of girls. Then her person disengages itself, through a
series of views that are like distinct personalities, with Albertine’s
face jumping from one plane to another as the narrator’s lips draw
nearer her cheek. At last, within the magnified proximity, everything
falls apart like a face drawn in sand, Albertine’s face shatters into
molecular partial objects, while those on the narrator’s face rejoin the
body without organs, eyes closed, nosrils pinched shut, mouth filled.
What is more, their entire love tells the same story. From the
statistical nebula, from the molar entirety of men-women loves, there
emerge the two accursed and guilty series that bear witness to the same
castration with two nonsuperimposable sides, the Sodom series and the
Gomorrah series, each one excluding the other.


This is not all, however, since the vegetal theme—the innocence of
flowers—brings us yet another message and another code: everyone is
bisexual, everyone has two sexes, but partitioned, noncommunicating; the
man is merely the one in whom the male part, and the woman the one in
whom the female part, dominates statistically. So that at the level of
elementary combinations, at least two men and two women must be made to
intervene to constitute the multiplicity in which transverse
communications are established—connections of partial objects and
flows\footnote{See Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Proust and Signs}, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 120–22 ff. for a discussion in depth of the two Proustian series. (\emph{Translators’ note.})}: the male part of a man can communicate with the female part
of a woman, but also with the male part of a woman, or with the female
part of another man, or yet again with the male part of the other man,
etc. Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as
these. In contrast to the alternative of the “either\Slash{}or” exclusions,
there is the “either \dots{} or \dots{} or” of the combinations and permutations
where the differences amount to the same without ceasing to be
differences.


We are statistically or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual,
without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are
transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense. That is why Proust, the
first to deny all oedipalizing interpretations of his own
interpretations, contrasts two kinds of homosexuality, or rather two
regions only one of which is Oedipal, exclusive, and depressive, the
other being anoedipal schizoid, included, and inclusive: “For some,
doubtless those \emph{whose childhoods were timid}, the material kind of
pleasure they take does not matter, so long as they can \emph{relate it to a
male countenance}. While others, whose sensuality is doubtless more
violent, give their material pleasure certain imperious localizations.
The second group would shock most people by their avowals. They live
perhaps less exclusively under Saturn’s satellite, for in their case
women are not entirely excluded\dots{}. But those in the second group seek out
women who prefer women, women who suggest young men \dots{} \emph{indeed}, they can
take, with \emph{such women}, the same pleasure as with a man\dots{}. For in their
relations with women, they play—for the woman who prefers women—the role
of \emph{another woman}, and at the same time a woman offers them
approximately what they find \emph{in a man}.”\footnote{Translated by Richard Howard, and first appearing in Deleuze, \emph{Proust and Signs}, pp. 121–22. Translation of Marcel Proust, \emph{A la recherche du temps perdu}, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), Vol. 2, 622 (emphasis added). (\emph{Translators’ revised note.})}


The opposition here is between two uses of the connective syntheses: a
global and specific use, and a partial and nonspecific use. In the
first, desire at the same time receives a fixed subject, an ego
specified according to a given sex, and complete objects defined as
global persons. The complexity and the foundations of such an operation
appear more distinctly if we consider the mutual reactions between the
different syntheses of the unconscious following a given use. It is
first of all the synthesis of recording that in effect situates, on its
surface of inscription within the conditions of Oedipus, a definable and
differentiable ego in relation to parental images serving as
co-ordinates (mother, father). There we have a triangulation that
implies in its essence a constituent prohibition, and that conditions
the differentiation between persons: prohibition of incest with the
mother, prohibition against taking the father’s place. But a strange
sort of reasoning leads one to conclude that, since \emph{it} is forbidden,
**that very thing* was desired. In reality, global persons—even the very
form of persons—do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on
them and constitute them, any more than they exist prior to the
triangulation into which they enter: desire receives its first complete
objects and is forbidden them at one and the same time. Therefore it is
indeed the same Oedipal operation that lays the foundations for the
possibility of its own “resolution,” by way of a differentiation of
persons in conformity with the prohibition, as well as the possibility
for its own failure or stagnation, by falling into the undifferentiated
as the reverse side of the differentiation created by the prohibitions
(incest by identification with the father, homosexuality by
identification with the mother). The personal material of transgression
does not exist prior to the prohibition, any more than does the form of
persons.


We can therefore see the property the prohibition has of displacing
itself, since from the start it displaces desire. It displaces itself in
the sense that the Oedipal inscription does not force its way into the
synthesis of recording without reacting on the synthesis of production,
and profoundly changing the connections of this synthesis by introducing
new global persons. These new images of persons are the sister and the
spouse, after the father and the mother. It has often been remarked in
fact that the prohibition existed in two forms, the one negative, having
to do above all with the mother and imposing differentiation, the other
positive, concerning the sister and requiring exchange: I have a moral
obligation to take as wife someone other than my sister, and an
obligation to keep my sister for someone else; I must give up my sister
to a brother-in-law, receive my wife from a father-in-law.\footnote{Luc de Heusch, \emph{Essai sur le symbolisme de l’inceste royal en Afrique} (Bruxelles: 1959), pp. 13–16.} And
although new stases or relapses are produced at this level, such as new
forms of incest and homosexuality, it is certain that the Oedipal
triangle would have no way of transmitting and reproducing itself
without this second step: the first step elaborates the form of the
triangle, but it is only the second step that ensures the transmission
of this figure. I take a woman other than my sister in order to
constitute the differentiated base of a new triangle whose inverted
vertex will be my child—which is called surmounting Oedipus, but
reproducing it as well, transmitting it rather than dying all alone,
incestuous, homosexual, and a zombie.


Thus the parental or familial use of the synthesis of recording extends
into a conjugal use, or an alliance use, of the connective syntheses of
production: a régime for the pairing of people replaces the connection
of partial objects. On the whole, the connections of organ-machines
suited to desiring-production give way to a pairing of people under the
rules of familial reproduction. Partial objects now seem to be taken
from people, rather than from the nonpersonal flows that pass from one
person to another. The reason is that persons are derived from abstract
quantities, instead of from flows. Instead of a connective
appropriation, partial objects become the possessions of a person and,
when required, the property of another person. Just as he draws upon
centuries of scholastic reflection in defining God as the principle of
the disjunctive syllogism, Kant draws upon centuries of Roman juridical
reflection when he defines marriage as the tie that makes a person the
owner of the sexual organs of another person.\footnote{Immanuel Kant, \emph{The Metaphysics of Morals}, Part I.} One need only consult
a religious manual of sexual casuistry to see with what restrictions the
organ-desiring machine connections remain tolerated within the régime
for the pairing of people, which legally determines what may be
appropriated from the body of the wife.


Clearer still, the difference in régime becomes apparent each time a
society permits an infantile stage of sexual promiscuity to subsist,
where everything is permitted until the age when the young man in turn
submits to the principle of pairing that regulates the social production
of children. It is true that the connections of desiring-production were
found to comply with a binary rule; and we have even seen that a third
term intervened in this binarity, the body without organs that reinjects
producing into the product, extends the connections of machines, and
serves as a surface of recording. But here no biunivocal process is in
fact produced that would fit production into the mold of
representatives; no triangulation appears at this level that would refer
the objects of desire to global persons, or desire to a specific
subject. The only subject is desire itself on the body without organs,
inasmuch as it machines partial objects and flows, selecting and cutting
the one with the other, passing from one body to another, following
connections and appropriations that each time destroy the factitious
unity of a possessive or proprietary ego (anoedipal sexuality).


The triangle takes form in the parental use, and reproduces itself in
the conjugal use. We do not yet know what forces bring about this
triangulation that interferes with the recording of desire in order to
transform all its productive connections. But we are able at least to
follow, abstractly, the manner in which these forces proceed. We are
told that partial objects are caught up in an intuition of precocious
totality, just as the ego is caught up in an intuition of unity that
precedes its fulfillment. (Even in Melanie Klein, the schizoid partial
object is related to a whole that prepares for the advent of the
complete object in the depressive phase.) It is clear that such a
totality-unity is posited only in terms of a certain mode of absence, as
that which partial objects and subjects of desire “lack.” Consequently,
everything is played out from the start: everywhere we encounter the
analytic process that consists in extrapolating a transcendent and
common something, but that is a common-universal for the sole purpose of
introducing lack into desire, in situating and specifying persons and an
ego under one aspect or another of its absence, and imposing an
exclusive direction on the disjunction of the sexes.


Such is the case in Freud: for Oedipus, for castration, for the second
phase of the fantasy “A Child Is Being Beaten,” or again for the famous
latency period where the analytical mystification culminates. This
common, transcendent, absent something will be called phallus or law, in
order to designate “the” signifier that distributes the effects of
meaning throughout the chain and introduces exclusions there (whence the
oedipalizing interpretations of Lacanism). This signifier acts as the
formal cause of the triangulation—that is to say, makes possible both
the form of the triangle and its reproduction: Oedipus has as its
formula 3+1, the One of the transcendent phallus without which the terms
considered would not take the form of a triangle.\footnote{* M. C. and Edmond Ortigues, \emph{Oedipe africain} (Ch. 3, reference note 22), p. 83: “In order that the necessary conditions for the existence of a structure in the familial institution or in the Oedipus complex be fulfilled, at least four terms are required—that is, one term more than is naturally necessary.”} It is as if the
so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves
nonsignifying—of polyvocal writing and detachable fragments—were the
object of a special treatment, a crushing operation that extracted a
detached object from the chain, a despotic signifier from whose law the
entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each link triangulated.
There we have a curious paralogism implying a transcendent use of the
syntheses of the unconscious: \emph{we pass from detachable partial objects
to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by an
assigning of lack}. For example, in the capitalist code and its
trinitary expression, money as detachable chain is converted into
capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of
stocks and lacks.


The same is true of the Oedipal code: the libido as energy of selection
and detachment is converted into the phallus as detached object, the
latter existing only in the transcendent form of stock and lack
(something common and absent that is just as lacking in men as in
women). It is this conversion that makes the whole of sexuality shift
into the Oedipal framework: this projection of all the breaks-flows onto
the same mythical locale, and all the nonsignifying signs into the same
major signifier. “The effective triangulation makes it possible to
assign sexuality to one of the sexes. The partial objects have lost
nothing of their virulence and efficacy. Yet the reference to the penis
gives its full meaning to castration. Through it, all the external
experiences linked to deprivation, to frustration, to the \emph{lack} of
partial objects take on meaning after the fact. All previous history is
recast in a new version in the light of castration.”\footnote{Green, \emph{L’affect}, p. 167.}


That is indeed what disturbs us, this recasting of history and this
“lack” attributed to partial objects. And how could partial objects not
have lost their virulence and efficacy, once they had been introduced
into a use of synthesis that remains fundamentally illegitimate with
regard to them? We do not deny that there is an Oedipal sexuality, an
Oedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, an Oedipal castration, as
well as complete objects, global images, and specific egos. We deny that
these are productions of the unconscious. What is more, castration and
oedipalization beget a basic illusion that makes us believe that real
desiring-production is answerable to higher formations that integrate
it, subject it to transcendent laws, and make it serve a higher social
and cultural production; there then appears a kind of “unsticking” of
the social field with regard to the production of desire, in whose name
all resignations are justified in advance. Psychoanalysis, at the most
concrete level of therapy, reinforces this apparent movement with its
combined forces. Psychoanalysis itself ensures this conversion of the
unconscious. In what it calls the pre-oedipal, it sees a stage that must
be surmounted in the direction of an evolutive integration (toward the
depressive position under the reign of the complete object), or
organized in the direction of a structural integration (toward the
position of a despotic signifier, under the reign of the phallus). The
aptitude for conflict of which Freud spoke, the qualitative opposition
between homosexuality and heterosexuality, is in fact a consequence of
Oedipus: far from being an obstacle to treatment encountered from
without, it is a product of oedipalization, and a countereffect of the
treatment that reinforces it.


In reality the problem has nothing to do with pre-oedipal stages that
would still revolve around an Oedipal axis, but rather with the
existence and the nature of an anoedipal sexuality, an anoedipal
heterosexuality and homosexuality, an anoedipal castration: the
breaks-flows of desiring-production do not let themselves be projected
onto a mythical locale; the signs of desire do not let themselves be
extrapolated from a signifier; transsexuality does not let any
qualitative opposition between a \emph{local and nonspecific} heterosexuality
and a \emph{local and nonspecific} homosexuality arise. Everywhere, in this
reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion.
But rather than ensuring, or tending to ensure, the reversion of the
entire unconscious according to the anoedipal form and within the
anoedipal content of desiring-production, analytic theory and practice
never cease to promote the conversion of the unconscious to Oedipus,
form and content. (We shall see in effect what psychoanalysis calls
“resolving” Oedipus.) This conversion is therefore promoted by
psychoanalysis first of all by making a global and specific use of the
connective syntheses. This use can be defined as transcendent, and
implies a first paralogism in the psychoanalytic process. For a simple
reason, we again make use of Kantian terminology. In what he termed the
critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to
understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate
uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of \emph{transcendental}
philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the
transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like
fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its
metaphysics—its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution—this time
materialist—can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by
denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as
found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental
unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a
corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis.

\section{4. The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-4}%


When Oedipus slips into the disjunctive syntheses of desiring-recording,
it imposes the ideal of a certain restrictive or exclusive use on them
that becomes identical with the form of triangulation: being daddy,
mommy, or child. This is the reign of the “either\Slash{}or” in the
differentiating function of the prohibition of incest: here is where
mommy begins, there daddy, and there you are—stay in your place.
Oedipus’s misfortune is indeed that it no longer knows who begins where,
nor who is who. And “being parent or child” is also accompanied by two
other differentiations on the other sides of the triangle; “being man or
woman,” “being dead or alive.” Oedipus must not know whether it is alive
or dead, man or woman, any more than it knows whether it is parent or
child. Commit incest and you’ll be a zombie and a hermaphrodite. In this
sense, indeed, the three major neuroses that are termed familial seem to
correspond to Oedipal lapses in the differentiating function or in the
disjunctive synthesis: the phobic person can no longer be sure whether
he is parent or child; the obsessed person, whether he is dead or alive;
the hysterical person, whether he is man or woman.\footnote{On the hysterical “question” (Am I man or woman?) and the obsessional “question” (Am I dead or alive?), see Serge Leclaire, “La mort dans la vie de l’obsédé,” \emph{La Psychanalyse}, no. 2, pp. 129–30.} In short, the
familial triangulation represents the minimum condition under which an
“ego” takes on the co-ordinates that differentiate it at one and the
same time with regard to generation, sex, and vital state. And the
religious triangulation confirms this result in another mode: thus in
the trinity, the obliteration of the feminine image in favor of a
phallic symbol demonstrates how the triangle displaces itself toward its
own cause and attempts to integrate it. This time it is a matter of the
maximum conditions under which persons are differentiated. Hence the
importance of the Kantian definition that posits God as the a priori
principle of the disjunctive syllogism, so that all things derive from
it by a restriction of a larger reality (\emph{omnitudo realitatis}): Kant’s
humor makes God into the master of \emph{a} syllogism.


The action characteristic of Oedipal recording is the introduction of an
exclusive, restrictive, and negative use of the disjunctive synthesis.
We are so molded by Oedipus that we find it hard to imagine another use,
and even the three familial neuroses do not escape this use, although
they suffer from no longer being capable of applying it. Everywhere in
psychoanalysis, in Freud, we have seen this taste for exclusive
disjunctions assert itself. It becomes nevertheless apparent that
schizophrenia teaches us a singular extra-Oedipal lesson, and reveals to
us an unknown force of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that
would no longer be exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative,
nonrestrictive, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and
that still affirms the disjoined terms, that affirms them throughout
their entire distance, \emph{without restricting one by the other or
excluding the other from the one}, is perhaps the greatest paradox.
“Either \dots{} or \dots{} or,” instead of “either\Slash{}or.”


The schizophrenic is not man and woman. He is man or woman, but he
belongs precisely to both sides, man on the side of men, woman on the
side of women. Likable Jayet (Albert Désiré, matriculation number
54161001) intones the litany of the parallel series of the masculine and
the feminine, and places himself on both sides: “Mat Albert 5416 ricu-le
sultan romain vesin,” “Mat Désiré 1001 ricu-la sultane romaine vesine”
(“Mat Albert 5416 ricu-the insane Roman sultan,” “Mat Désiré 1001
ricu-the insane Roman sultaness”).\footnote{\emph{L’Art brut}, no. 3, p. 139. In his presentation, Jean Oury calls Jayet “the nondelimited,” “in permanent flight.”} The schizophrenic is dead \emph{or}
alive, not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a
distance over which he glides. He is child \emph{or} parent, not both, but
the one at the end of the other, like the two ends of a stick in a
nondecomposable space. This is the meaning of the disjunctions where
Beckett records his characters and the events that befall them:
**everything divides, but into itself*. Even the distances are positive,
at the same time as the included disjunctions.


It would be a total misunderstanding of this order of thought if we
concluded that the schizophrenic substituted vague syntheses of
identification of contradictory elements for disjunctions, like the last
of the Hegelian philosophers. He does not substitute syntheses of
contradictory elements for disjunctive syntheses; rather, for the
exclusive and restrictive use of the disjunctive synthesis, he
substitutes an affirmative use. He is and remains in disjunction: he
does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements
by means of elaboration; instead, he affirms it through a continuous
overflight spanning an indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual,
or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He is
trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild. He does not reduce two contraries to
an identity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates
the two as different. He does not confine himself inside contradictions;
on the contrary, he opens out and, like a spore case inflated with
spores, releases them as so many singularities that he had improperly
shut off, some of which he intended to exclude, while retaining others,
but which now become points-signs (\emph{points-signes})\footnote{Félix Guattari first develops this concept at length in “D’un signe à l’autre,” in \emph{Psychanalyse et transversalité} (Paris: Maspero, 1973). (\emph{Translators’note.})} all affirmed by
their new distance. The disjunction, being now inclusive, does not
closet itself inside its own terms. On the contrary it is
nonrestrictive. “I was then no longer this closed box to which I owed
being so well preserved, but a partition came crashing down”—an event
that will liberate a space where Molloy and Moran no longer designate
persons, but singularities flocking from all sides, evanescent agents of
production. This is free disjunction; the differential positions persist
in their entirety, they even take on a free quality, but they are all
inhabited by a faceless and transpositional subject. Schreber is man and
woman, parent and child, dead and alive: which is to say, he is situated
wherever there is a singularity, in all the series and in all the
branches marked by a singular point, because he is himself this distance
that transforms him into a woman, and at its terminal point he is
already the mother of a new humanity and can finally die.


That is why the schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of
religion, even though they are related to the same syllogism. In \emph{Le
Baphomet} Klossowski contrasts God as the master of the exclusions and
restrictions that derive from the disjunctive syllogism, with an
antichrist who is the prince of modifications, determining instead the
passage of a subject through all possible predicates. I am God I am not
God, I am God I am Man: it is not a matter of a synthesis that would go
beyond the negative disjunctions of the derived reality, in an original
reality of Man-God, but rather of an inclusive disjunction that carries
out the synthesis itself in drifting from one term to another and
following the distance between terms. Nothing is primal. It is like the
famous conclusion to \emph{Molloy}: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on
the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”\footnote{Samuel Beckett, \emph{Molloy}, in \emph{Three Novels by Samuel Beckett} (New York: Grove Press, 1959).} Nijinsky
wrote: “I am God I was not God I am a clown of God; I am Apis. I am an
Egyptian. I am a red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a
Japanese. I am a foreigner, a stranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land
bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tolstoy\dots{}. I am husband
and wife in one. I love my wife. I love my husband.”\footnote{Vaslav Nijinsky, \emph{Diary} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), pp. 20,156.}


What counts is not parental designations, nor racial or divine
designations, but merely the use made of them. No problem of meaning,
but only of usage. Nothing original or derived, but a generalized drift.
It would seem that the schizo liberates a raw genealogical material,
nonrestrictive, where he can situate himself, record himself, and take
his bearings in all the branches at once, on all sides. He explodes the
Oedipal genealogy. Through graduated relationships he performs absolute
overflights spanning indivisible distances. The genealogist-madman lays
out a disjunctive network on the body without organs. And God, who
designates none other than the energy of recording, can be the greatest
enemy in the paranoiac inscription, but also the greatest friend in the
miraculating inscription. In any case, the question of a being superior
to man and to nature does not arise here at all. Everything is on the
body without organs, both what is inscribed and the energy that
inscribes it. On the unengendered body, the nondecomposable distances
are necessarily surveyed, while the disjoined terms are all affirmed. I
am the letter and the pen and the paper. It was in this fashion that
Nijinsky kept his diary: yes, I was my father and I was my son.


The disjunctive synthesis of recording therefore leads us to the same
result as the connective synthesis: it too is capable of two uses, the
one immanent, the other transcendent. And here again, why does
psychoanalysis reinforce the transcendent use that introduces exclusions
and restrictions everywhere in the disjunctive network, and that makes
the unconscious swing over into Oedipus? And why is oedipalization
precisely that? It is because the exclusive relation introduced by
Oedipus comes into play not only between the various disjunctions
conceived as differentiations, \emph{but between the whole of the
differentiations that it imposes and an undifferentiated (un
indifférencié) that it presupposes}. Oedipus informs us: if you don’t
follow the lines of differentiation daddy-mommy-me, and the exclusive
alternatives that delineate them, you will fall into the black night of
the undifferentiated. It should be made clear that the exclusive
disjunctions are not at all the same as the inclusive disjunctions;
neither God nor the parental designations play the same role in the two.
In exclusive disjunctions, parental appellations no longer designate
intensive states through which the subject passes on the body without
organs and in the unconscious that remains an orphan (yes, I was\dots{});
rather, they designate global persons who do not exist prior to the
prohibitions that found them, and they differentiate among these global
persons and in relation to the ego. So that the transgression of the
prohibition becomes correlatively a confusion of persons, where the ego
identifies with the global persons, with the loss of differentiating
rules or differential functions.


But we should stress the fact that Oedipus creates both \emph{the
differentiations that it orders and the undifferentiated with which it
threatens us}. With the same movement the Oedipus complex inserts desire
into triangulation, and prohibits desire from satisfying itself with the
terms of the triangulation. It forces desire to take as its object the
differentiated parental persons, and, brandishing the threats of the
undifferentiated, prohibits the correlative ego from satisfying its
desires with these persons, in the name of the same requirements of
differentiation. But it is this undifferentiated \emph{that Oedipus creates
as the reverse of the differentiations that it creates}. Oedipus says to
us: either you will internalize the differential functions that rule
over the exclusive disjunctions, and thereby “resolve” Oedipus, or you
will fall into the neurotic night of imaginary identifications. Either
you will follow the lines of the triangle—lines that structure and
differentiate the three terms—or you will always bring one term into
play as if it were one too many in relation to the other two, and you
will reproduce in every sense the dual relations of identification in
the undifferentiated. But there is Oedipus on either side. And everybody
knows what psychoanalysis means by \emph{resolving} Oedipus: internalizing it
so as to better rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where
it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to the children. “The
child becomes a man only by resolving the Oedipus complex, whose
resolution introduces him into society, where he finds, within the
figure of Authority, the obligation to relive it, this time with no way
out. Nor is it by any means certain that, between the impossible return
to that which precedes the stage of culture and the growing malaise that
this stage provokes, a point of equilibrium can be found.”\footnote{A. Besançon, “Vers une histoire psychanalytique,” \emph{Annales}, May 1969.} Oedipus
is like the labyrinth, you only get out by re-entering it—or by making
someone else enter it. Oedipus as either problem \emph{or} solution is the
two ends of a ligature that cuts off all desiring-production. The screws
are tightened, nothing relating to production can make its way through
any longer, except for a far-distant murmur. The unconscious has been
crushed, triangulated, and confronted with a choice that is not its own.
With all of the exits now blocked, there is no longer any possible use
for the inclusive, nonrestrictive disjunctions. Parents have been found
for the (orphan) unconscious!


**Double bind* is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the
simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which
contradicts the other, as for example the father who says to his son: go
ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism—at
least a certain type of criticism—will be very unwelcome. Bateson sees
in this phenomenon a particularly schizophrenizing situation, which he
interprets as a “contrary” from the viewpoint of Russell’s theory of
types.\footnote{Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” \emph{Behavioral Science}, Vol. 1 (1956). See the commentaries of Pierre Fédida in “Psychose et parenté,” \emph{Critique}, October 1968.} It seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse, is
instead a common situation, oedipalizing par excellence. And although it
would require formalization, the other type of non-sense spoken of by
Russell is brought to mind by the double-bind situation: an alternative,
an exclusive disjunction is defined in terms of a principle which,
however, constitutes its two terms or underlying wholes, and where the
principle itself enters into the alternative (a completely different
case from what happens when the disjunction is inclusive). Here we have
the second paralogism of psychoanalysis. In short, \emph{the “double bind”is
none other than the whole of Oedipus}. It is in this sense that Oedipus
should be presented as a series, or an oscillation between two poles:
the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be
normative. On either side is Oedipus, the double impasse. And if a
schizo is produced here as an entity, this occurs for the simple reason
that there is no other means of escaping this double path, where
normality is no less blocked than neurosis, and where the solution
offers no more of a way out than does the problem. Hence the schizo’s
withdrawal to the body without organs.


It seems that Freud himself was acutely aware of Oedipus’s
inseparability from a double impasse into which he was precipitating the
unconscious. Thus in the 1936 letter to Romain Rolland, Freud writes:
“Everything unfolds as if the essential were to go beyond the father, as
if going beyond the father were always forbidden.” This becomes even
more clear when Freud elaborates the entire historico-mythical series:
at one end the Oedipal bond is established by the murderous
identification, at the other end it is reinforced by the restoration and
internalization of paternal authority (“revival of the old state of
things at a new level”).\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego}, Ch. 12, B.} Between the two there is latency—the
celebrated latency—which is without doubt the greatest psychoanalytic
mystification: this society of “brothers” who forbid themselves the
fruits of the crime, and spend all the time necessary for internalizing.
But we are warned: the society of brothers is very dejected, unstable,
and dangerous, it must prepare the way for the rediscovery of an
equivalent to parental authority, it must cause us to pass over to the
other pole. In accord with a suggestion of Freud’s, American society—the
industrial society with anonymous management and vanishing personal
power, etc.—is presented to us as a resurgence of the “society without
the father.” Not surprisingly, the industrial society is burdened with
the search for original modes for the restoration of the equivalent—for
example, the astonishing discovery by Mitscherlich that the British
Royal Family, after all, is not such a bad thing.\footnote{Alexander Mitscherlich, \emph{Society without the Father}, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), pp. 296ff.}


It is therefore understood that we leave one pole of Oedipus only to
pass on to the other. No way of getting out, neurosis or normality. The
society of brothers rediscovers nothing of production and
desiring-machines; on the contrary, it spreads the veil of latency. As
to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end
or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the
asylum or the police for help. The police on our side!—never did
psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement of
social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm. Let it
not be thought that we are alluding to the folkloric aspects of
psychoanalysis. The fact that there are some, around Lacan, who are
developing another conception of psychoanalysis, does not mean that we
should take no notice of the dominant tone in the most respected
associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs. Stéphane, the state of
fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the
thought that someone might claim to escape the Oedipal dragnet. Oedipus
is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less
people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high
priests. The first profound example of an analysis of double bind, in
this sense, can be found in Marx’s \emph{On the Jewish Question}: between the
family and the State—the Oedipus of familial authority and the Oedipus
of social authority.


Oedipus is completely useless, except for tying off the unconscious on
both sides. We shall see in what sense Oedipus is strictly “undecidable”
(\emph{indécidable}), as the mathematicians would put it. We are extremely
tired of those stories where one is said to be in good health because of
Oedipus, sick from Oedipus, and suffering from various illnesses under
the influence of Oedipus. It sometimes happens that an analyst becomes
fed up with this myth that is the bed and board of psychoanalysis, and
goes back to the sources: Freud never managed to escape the world of the
father, or of guilt\dots{}. While offering the possibility of constructing a
**logic* of the relation to the father, he was the first to open the way
for a release from the father’s hold on man. The possibility of living
**beyond* the father’s law, beyond all law, is perhaps the most essential
possibility brought forth by Freudian psychoanalysis. But paradoxically,
and perhaps because of Freud, everything leads us to conclude that this
release, made possible by psychoanalysis, will be achieved, is already
being achieved, outside it.\footnote{Marie-Claire Boons, “Le meurtre du père chez Freud,” \emph{L’Inconscient}, no. 5 (January 1968), p. 129.}


We cannot, however, share either this pessimism or this optimism. For
there is much optimism in thinking psychoanalysis makes possible a
veritable solution to Oedipus: Oedipus is like God; the father is like
God; the problem is not resolved until we do away with \emph{both the problem
and the solution}. It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve
Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal
psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in
order to reach the real problems. Schizoanalysis proposes to reach those
regions of the orphan unconscious—indeed “beyond all law”—where the
problem of Oedipus can no longer even be raised. By the same token, we
do not share the pessimism that consists in thinking that this change,
this release, can be achieved only outside psychoanalysis. We believe,
on the contrary, in the possibility of an internal reversal that would
make the analytic machine into an indispensable part of the
revolutionary machinery. What is more, the objective conditions for such
a practice appear to be already present.


Everything takes place as if Oedipus of itself had two poles: one pole
characterized by imaginary figures that lend themselves to a process of
identification, and a second pole characterized by symbolic functions
that lend themselves to a process of differentiation. But in any case we
are oedipalized: if we don’t have Oedipus as a crisis, we have it as a
structure. Then the crisis is passed on to others, and the whole
movement starts all over again. Such is the Oedipal disjunction, the
swing of the pendulum, the exclusive inverse reasoning. That is why,
when we are invited to go beyond a simplistic conception of Oedipus
based on parental images, in order to define symbolic functions within a
structure, it is in vain that the traditional daddy-mommy are replaced
by a mother-function, a father-function; we don’t quite see what there
is to gain by this, except for the founding of the universality of
Oedipus beyond the variability of images; the fusing of desire even more
strongly to law and prohibitions; and the pushing of the process of
oedipalization of the unconscious to its limits. Here Oedipus encounters
its two extremes, \emph{its minimum and its maximum}, depending on whether it
is regarded as tending toward an undifferentiated value of its variable
images, or toward the force of differentiation of its symbolic
functions. “When one draws nearer to the material imagination, the
differential function diminishes, one tends toward equivalences; when
one draws nearer to the formative elements, the differential function
increases, one tends toward distinctive valences.”\footnote{Edmond Ortigues, \emph{Le discours et le symbole} (Paris: Aubier, 1962), p. 197.} It will hardly
come as a surprise to learn that Oedipus as a structure is the Christian
Trinity, whereas Oedipus as a crisis is a familial trinity
insufficiently structured by faith: always the two poles in inverse
proportion, Oedipus forever!\footnote{* See J. M. Pohier, “La paternité de Dieu,” \emph{L’inconscient}, no. 5 (January 1968). This article contains a perfect formulation of Oedipus as double bind: “The psychic life of man unfolds in a sort of dialectical tension between two ways of living the Oedipus complex: one that consists in living it, and the other that consists in living according to the structures that might be called Oedipal. Experience also shows us that these structures are not foreign to the most critical phase of this complex. For Freud, man is definitively marked by this complex: it constitutes both his grandeur and his misery,” etc. (pp. 57–58).}


How many interpretations of Lacanism, overtly or secretly pious as the
case may be, have in this manner invoked a structural Oedipus to create
and shut the double impasse, to lead us back to the question of the
father, to oedipalize even the schizo, and to show that a gap in the
Symbolic would bring us back to the Imaginary, and inversely that
imaginary drivel or confusions would lead us to the structure! As a
famous predecessor said to these creatures, you’ve already made this
into an old refrain. As for us, that is why we were unable to posit any
difference in nature, any border line, any limit at all between the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, or between Oedipus-as-crisis and
Oedipus-as-structure, or between the problem and its solution. It is
solely a question of a correlative double impasse, a swing of a pendulum
responsible for sweeping away the entire unconscious, and that
continuously carries us from one pole to the other. A double pincer
action that crushes the unconscious caught in its exclusive disjunction.


The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the
Imaginary, but between the real machinic (\emph{machinique}) element, which
constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants.
The difference is not between two uses of Oedipus, but between the
anoedipal use of the inclusive, nonrestrictive disjunctions, and the
Oedipal use of exclusive disjunctions, whether this last use borrows
from the paths of the Imaginary \emph{or} the values of the Symbolic. It
would also be necessary to heed Lacan’s word of caution concerning the
Freudian myth of Oedipus, which “has no way of holding its own
indefinitely in the forms of society where the tragic sense is
increasingly lost\dots{}: a myth cannot sustain itself when it supports no
ritual, and psychoanalysis is not the Oedipus ritual.”\footnote{Jacques Lacan, \emph{Ecrits} (Paris: Editions du Seuil), p. 813.} Even if we
go back from the images to the structure, from imaginary figures to
symbolic functions, from the father to the law, from the mother to the
great Other, in truth \emph{the question merely retreats}. And if we try to
envisage the time put into this retreat, Lacan goes on to say, the sole
foundation for the society of brothers, for fraternity, is “segregation”
(what does he mean here?).


In any case, it was inopportune to tighten the nuts and bolts where
Lacan had just loosened them; or to oedipalize the schizo where on the
contrary he had just schizophrenized even neurosis, injecting a
schizophrenic flow capable of subverting the field of psychoanalysis.
The object (small o) erupts at the heart of the structural equilibrium
in the manner of an infernal machine, the desiring-machine. Then a
second generation of disciples of Lacan supervenes, less and less
sensitive to the false problems of Oedipus. But if the first disciples
were tempted to reclose the Oedipus yoke, didn’t they do so to the
extent that Lacan seemed to maintain a kind of projection of the
signifying chains onto a despotic signifier, lacking unto itself and
reintroducing lack into the series of desire on which it imposed an
exclusive use? Was it possible to denounce Oedipus-as-myth, and
nevertheless maintain that the castration complex itself was not a myth
but in fact something real? (Wasn’t this tantamount to taking up the cry
of Aristotle: “We really must come to a halt,” in the face of this
Freudian \emph{Anankè}, this Rock?)

\section{5. The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-5}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-5}%


In the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, we
have seen how the body without organs was in fact an egg, crisscrossed
with axes, banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured
off by gradients, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds. In this
sense, we believe in a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in conjunction
with the biochemistry of drugs), that will be progressively more capable
of determining the nature of this egg and the distribution of
field-gradient-threshold. It is a matter of relationships of intensities
through which the subject passes on the body without organs, a process
that engages him in becomings, rises and falls, migrations and
displacements. R.D. Laing is entirely right in defining the
schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental
experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes a subject to remark: “I
had existed since the very beginning \dots{} from the lowest form of life [the
body without organs] to the present time,\dots{} I was looking \dots{}—not looking
so much as just \emph{feeling}—ahead of me was lying the most horrific
journey.”\footnote{R.D. Laing, \emph{The Politics of Experience} (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 154–55.} When we speak here of a voyage, this is no more a
metaphor than before when we spoke of an egg, and of what takes place in
and on it—morphogenetic movements, displacements of cellular groups,
stretchings, folds, migrations, and local variations of potentials.
There is no reason to oppose an interior voyage to exterior ones: Lenz’s
stroll, Nijinsky’s stroll, the promenades of Beckett’s creatures are
effective realities, but where the reality of matter has abandoned all
extension, just as the interior voyage has abandoned all form and
quality, henceforth causing pure intensities—coupled together, almost
unbearable—to radiate within and without, intensities through which a
nomadic subject passes. Here it is not a case of an hallucinatory
experience nor of a delirious mode of thought, but a feeling, a series
of emotions and feelings as a consummation and a consumption of
intensive quantities, that form the material for subsequent
hallucinations and deliriums. The intensive emotion, the affect, is both
the common root and the principle of differentiation of deliriums and
hallucinations.


We are also of a mind to believe that everything commingles in these
intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends
and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental
appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical
designations, and even miscellaneous news items. (\emph{I feel that}) I am
becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am
Heliogabalus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a
Templar, I was my father and I was my son. And all the criminals, the
whole list of criminals, the decent criminals and the scoundrels: Szondi
rather than Freud and his Oedipus. “Perhaps it’s by trying to be Worm
that I’ll finally succeed in being Mahood\dots{}. Then all I’ll have to do is
be Worm. Which no doubt I shall achieve by trying to be Jones. Then all
I’ll have to do is be Jones.” But if everything commingles in this
fashion it does so in intensity, with no confusion of spaces and forms,
since these have indeed been undone on behalf of a new order: the
intense and intensive order.


What is the nature of this order? The first things to be distributed on
the body without organs are races, cultures, and their gods. The fact
has often been overlooked that the schizo indeed participates in
history; he hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates
the races. All delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean
racist. It is not a matter of the regions of the body without organs
“representing” races and cultures. The full body does not represent
anything at all. On the contrary, the races and cultures designate
regions on this body—that is, zones of intensities, fields of
potentials. Phenomena of individualization and sexualization are
produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by
crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other
individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as
being born or dying. Along the way we struggle against other races, we
destroy civilizations, in the manner of the great migrants in whose wake
nothing is left standing once they have passed through—although these
destructions can be brought about, as we shall see, in two very
different ways.


The crossing of a threshold entails ravages elsewhere—how could it be
otherwise? The body without organs closes round the deserted places. The
theater of cruelty cannot be separated from the struggle against our
culture, from the confrontation of the “races,” and from Artaud’s great
migration toward Mexico, its forces, and its religions: individuations
are produced only within fields of forces expressly defined by intensive
vibrations, and that animate cruel personages only in so far as they are
induced organs, parts of desiring-machines (mannequins).\footnote{On the interplay of races and intensities in the theater of cruelty, see Antonin Artaud, \emph{Oeuvres complètes}, (Paris: Gallimard), Vols. 4 and 5: for example, the project of “La conquete du Mexique,” Vol. 4, p. 151; and the role of intensive vibrations and rotations in “Les Cenci,” Vol. 5, pp. 46ff. (\emph{Translators’ note:} For the English text of the latter, see Antonin Artaud, \emph{The Cenci}, trans. Simon Watson Taylor [New York: Grove Press, 1970], pp. viiff.)} A season
in hell—how could it be separated from denunciations of European
families, from the call for destructions that don’t come quickly enough,
from the admiration for the convict, from the intense crossing of the
thresholds of history, and from this prodigious migration, this
becoming-woman, this becoming-Scandinavian or Mongol, this “displacement
of races and of continents,” this feeling of raw intensity that presides
over delirium as well as over hallucinations, and especially this
deliberate, stubborn, material will to be “of a race inferior for all
eternity”: “I have known every son of good birth, I have never been of
this people, I have never been Christian,\dots{} yes my eyes are closed to
your light. I am a beast, a Negro.”\footnote{Arthur Rimbaud, \emph{Une Saison en Enfer}.}


And can Zarathustra be separated from the “grand politics,” and from the
bringing to life of the races that leads Nietzsche to say, I’m not a
German, I’m Polish. Here again individuations are brought about solely
within complexes of forces that determine persons as so many intensive
states embodied in a “criminal,” ceaselessly passing beyond a threshold
while destroying the factitious unity of a family and an ego: “I am
Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say that I am also
Lesseps\dots{}. I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new idea—that of
a decent criminal. I am also Chambige—also a decent criminal\dots{}. The
unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root
**every name in history is I*.”\footnote{Nietzsche, letter to Jakob Burckhardt, January 5, 1889, in \emph{Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche}, trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 347.} Yet it was never a question of
identifying oneself with personages, as when it is erroneously
maintained that a madman “takes himself for so-and-so\dots{}.” It is a
question of something quite different: identifying races, cultures, and
gods with fields of intensity on the body without organs, identifying
personages with states that fill these fields, and with effects that
fulgurate within and traverse these fields. Whence the role of names,
with a magic all their own: there is no ego that identifies with races,
peoples, and persons in a theater of representation, but proper names
that identify races, peoples, and persons with regions, thresholds, or
effects in a production of intensive quantities. The theory of proper
names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers
instead to the class of “effects”: effects that are not a mere
dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation
of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper
names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule
effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics:
a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the \emph{names} of history,
and not the name of the father.


Everything has been said about the paucity of reality, the loss of
reality, the lack of contact with life, autism and athymia.
Schizophrenics themselves have said everything there is to say about
this, and have been quick to slip into the expected clinical mold. Dark
world, growing desert: a solitary machine hums on the beach, an atomic
factory installed in the desert. But if the body without organs is
indeed this desert, it is as an indivisible, nondecomposable distance
over which the schizo glides in order to be everywhere something real is
produced, everywhere something real has been and will be produced. It is
true that reality has ceased to be a principle. According to such a
principle, the reality of the real was posed as a divisible abstract
quantity, whereas the real was divided up into qualified unities, into
distinct qualitative forms. But now the real is a product that envelops
the distances within intensive quantities. The indivisible is enveloped,
and signifies that what envelops it does not divide without changing its
nature or form. The schizo has no principles: he is something only by
being something else. He is Mahood only by being Worm, and Worm only by
being Jones. He is a girl only by being an old man who is miming or
simulating the girl. Or rather, by being someone who is simulating an
old man simulating a girl. Or rather, by simulating someone \dots{} , etc.
This was already true of the completely oriental art of the Roman
Emperors, the twelve paranoiacs of Suetonius. In a great book by Jacques
Besse, we encounter once again the double stroll of the schizo, the
geographic exterior voyage following nondecomposable distances, and the
interior historical voyage enveloping intensities: Christopher Columbus
calms his mutinous crew and becomes admiral again only by simulating a
(false) admiral who is simulating a whore who is dancing.\footnote{Jacques Besse, “Le danseur,” in \emph{La grande pâque} (Paris: Editions Belfond, 1969). The whole first part of this book describes the schizo’s stroll in the city; the second part, “Légendes folles,” progresses to the hallucinations or deliriums of historical episodes.}


But simulation must be understood in the same way as we spoke of
identification. It expresses those nondecomposable distances always
enveloped in the intensities that divide into one another while changing
their form. If identification is a nomination, a designation, then
simulation is the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is
strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its
principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the
desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order
to become the Real \emph{and its artifice}. To seize an intensive real as
produced in the coextension of nature and history, to ransack the Roman
Empire, the Mexican cities, the Greek gods, and the discovered
continents so as to extract from them this always-surplus reality, and
to form the treasure of the paranoiac tortures and the celibate
glories—all the pogroms of history, that’s what I am, and all the
triumphs, too, as if a few simple univocal events could be extricated
from this extreme polyvocity: such is the “histrionism” of the
schizophrenic, according to Klossowski’s formula, the true program for a
theater of cruelty, the \emph{mise-en-scène} of a machine to produce the
real. Far from having lost who knows what contact with life, the
schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, to an intense
point identical with the production of the real, and that leads Reich to
say: “What belongs specifically to the schizophrenic patient is that \dots{}
he experiences the vital biology of the body\dots{}. With respect to their
experiencing of life, the neurotic patient and the perverted individual
are to the schizophrenic as the petty thief is to the daring
safecracker.”\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm}, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1973), p. 70. For a critique of autism, see Roger Gentis, \emph{Les murs de l’asile} (Paris: Maspero, 1970), pp. 41ff.} So the question returns: what reduces the
schizophrenic to his autistic, hospitalized profile, cut off from
reality? Is it the process, or is it rather the interruption of the
process, its aggravation, its continuation in the void? What forces the
schizophrenic to withdraw to a body without organs that has become deaf,
dumb, and blind?


We often hear it said: he thinks he’s Louis XVII. Not true. In the Louis
XVII affair, or rather in the finest case, that of the pretender
Richemont, there is a desiring-machine or a celibate machine in the
center: the horse with short, jointed paws, inside which they supposedly
put the Dauphin so he could flee. And then, all around, there are agents
of production and antiproduction, the organizers of the escape, the
accomplices, the allied sovereigns, the revolutionary enemies, the
jealous and hostile uncles, who are not persons but so many states of
rising and falling through which the pretender passes. Moreover, the
pretender Richemont’s stroke of genius is not simply that he “takes into
account” Louis XVII, or that he takes other pretenders into account by
denouncing them as fake. What is so ingenious is that he takes other
pretenders into account by assuming them, by authenticating them—that is
to say, by making them too into states through which he passes: I am
Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau, who claimed
to be Louis XVII.\footnote{Maurice Garçon, \emph{Louis XVII ou la fausse énigme} (Paris: Hachette, 1968), p. 177.} Richemont doesn’t identify with Louis XVII, he
lays claim to the premium due the person who traverses all the
singularities of the series converging around the machine for kidnapping
Louis XVII. There is no ego at the center, any more than there are
persons distributed on the periphery. Nothing but a series of
singularities in the disjunctive network, or intensive states in the
conjunctive tissue, and a transpositional subject moving full circle,
passing through all the states, triumphing over some as over his
enemies, relishing others as his allies, collecting everywhere the
fraudulent premium of his avatars. Partial object: a well situated
scar—ambiguous besides—is better proof than all the memories of
childhood that the pretender lacks. The conjunctive synthesis can
therefore be expressed: “So \emph{I} am the king! So the kingdom belongs to
**me!\emph{” But this \emph{me} is merely the residual subject that sweeps the
circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle.
}


All delirium possesses a world-historical, political, and racial
content, mixing and sweeping along races, cultures, continents, and
kingdoms; some wonder whether this long drift merely constitutes a
derivative of Oedipus. The familial order explodes, families are
challenged, son, father, mother, sister—“I mean those families like my
own, that owe all to the Declaration of the Rights of Man!”; “When I
seek out my most profound opposite, I always encounter my mother and my
sister; to see myself related to such German rabble is, as it were, a
blasphemy with respect to my doctrine of the Eternal Return!” It is a
question of knowing if the historico-political, the racial, and the
cultural are merely part of a manifest content and formally depend on a
work of elaboration, or if, on the contrary, this content should be
followed as the thread of latency that the order of families hides from
us. Should the rupture with families be taken as a sort of “familial
romance” that would indeed bring us back again to families and refer us
to an event or a structural determination inside the family itself? Or
is this rather the sign that the problem must be raised in a completely
different manner, because it is already raised elsewhere for the schizo
himself, outside the family? Are “the names of history” derivatives of
the name of the father, and are the races, cultures, and continents
substitutes for daddy-mommy, dependent on the Oedipal genealogy? Is
history’s signifier the dead father?


Once again let us consider Judge Schreber’s delirium. To be sure, the
use of races and the mobilization or notion of history are developed
there in a manner totally different from that employed by the authors we
have previously mentioned. The fact remains that Schreber’s memoirs are
filled with a theory of God’s chosen peoples, and with the dangers that
face the currently chosen people, the Germans, who are threatened by the
Jews, the Catholics, and the Slavs. In his intense metamorphoses and
passages, Schreber becomes a pupil of the Jesuits, the burgomaster of a
city where the Germans are fighting against the Slavs, and a girl
defending Alsace against the French. At last he crosses the Aryan
gradient or threshold to become a Mongol prince. What does this
becoming-pupil, burgomaster, girl, and Mongol signify? All paranoiac
deliriums stir up similar historical, geographic, and racial masses. The
error would lie in concluding, for example, that fascists are mere
paranoiacs. This would be an error precisely because, in the current
state of affairs, this would still amount to leading the historical and
political content of the delirium back to an internal familial
determination. And what is even more disturbing to us is the fact that
the entirety of this enormous content disappears completely from Freud’s
analysis: not one trace of it remains; everything is ground, squashed,
triangulated into Oedipus; everything is reduced to the father, in such
a way as to reveal in the crudest fashion the inadequacies of an Oedipal
psychoanalysis.


Let us consider another paranoiac delirium as related by Maud Mannoni, a
delirium whose political nature is especially vivid. This example
appears all the more striking to us, given our great admiration for Maud
Mannoni’s work and for the manner in which she poses antipsychiatric and
institutional problems. Here then we see a man from Martinique who, in
the process of his delirium, situates himself in relation to the Arabs
and the Algerian War, in relation to the whites and the May ’68 events,
and so on: “I fell sick from the Algerian problem. I had partaken in the
same foolishness as they (sexual pleasure). They adopted me as one of
their own race. Mongol blood flows through my veins. Every time I
attempted to put something into effect, the Algerians argued against it.
I had racist notions\dots{}. I descend from the Gallic dynasty. By this right
I am a man of noble lineage\dots{}. Let my name be determined, let it be
determined scientifically, and then I shall be able to set up a
harem.”\footnote{Maud Mannoni, \emph{Le psychiatre, son fou et la psychanalyse} (Pans: Editions du Seuil, 1970).} Though aware of the character of “revolt” and of “truth for
all” implied in the psychosis, Maud Mannoni argues that the origin of
the breakup of familial relations in favor of themes that the subject
himself declares to be racist, metaphysical, and political, is to be
found in the familial structure serving as a matrix. This origin would
exist therefore in the symbolic void or in “the initial foreclosure
(\emph{forclusion}) of the signifier of the father.”\footnote{Ibid.} The name to be
determined scientifically, the name that haunts all history, is simply
the paternal name.


In this case as in many others, the utilization of the Lacanian concept
of foreclosure leads to the forced oedipalization of the rebel: the
absence of Oedipus is interpreted as a \emph{lack} with regard to the father,
a gaping hole in the structure; next, in the name of this lack, we are
referred to the other Oedipal pole, the pole of imaginary
identifications within the maternal undifferentiated. The law of the
double bind operates relentlessly, ruthlessly, flinging us from one pole
to the other, in such a way that what is foreclosed in the Symbolic must
reappear in the Real in a hallucinatory form. But in this fashion the
**entire historico-political theme gets interpreted as a constellation of
imaginary identifications depending* on Oedipus, or on that which the
subject “lacks” in order to become oedipalized.\footnote{* “The Oedipal personages are all in their places, but in the play of permutations brought about, there is something like an empty place\dots{}. What appears as rejected is everything referring to the phallus and the father\dots{}. Each time Georges tries to take hold of himself as a desiring-person, he is driven back to a form of dissolution of identities. He is another, enthralled by a maternal image\dots{}. He remains trapped within an imaginary position in which he is captivated by the maternal imago; he situates himself within the Oedipal triangle in terms of this locale, which implies an impossible process of identification, involving forever after, in the mode of a pure imaginary dialectic, the destruction of one or the other of the partners.”—Mannoni (reference note 38), pp. 104–107.} And to be sure, it
is not a question of knowing whether or not the familial determinations
or indeterminations play a role. It is obvious that they do. But is this
an initial role as symbolic organizer (or symbolic disorganizer) from
which the floating contents of the historical delirium would derive, as
so many glittering, reflections in an imaginary mirror? Is the trinitary
formula for the schizo—which leads him, forced and constrained, back to
Oedipus—this void left by the absence of the father and this cancerous
development of the mother and the sister? And yet, as we have seen, if
there is one problem that does not exist in schizophrenia, it is the
problem of identifications. And if getting well amounts to getting
oedipalized, we can easily understand the outbursts of the patient who
“does not want to be cured,” and who treats the analyst as one of the
family, then as an ally of the police. Is the schizophrenic sick and cut
off from reality because he lacks Oedipus, because he “is lacking” in
something only to be found in Oedipus—or on the contrary is he sick by
virtue of the oedipalization he is unable to bear, and around which
everything combines in order to force him to submit (social repression
even before psychoanalysis)?


The schizophrenic egg is like the biological egg: they have a similar
history, and our knowledge of them has run up against the same sort of
difficulties and illusions. During the development of the
differentiation of the egg, it was first believed that veritable
“organizers” decided the destiny of the parts. But it was soon noticed
that on the one hand, all kinds of other variable substances had the
same action as the envisaged organizing stimulus, and that on the other
hand, the parts themselves had specific abilities and potentials for
development that did not exist for the stimulus (experiments with
grafting). Whence the idea that the stimuli are not organizers, but mere
inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of
indifference. Many different kinds of substances and materials, when
killed, boiled, and pulverized, have the same effect. It was the
**beginnings* of the development that favored the illusion: the
simplicity of the beginning—consisting, for example, of cellular
divisions—could lead one to believe in some sort of adequation between
the inductor and what is induced. But we are well aware that, when
considered in terms of its beginnings, a thing is always poorly judged
because, in order to become apparent, it is forced to simulate
structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as
masks. What is more, \emph{from the beginning} we can see that it makes use
of masks in an entirely different manner, and that underneath the mask
and by means of it, it already invests the terminal forms and the
specific higher states whose integrity it will subsequently establish.


Such is the history of Oedipus: the parental figures are in no way
organizers, but rather inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import
that trigger processes of an entirely different nature, processes that
are endowed with what amounts to an indifference with regard to the
stimulus. Doubtless one can \emph{believe} that, in the beginning (?), the
stimulus—the Oedipal inductor—is a real organizer. But believing is an
operation of a conscious or preconscious nature, an extrinsic perception
rather than an operation of the unconscious upon itself. From the
beginning of the life of the child, it is already an altogether
different undertaking that pierces the mask of Oedipus, a different flow
running through the openings in the mask, a different adventure—that of
desiring-production. Yet it cannot be said that psychoanalysis was
unaware of this in a certain respect. In his theory of the primal
fantasy, of the traces of an archaic heredity, and the endogenous
sources of the superego, Freud constantly asserts that the active
factors are not the real parents, nor even the parents as the child
imagines them. Such is also the case, and all the more so, for Lacan’s
disciples, when they take up the distinction between the Imaginary and
the Symbolic, when they oppose the name of the father to the imago, and
the foreclosure concerning the signifier to a real deficiency or absence
of the paternal personage. There is no better example than this to show
that the parental figures are indifferent inductors and that the true
organizer is elsewhere—on the side of what is induced, not on that of
the inductor.


But that is just the beginning of the question, the same question as in
the case of the biological egg. For under these conditions is there no
solution but to revive the notion of a “terrain,” whether in the form of
a phylogenetic innateness of preformation, or a cultural symbolic a
priori linked to prematuration? Worse yet: it is clear that by invoking
such an a priori one does not by any means abandon familialism in the
strictest sense, which burdens all of psychoanalysis; on the contrary,
one thereby plunges deeper into familialism and generalizes it. Parents
have been put in their true places within the workings of the
unconscious, as inductors of an indifferent nature, yet the role of
organizer continues to be entrusted to symbolic or structural elements
that are still part of the family and its Oedipal matrix. Once again one
is caught, without a way out: it is simply that the means have been
found to render the family transcendent.


There we have it—the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, enclosing
the unconscious within Oedipus, cutting off all vital flows, crushing
desiring-production, conditioning the patient to respond daddy-mommy,
and to always consume daddy-mommy. Thus Foucault was entirely right in
saying that, in a certain sense, the psychoanalyst completed and
perfected what the psychiatry of nineteenth-century asylums, with Pinel
and Tuke, had set out to do: to fuse madness with a parental complex, to
link it to “the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family”; to
constitute for the madman a microcosm symbolizing “the massive
structures of bourgeois society and its values,” relations of
Family-Child, Transgression-Punishment, Madness-Disorder; to arrange
things so that disalienation goes the same route as alienation, with
Oedipus at both ends; to establish the moral authority of the doctor as
Father and Judge, Family and Law; and finally to culminate in the
following paradox: “While the victim of mental illness is entirely
alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the
reality of the mental illness in the critical concept of madness.”\footnote{* Foucault (Ch. 1, reference note 43). “And it is to this degree that all nineteenth-century psychiatry really converges on Freud, the first man to accept in all its seriousness the reality of the physician-patient couple\dots{}. To the doctor, Freud transferred all the structures Pinel and Tuke had set up within confinement. He did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his ’liberators’ had alienated him; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its powers, extending them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor’s hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject. \protect\endgraf “The doctor, as an alienating figure, remains the key to psychoanalysis. Perhaps because it did not suppress this ultimate structure, and because it referred all the others to it, psychoanalysis has not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of unreason, nor to decipher in themselves the signs of the madman. Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason” (pp. 254, 274, 276–78).}
Luminous pages.


Let us add that by \emph{enveloping} the illness in a familial complex
internal to the patient, and then the familial complex itself in the
transference or the doctor-patient relationship, Freudian psychoanalysis
made a somewhat intensive use of the family. Granted, this use distorted
the nature of the intensive quantities in the unconscious. Nevertheless
it still respected in part the general principle of a production of
these quantities. When it became necessary once again to confront
psychosis directly, however, the family was immediately reopened in
extension, and was in itself considered as the indicator for measuring
the forces of alienation and disalienation. In this manner the study of
the families of schizophrenics has breathed new life into Oedipus by
making it reign over the extensive order of an expanded family, where
not only each person would combine to a greater or lesser extent his or
her triangle with the triangle of others, but where the entirety of the
extended family also would oscillate between the two poles of a
“healthy” triangulation, structuring and differentiating, and forms of
perverted triangles, bringing about their fusion in the realm of the
undifferentiated.


Jacques Hochman analyzes some interesting varieties of psychotic
families under the same “fusionist postulate”: the properly fusionist
family, where differentiations are no longer made except between the
inside and the outside (those who are outside the family); the divisive
(\emph{scissionnelle}) family that establishes blocks, clans, or coalitions
within itself; the tubular family, where the triangle multiplies
endlessly, each member having his own triangle that interlocks with
others without one’s being able to discern the limits of a nuclear
family; the foreclosing family, where differentiation is both included
and warded off in the person of one of its members who has been
eliminated, rendered null, and foreclosed.\footnote{Jacques Hochman, \emph{Pour une psychiatrie communautaire} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), Ch. 4. Also his article “Le postulat fusionnel,” \emph{Information psychiatrique}, September 1969.}


We can understand how such a concept as foreclosure operates within this
extensive framework of a family where several generations—at least
three—form the condition of fabrication of a psychotic: as for example
when the troubles a mother has with regard to her own father lead to the
son’s inability, in turn, to even “posit his desire” toward his mother.
Whence the strange notion that if a psychotic escapes the Oedipal
apparatus, this is solely due to the fact that he is doubly embedded
there, to the second power, in a field of extension that includes the
grandparents. The problem of the cure then becomes rather similar to an
operation of differential calculus, where one proceeds by way of
depotentialization in order to rediscover the primary functions and
reestablish the characteristic or nuclear triangle—always a holy
trinity, the means of access to a three-sided situation. It is clear
that this extended familialism, wherein the family receives the very
forces of alienation and disalienation, carries with it a renunciation
of the fundamental positions of psychoanalysis concerning sexuality,
despite the formal conservation of an analytic vocabulary. A veritable
regression in favor of a taxonomy of families. This is clearly visible
in the projects of community psychiatry or of so-called familial
psychotherapy, which effectively break apart asylum existence while
nonetheless still maintaining all the presuppositions of the asylum, and
basically renewing the thrust of nineteenth-century psychiatry according
to the slogan put forward by Hochman: “From the family to the
institution of the hospital, from the institution of the hospital to the
familial institution,\dots{} a therapeutic return to the family”!


But even within the progressive or revolutionary sectors of
institutional analysis on the one hand, and antipsychiatry on the other,
the danger of this familialism in extension is ever present, conforming
to the double impasse of an extended Oedipus, just as much in the
diagnostic of pathogenic families in themselves as in the constitution
of therapeutic quasi families. Once it has been said that it is no
longer a matter of re-forming cadres of familial and social adaptation
or integration, but rather of instituting original forms of active
groups, the question arises as to what extent these core groups resemble
artificial families, and to what extent they still lend themselves to
oedipalization. These questions have been analyzed in depth by Jean
Oury. They demonstrate how revolutionary psychiatry broke in vain with
the ideals of community adaptation, with everything that Maud Mannoni
calls the adaptation police force, since at every moment it still risks
being thrust back into the framework of a structural Oedipus whose
deficiencies are diagnosed but whose integrity is restored; a holy
trinity that continues to strangle desiring-production and suffocate its
problems. The political, cultural, world-historical, and racial content
is left behind, crushed in the Oedipal treadmill. This is because
psychiatrists persist in treating the family as a matrix, or better
still as a microcosm, an \emph{expressive} milieu that provides its own
justifications, and that—however capable of expressing the action of the
alienating forces\footnote{* \emph{des forces alienantes}: The French word \emph{aliénation} means both social alienation and what we English-speakers call “mental derangement.” Obviously, the authors aim at discrediting the distinction between the two terms. (\emph{Translators’ note.})}—“mediates” them precisely by suppressing the true
categories of \emph{production} in the machines of desire.


It seems to us that such a viewpoint is present even in Cooper. (In this
respect Laing is better able to disengage himself from familialism,
thanks to the resources of a flux from the Orient.) Cooper writes:
“Families mediate social reality to their children. If the social
reality in question is rife with alienated social forms, then this
alienation will be mediated to the individual child and will be
experienced as estrangement in the family relationships \dots{} for example he
may say that his mind is controlled by an electrical machine or by men
from outer space. These constructions, however, are largely embodiments
of the family process, which has the illusion of substantiality but
which is none other than the alienated form of the action of praxis of
the family members that literally dominates the mind of the psychotic
member. \emph{These metaphysical men from outer space} are the literal
mother, father, and sibling who sit around the breakfast table with the
so-called psychotic patient.”\footnote{David Cooper, \emph{Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry} (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), p. 44 (emphasis added).} Even the essential hypothesis of
antipsychiatry, which ultimately posits an identity in nature between
social alienation and mental alienation, must be understood in terms of
a maintained familialism, and not in terms of a refutation of this
familialism. For it is to the extent that the family-microcosm, the
family-social-indicator, expresses social alienation that it is believed
to “organize” mental alienation in the mind of its own members or its
psychotic member. (And among all the members, who is the real
psychotic?)


With his general conception of microcosm-macrocosm relationships,
Bergson brought about a discreet revolution that deserves further
consideration. Likening the living to a microcosm is an ancient
platitude. But if the living organism was thought to be similar to the
world, this was attributed to the fact that it was or tended to be an
isolated system, naturally closed: the comparison between microcosm and
macrocosm was thus a comparison between two closed figures, one of which
expressed the other and was inscribed within the other. At the beginning
of \emph{Creative Evolution}, Bergson completely alters the scope of the
comparison by opening up both ends. If the living being resembles the
world, this is true, on the contrary, insofar as it opens itself to the
opening of the world; if it is a whole, this is true to the extent that
the whole, of the world as of the living being, is always in the process
of becoming, developing, coming into being or advancing, and inscribing
itself within a temporal dimension that is irreducible and nonclosed.


We believe that this is also true in the case of the family-society
relationship. There is no Oedipal triangle: Oedipus is always open in an
open social field. Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners
of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+\emph{n}). A poorly closed triangle,
a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the flows
of desire escape in the direction of other territories. It is strange
that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see
that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with the
missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self
was being beaten by a white man. It is precisely this pairing of the
parental figures with agents of another nature, their locking embrace
similar to that of wrestlers, that keeps the triangle from closing up
again, from being valid in itself, and from claiming to express or
represent this different nature of the agents that are in question in
the unconscious itself. When Frantz Fanon encounters a case of
persecution psychosis linked to the death of the mother, he first asks
himself if he has “to deal with an unconscious guilt complex following
on the death of the mother, as Freud had described in \emph{Mourning and
Melancholia}.” But he soon learns that the mother has been killed by a
French soldier, and that the subject himself has murdered the wife of a
colonist whose disemboweled ghost perpetually appears before him,
carrying along with it and tearing apart the memory of the mother.\footnote{Frantz Fanon, \emph{The Wretched of the Earth}, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 262.}
It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of
colonization, of dire poverty, and so on, are unfavorable to the
construction of the Oedipal apparatus—and that it is precisely because
of this that these situations favor a psychotic development or
explosion—but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere.
Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the
bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized
subjects, the question of knowing \emph{what is actually invested} in the
comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is
pushed still further into the background.


The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: “Oedipus? Never
heard of it.” For the disjointed fragments of Oedipus remain stuck to
all the corners of the historical social field, as a battlefield and not
a scene from bourgeois theater. Too bad if the psychoanalysts roar their
disapproval at this point. Fanon pointed out that troubled
times had unconscious effects
not only on the active militants, but also on those claiming to be
neutral and to remain outside the affair, uninvolved in politics. The
same could also be said with respect to apparently peaceful times: what
a grotesque error to think that the unconscious-as-child is acquainted
only with daddy-mommy, and that it doesn’t know “in its own way” that
its father has a boss who is not a father’s father, or moreover that its
father himself is a boss who is not a father. Therefore we formulate the
following rule, which we feel to be applicable in all cases: the father
and the mother exist only as fragments, and are never organized into a
figure or a structure able both to represent the unconscious, and to
represent in it the various agents of the collectivity; rather, they
always shatter into fragments that come into contact with these agents,
meet them face to face, square off with them, or settle the differences
with them as in hand-to-hand combat.


The father, the mother, and the self are at grips with, and directly
coupled to, the elements of the political and historical situation—the
soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the
resister, the boss, the boss’s wife—who constantly break all
triangulations, and who prevent the entire situation from falling back
on the familial complex and becoming internalized in it. In a word, the
family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even
when inscribed in a larger circle that it is said to mediate and
express. The family is by nature eccentric, decentered. We are told of
fusional, divisive, tubular, and foreclosing families. But what produces
the hiatuses (\emph{coupures}) and their distribution that indeed keep the
family from being an “interior”? There is always an uncle from America;
a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man; a
cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of the Crash; an anarchist
grandfather; a grandmother in the hospital, crazy or senile. The family
does not engender its own ruptures. Families are filled with gaps and
transected by breaks that are not familial: the Commune, the Dreyfus
Affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of
fascism, Stalinism, the Vietnam war, May ’68—all these things form
complexes of the unconscious, more effective than everlasting Oedipus.
And the unconscious is indeed at issue here. If in fact there are
structures, they do not exist in the mind, in the shadow of a fantastic
phallus distributing the lacunae, the passages, and the articulations.
Structures exist in the immediate impossible real. As Witold Grombrowicz
says, the structuralists “search for their structures in culture. As for
myself, I look for them in the immediate reality. My way of seeing
things was in direct relationship to the events of the times: Hitlerism,
Stalinism, fascism\dots{}. I was fascinated by the grotesque and terrifying
forms that surfaced in the sphere of the interhuman, destroying all that
was held dear until then.”\footnote{Witold Grombrowicz, \emph{L’Herne}, no. 14, p. 230.}


Hellenists were right to remind us that, even in the case of worthy
Oedipus, it was already a matter of “politics.” They are simply wrong in
concluding from this that the libido has nothing to do with any of it.
Quite the contrary: what is invested by the libido throughout the
disjoined elements of Oedipus—especially given the fact that these
elements never form a mental structure that is autonomous and
expressive—are these extrafamilial, subfamilial gaps and breaks
(\emph{coupures}), \emph{these forms of social production in conjunction with
desiring-production}. Schizoanalysis therefore does not hide the fact
that it is a political and social psychoanalysis, a militant analysis:
not because it would go about generalizing Oedipus in culture, under the
ridiculous conditions that have been the norm until now. It is a
militant analysis, on the contrary, because it proposes to demonstrate
the existence of an unconscious libidinal investment of sociohistorical
production, distinct from the conscious investments coexisting with it.
Proust is not wrong in saying that, far from being the author of an
“intimate” work, he goes further than the proponents of a populist or
proletarian art who are content to describe the social and the political
in “willfully” expressive works. For his part, he is interested in the
manner in which the Dreyfus Affair and then World War I cut across
families, introducing into them new breaks and new connections resulting
in a modification of the heterosexual and homosexual libido (in the
decomposed milieu of the Guermantes, for example).


It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in
unconscious forms, thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in
delirium entire civilizations, races, and continents, and intensely
“feeling” the becoming of the world. There is no signifying chain
without a Chinaman, an Arab, and a black who drop in to trouble the
night of a white paranoiac. Schizoanalysis sets out to undo the
expressive Oedipal unconscious, always artificial, repressive and
repressed, mediated by the family, in order to attain the immediate
productive unconscious. Yes, the family is a \emph{stimulus}—but a stimulus
that is qualitatively indifferent, an inductor that is neither an
organizer nor a disorganizer. As for the \emph{response}, it always comes
from another direction. If there is indeed language (\emph{langage}), it is
on the side of the response, not the stimulus. Even Oedipal
psychoanalysis recognized the indifference of the effective parental
images, the irreducibility of the response to the stimulation performed
by these images. But it contented itself with understanding the response
by starting from an expressive symbolism that was still familial,
instead of interpreting it in an unconscious system of production as
such (analytical economy).


The great argument of familialism is: “at least in the beginning\dots{}” This
argument may be explicitly formulated, but it also persists implicitly
in theories that nevertheless refuse the viewpoint of genesis. \emph{At least
in the beginning}, this argument runs, the unconscious is expressed in a
state of familial relations and constellations where the Real, the
Imaginary, and the Symbolic intermingle. In this conception, the
metaphysical and social relations arise \emph{afterward}, in the manner of a
beyond. And since the beginning always proceeds by twos—this is even the
necessary condition for rendering escape impossible—a first pre-oedipal
beginning is invoked, “the primitive nondifferentiation of the most
precocious stages of the personality” in the relationship with the
mother; then a second beginning is invoked; Oedipus itself with the law
of the father and the exclusive differentiations that this law
prescribes at the heart of the family; and finally latency, the
celebrated latency, \emph{after} which the beyond begins. But since this
beyond consists in duping others into taking the same path (the children
to come), and also since the first beginning is said to be “pre-oedipal”
only to indicate that it already belongs to Oedipus as a referential
axis, it is quite clear that the two ends of Oedipus have simply been
closed, and that the beyond and the afterward will always be interpreted
in terms of Oedipus, in relation to Oedipus, within the framework of
Oedipus. Everything will be reduced to Oedipus, as the discussions on
the comparative role of childhood factors and actual factors in neurosis
bear out: how could it be otherwise, so long as the “actual” factor is
conceived of in this form of the afterward?


But we know in point of fact that the actual factors are there from
childhood, and that they determine the libidinal investments in terms of
breaks and connections that they introduce into the family. Over the
heads of the members of the family, and underneath, it is
desiring-production and social production that manifest, through the
childhood experience, their identical natures and their differing
régimes. In this regard let us consider three important works about
children: \emph{L’Enfant} by Jules Valles, \emph{Bas les coeurs} by Georges
Darien, \emph{Mort à crédit} by L.-F. Céline. In them we see how bread,
money, dwelling place, social promotion, bourgeois and revolutionary
values, wealth and poverty, oppression and revolt, social classes,
political events, metaphysical and collective problems—what does it mean
to be able to breathe? why be poor? why are there rich people?—form the
object of investments in which the parents merely have a role as agents
of a special production or antiproduction, always grappling with other
agents that they express all the less as they are increasingly at grips
with them in the heaven and hell of the child. And the child says: Why?
Freud’s Rat Man does not wait until he is a man to invest the rich woman
and the poor woman who constitute the actual factor of his obsession.
For inadmissible reasons, the existence of an infantile sexuality is
denied; but for hardly more admissible reasons, this sexuality is
reduced to desiring mommy and wanting the place of the father. The
Freudian blackmail is this: either you recognize the Oedipal character
of infantile sexuality, or you abandon all positions of sexuality.


And yet, not even in the shadow of a transcendent phallus are the
unconscious effects of a “signified” established throughout the
determinations of a social field; on the contrary, it is the libidinal
investment of these determinations that situates their particular use in
desiring-production, and the comparative operation of this production
with social production, whence derive the state of desire and its
repression, the distribution of the agents, and the degree of
oedipalization of sexuality. Lacan explains well how, in terms of the
crises and the ruptures (\emph{coupures}) within science, there is a drama
for the scientist that at times goes as far as madness, and that “would
have no way of including itself in the Oedipal apparatus, unless by
calling it into question” by way of a consequence.\footnote{Lacan, \emph{Ecrits}, p. 870. With regard to the specific role of the rich woman and the poor woman in the Rat Man case, the reader may refer to the analyses of Lacan in “Le mythe individuel du névrosé,” \emph{C.D.U.}, not included in the \emph{Ecrits}.} In this sense
every child is a little scientist, a little Cantor.\footnote{* Georg Cantor (1845–1918), a German mathematician known for his theory of transfinite numbers (\emph{Translators’ note.})} Go back through
the course of the ages, you will never find a child caught in a familial
order that is autonomous, expressive, or signifying. Even the nursing
child, in his games as in his feedings, his chains, and his meditations,
is already caught up in an immediate desiring-production where the
parents play the role of partial objects, witnesses, reporters, and
agents, in a process that outflanks them on all sides, and places desire
in an immediate relationship with a historical and social reality. It is
true that nothing is pre-oedipal, and that we must take Oedipus back to
the earliest age, but within the order of a repression of the
unconscious. It is equally true that everything within the order of
production is anoedipal, and that there are non-oedipal, anoedipal
currents that begin as early as Oedipus and continue just as long, with
another rhythm, in a different mode of operation, in another dimension,
with other uses of syntheses that feed the autoproduction of the
unconscious—the unconscious-as-orphan, the playful unconscious, the
meditative and social unconscious.


The Oedipal operation consists in establishing a constellation of
biunivocal relations between the agents of social production,
reproduction, and antiproduction on the one hand, and the agents of the
so-called natural reproduction of the family on the other. This
operation is called an \emph{application}. It is as if a tablecloth were
being folded, as if its 4 (+\emph{n}) corners were reduced to 3 (+1, to
designate the transcendent factor performing the operation). From that
moment it is a foregone conclusion that the collective agents will be
interpreted as derivatives of, or substitutes for, parental figures, in
a system of equivalence that rediscovers everywhere the father, the
mother, and the ego. (And one merely pushes the difficulty into the
background when one considers the system as a whole and then makes it
depend on the transcendent term, the phallus). There we have a faulty
use of the conjunctive synthesis, leading to the statement, “So it was
your father, so it was your mother\dots{}” It is not at all surprising that
only afterward is it discovered that all of this was the father and the
mother, since this is assumed to be the case from the beginning, but is
subsequently forgotten-repressed, though still subject to a later
rediscovery in relation to more recent developments.\footnote{* Perhaps the reader would enjoy this parody of psychoanalytic logic in the authors’ French: “Et qu’on découvre seulement par après que tout ça c’était le père et la mère, n’a rien d’étonnant, puisqu’on suppose que ça l’est dès le début, mais que c’est ensuite oublié-refoulé, quitte à le retrouver après par rapport à l’ensuite.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} Whence the
magical formula that characterizes biunivocalization—the flattening of
the polyvocal real in favor of a symbolic relationship between two
articulations: so \emph{that} is what \emph{this} meant. Everything is made to
begin with Oedipus, by means of explanation, with all the more certainty
as one has reduced everything to Oedipus by means of application.


Only in appearance is Oedipus a beginning, either as a historical or
prehistorical origin, or as a structural foundation. In reality it is a
completely ideological beginning, for the sake of ideology. Oedipus is
always and solely an aggregate of destination fabricated to meet the
requirements of an aggregate of departure constituted by a social
formation. It can be applied to everything, in that the agents and
relations of social production, and the libidinal investments
corresponding to them, are made to conform to the figures of familial
reproduction. In the aggregate of departure there is the social
formation, or rather the social formations: the races, the classes, the
continents, the peoples, the kingdoms, the sovereignties; Joan of Arc
and the Great Mongol, Luther and the Aztec Serpent. In the aggregate of
destination, there remains only daddy, mommy, and me.


Thus it must be said \emph{of Oedipus as well as of desiring-production}: it
is at the end, not at the beginning. But not at all in the same fashion.
We have seen that desiring-production was the limit of social
production, always thwarted in the capitalist formation: the body
without organs at the edge of the deterritorialized socius, the desert
at the gates of the city. But it is urgent, it is essential that the
limit be displaced, rendered inoffensive, and that it pass or seem to
pass into the social formation itself. Schizophrenia or
desiring-production is the boundary between the molar organization and
the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization
must now pass into the interior of the molar organization, and it must
be applied to a factitious and subjugated territoriality. We are now
able to surmise what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it
internalizes the limit. Rather a society of neurotics than one
successful schizophrenic who has not been made autistic. Oedipus, the
incomparable instrument of gregariousness, is the ultimate private and
subjugated territoriality of European man. (Moreover the displaced,
exorcised limit or border shifts to the interior of Oedipus, between its
two poles.)


One word here on the disgrace of psychoanalysis in history and politics.
The procedure is well known: two figures are made to appear, the Great
Man and the Crowd. One then claims to make history with these two
entities, these two puppets, the Great Crustacean and the Crazy
Invertebrate. Oedipus is placed at the beginning. On the one side there
is the great man defined oedipally: so he killed the father, in a murder
without end, either to annihilate him and identify with the mother, or
to internalize him, to take his place or reach a reconciliation (with a
host of variations in detail that correspond to neurotic, psychotic,
perverse, or “normal” solutions, that is to say solutions of
sublimation). In any case the great man is already great because, for
good or for evil, he has found a certain original solution to the
Oedipal conflict. Hitler annihilates the father and unleashes in him the
forces of the Bad Mother; Luther internalizes the father and reaches a
compromise with the superego. On the other side there is the crowd, also
defined oedipally, by means of parental images of a second order, this
time collective; the encounter can therefore take place between Luther
and the sixteenth-century Christians, or between Hitler and the German
people, with corresponding elements that do not necessarily imply
identity: Hitler plays the role of father through “homosexual
transfusion” and in relation to the female crowd; Luther plays the role
of woman in relation to the God of the Christians. Naturally, to ensure
against the historian’s justified anger, the psychoanalyst specifies
that he is concerned only with a certain causal order, that one must
take “other” causes into account, but that he alone cannot do
everything. Besides, he deals just enough with other causes so as to
give us a foretaste: he takes into account the institutions of a
particular period (from the sixteenth-century Church to
twentieth-century capitalist power), if only to see in them parental
images of yet another order, associating the father and the mother, who
will then be dissociated and otherwise regrouped within the action of
the great man and the crowd. It hardly matters whether the tone of these
books is orthodox Freudian, culturalist, or Jungian.


Books like those are nauseating. Let’s not dismiss them by saying that
they belong to the distant past of psychoanalysis: similar books—a lot
of them—are still written today. Let’s not say that it is merely a
question of a careless use of Oedipus: what other use could be made of
Oedipus? Nor is it a case of an ambiguous dimension of “applied
psychoanalysis”; for all Oedipus—Oedipus in and of itself—is already an
application, in the strictest sense of the word. And when the best
psychoanalysts forbid themselves historico-political applications, we
can’t say things are much better, since the analysts \emph{retreat} to the
rock of castration presented as the locus of an “untenable truth” that
is irreducible: they closet themselves in a phallocentrism that leads
them to think of the analytic activity as always having to evolve within
a familial microcosm, and they continue to treat the libido’s direct
investments of the social field as simple imaginary dependencies on
Oedipus, where it becomes necessary to denounce “a fusional dream,” “a
fantasy of a-return-to-Oneness.” “Castration,” they say, “is what
separates us from politics, is what makes for our originality as
analysts—we who do not forget that society too is triangular and
symbolic!”


If it is true that Oedipus is obtained by reduction or application, it
presupposes in itself a certain kind of libidinal investment of the
social field, of the production and the formation of this field. There
is no more an individual Oedipus than there is an individual fantasy.
Oedipus is a means of integration into the group, in both the adaptive
form of its own reproduction that makes it pass from one generation to
the next, and in its unadapted neurotic stases that block desire at
prearranged impasses. Oedipus also flourishes in subjugated groups,
where an established order is invested through the group’s own
repressive forms. And it is not the forms of the subjugated group that
depend on Oedipal projections and identifications, but the reverse: it
is Oedipal applications that depend on the determinations of the
subjugated group as an aggregate of departure and on their libidinal
investment (from the age of thirteen I’ve worked hard, rising on the
social ladder, getting promotions, being a part of the exploiters).
There is therefore a \emph{segregative use} of the conjunctive syntheses of
the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions between
classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a
dominating class: it is this use that brings about the feeling of
“indeed being one of us,” of being part of a superior race threatened by
enemies from outside. Thus the Little White pioneers’ son, the Irish
Protestant who commemorates the victory of his ancestors, the fascist
who belongs to the master race.


Oedipus depends on this sort of nationalistic, religious, racist
sentiment, and not the reverse: it is not the father who is projected
onto the boss, but the boss who is applied to the father, either in
order to tell us “you will not surpass your father,” or “you will
surpass him to find our forefathers.” Lacan has demonstrated in a
profound way the link between Oedipus and segregation. Not, however, in
the sense where segregation would be a consequence of Oedipus, subjacent
to the fraternity of the brothers once the father is dead. On the
contrary, the segregative use is a precondition of Oedipus, to the
extent that the social field is not reduced to the familial tie except
by presupposing an enormous archaism, an incarnation of the race in
person or in spirit: yes, I am one of you.


It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal
investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily
coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the
preconscious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects,
individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class
interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that
their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not
enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not
an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being
subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, \emph{and desire is part
of the infrastructure}. Preconscious investments are made, or should be
made, according to the interests of the opposing classes. But
unconscious investments are made according to positions of \emph{desire} and
uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject,
individual or collective, who desires.


These investments of an unconscious nature can ensure the general
submission to a dominant class by making cuts (\emph{coupures}) and
segregations pass over into a social field, insofar as it is effectively
invested by desire and no longer by interests. A form of social
production and reproduction, along with its economic and financial
mechanisms, its political formations, and so on, can be desired as such,
in whole or in part, independently of the interests of the
desiring-subject. It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal
metaphor, that Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists. It is
not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a
claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not
necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows,
money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic “complexes” that
are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a
voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the
military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus
have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than
being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in
and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows
and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or
slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.


Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of the
libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby
to show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire
its own repression—whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit
connecting desire to the social sphere. All this happens, not in
ideology, but well beneath it. An unconscious investment of a fascist or
reactionary type can exist alongside a conscious revolutionary
investment. Inversely, it can happen—rarely—that a revolutionary
investment on the level of desire coexists with a reactionary investment
conforming to a conscious interest. In any case conscious and
unconscious investments are not of the same type, even when they
coincide or are superimposed on each other. We define the reactionary
unconscious investment as the investment that conforms to the interest
of the dominant class, but operates on its own account, according to the
terms of desire, through the segregative use of the conjunctive
syntheses from which Oedipus is derived: I am of the superior race. The
revolutionary unconscious investment is such that desire, still in its
own mode, cuts across the interest of the dominated, exploited classes,
and causes flows to move that are capable of breaking apart both the
segregations and their Oedipal applications—flows capable of
hallucinating history, of reanimating the races in delirium, of setting
continents ablaze. No, I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the
deterritorialized, “I am of a race inferior for all eternity\dots{}. I am a
beast, a Negro.”\footnote{Rimbaud, \emph{Une Saison en Enfer}.}


There again it is a question of an intense potential for investment and
counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its
very conditions have disintegrated. \emph{The nomadic and polyvocal use} of
the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to \emph{the segregative and
biunivocal use}. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and
racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two,
ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself
oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary
potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he
breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts
of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in
ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the
thread. For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of
what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a
signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a
montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the
text its revolutionary force. The exclamation “So it’s\dots{}!”, or the
meditation of \emph{Igitur} on race, in an essential relationship with
madness.

\section{6. A Recapitulation of the Three Syntheses}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-6}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-6}%


Stupefying Oedipus, inexhaustible and ever present. We are told that the
father died “over a period of thousands of years” (well, well!) and that
the “internalization” corresponding to the paternal image was produced
during the Paleolithic right up until the start of the Neolithic,
“approximately 8,000 years ago.”\footnote{Gérard Mendel, \emph{La révolte contre le père} (Paris: Payot, 1968), p. 422.} One analyzes historically or one
doesn’t. But honestly, as to the death of the father, news doesn’t
travel very fast: it would be a mistake to embark Nietzsche on that
particular voyage through history. For Nietzsche is not the kind to
ruminate over the death of the father, and spend all his Paleolithic
period internalizing him. On the contrary, Nietzsche is exceedingly
tired of all these stories revolving around the death of the father, the
death of God, and wants to put an end to the interminable discourses of
this nature, discourses already in vogue in his Hegelian epoch. Alas, he
was wrong, the discourses have continued. But Nietzsche wanted us
finally to pass on to serious things. He gives us twelve or thirteen
versions of the death of God, for good measure and to be done with it,
so as to render the event comical. And he explains that strictly
speaking this event has no importance whatever, that it merely concerns
the latest Pope: God dead or not dead, the father dead or not dead, it
amounts to the same thing, since the same psychic repression
(\emph{refoulement}) and the same social repression (\emph{répression}) continue
unabated, here in the name of God or a living father, there in the name
of man or the dead father.


Nietzsche says that what is important is not the news that God is dead,
but the time this news takes to bear fruit. Here the psychoanalyst perks
up his ears, believing he has heard a familiar chord: it is well known
that the unconscious takes a lot of time to digest a bit of news; one
can even quote some texts of Freud on the unconscious being ignorant of
time, conserving its objects like an Egyptian tomb. But that is not at
all what Nietzsche is saying: he does not mean that the death of God
spends a long time plodding around in the unconscious. He means that
what takes so long in coming \emph{to consciousness} is the news that the
death of God makes no difference to \emph{the unconscious}. The fruits of
this news are not the consequences brought about by the death of God,
but this other news that the death of God is of no consequence. In other
terms: that God and the father never existed (or if they did, it was so
long ago, perhaps during the Paleolithic). All they did was kill a dead
man, from time immemorial. The fruits of the news of the death of God do
away with the flower of His death as well as the bud of His life. For,
alive or dead, it is still a question of belief: the element of belief
has not been abandoned. The announcement of the father’s death
constitutes a last belief, “a belief by virtue of nonbelief” about which
Nietzsche says: “This violence always manifests the need for a belief,
for a prop, for a \emph{structure}.” Oedipus-as-structure.


Engels paid homage to the genius of Bachofen, for having recognized in
myth the figures of a maternal and a paternal law, their struggles and
their relationships. But Engels slips in a reproach that changes
everything: it really seems as if Bachofen believes all this, that he
believes in myths, in the Furies, Apollo, and Athena.\footnote{Friedrich Engels, \emph{The Origin of the Family} (New York: International Publishers, 1942), preface, p. 10.} The same
reproach applies even better to psychoanalysts: it would seem that they
believe in all of this—in myth, in Oedipus and castration. They reply:
the question is not one of knowing whether we believe in this, but
whether or not the unconscious itself believes in it. But what is this
unconscious when reduced to the state of belief? Who injects it with
belief? Psychoanalysis cannot become a rigorous discipline unless it
accepts putting belief in parentheses, which is to say a \emph{materialist
reduction} of Oedipus as an ideological form. It is not a matter of
saying that Oedipus is a false belief, but rather that belief is
necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective
production. That is why seers are the least believing of men. When we
relate desire to Oedipus, we are condemned to ignore the productive
nature of desire: we condemn desire to vague dreams or imaginations that
are merely conscious expressions of it; we relate it to independent
existences—the father, the mother, the begetters—that do not yet
comprise their elements as internal elements of desire. The question of
the father is like that of God: born of an abstraction, it assumes the
link to be already broken between man and nature, man and the world, so
that man must be produced as man by something exterior to nature and to
man. On this point Nietzsche makes a remark completely akin to those of
Marx or Engels: “We now laugh when we find ‘Man \emph{and} World’ placed
beside one another, separated by the sublime presumption of the little
word ‘and.’”\footnote{Friedrich Nietzsche, \emph{Joyful Wisdom}, V, § 346. See also Marx, \emph{Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844}, pp. 144–46.}


Coextensiveness is another matter entirely, the coextension of man and
nature; a circular movement by which the unconscious, always remaining
subject, produces and reproduces itself. The unconscious does not follow
the paths of a generation progressing (or regressing) from one body to
another: your father, your father’s father, and so on. The organized
body is the object of reproduction by generation; it is not its subject.
The sole subject of reproduction is the unconscious itself, which holds
to the circular form of production. Sexuality is not a means in the
service of generation; rather, the generation of bodies is in the
service of sexuality as an autoproduction of the unconscious. Sexuality
does not represent a premium for the ego, in exchange for its
subordination to the process of generation; on the contrary, generation
is the ego’s solace, its prolongation, the passage from one body to
another through which the unconscious does no more than reproduce itself
in itself. Indeed, in this sense we must say the unconscious has always
been an orphan—that is, it has engendered itself in the identity of
nature and man, of the world and man. The question of the father, the
question of God, is what has become impossible, a matter of
indifference, so true is it that to affirm or deny such a being amounts
to the same thing, or to live it or kill it: one and the same
misconception (\emph{contresens}) concerning the nature of the unconscious.


But psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say
ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this
fashion, and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite
progression and regression: your father, and your father’s father, a
snowball gathering speed as it moves from Oedipus all the way to the
father of the primal horde, to God and the Paleolithic age. It is
Oedipus who makes us man, for better or for worse, say those who would
make fools of us all. The tone may vary, but the message remains
basically the same: you will not escape Oedipus, your sole choice is
between the “neurotic outlet” and the “nonneurotic outlet.” The tone may
be that of the scandalized psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst-as-cop:
those who do not bow to the imperialism of Oedipus are dangerous
deviants, leftists who ought to be handed over to social and police
repression; they talk too much and are lacking in anality (Dr. Gérard
Mendel, Doctors Stéphane). What kind of disquieting play on words is it
that can make the analyst a promoter of anality? Or there is the
psychoanalyst-as-priest, the pious psychoanalyst who is forever chanting
the incurable insufficiency of being: don’t you see that Oedipus saves
us from Oedipus, it is our agony but also our ecstasy, depending on
whether we live it neurotically or live its structure; it is the mother
of the holy faith (J. M. Pohier). Or the technopsychoanalyst, the reform
psychoanalyst obsessed with the triangle, who wraps the splendid gifts
of civilization in Oedipus—identity, manic-depression, and liberty in an
infinite progression: “Through Oedipus the individual learns to live the
triangular situation, the token of his identity, and at the same time he
discovers—sometimes in a depressive mode, sometimes in a mode of
exaltation—his fundamental alienation, his irremediable solitude, the
price of his liberty. The basic structure of the Oedipal apparatus must
not only be generalized in time so as to account for all the triangular
experiences of the child and his parents, it must be generalized in
space to include those triangular relations other than the parent-child
relations.”\footnote{Hochmann, \emph{Pour une psychiatrie communautaire}, p. 38.}


The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The
question posed by desire is not “What does it mean?” but rather “\emph{How
does it work?}” How do these machines, these desiring-machines,
work—yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their
functioning? How do they pass from one body to another? How are they
attached to the body without organs? What occurs when their mode of
operation confronts the social machines? A tractable gear is greased, or
on the contrary an infernal machine is made ready. What are the
connections, what are the disjunctions, the conjunctions, what use is
made of the syntheses? It represents nothing, but it produces. It means
nothing, but it works. Desire makes its entry with the general collapse
of the question “What does it mean?” No one has been able to pose the
problem of language except to the extent that linguists and logicians
have first eliminated meaning; and the greatest force of language was
only discovered once a \emph{work} was viewed as a machine, producing certain
effects, amenable to a certain use. Malcolm Lowry says of his work: it’s
anything you want it to be, so long as it works—“It works too, believe
me, as I have found out”—a machinery.\footnote{\emph{Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry}, ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1965), p. 66.} But on condition that meaning
be nothing other than use, that it become a firm principle only if we
have at our disposal \emph{immanent criteria} capable of determining the
legitimate uses, as opposed to the illegitimate ones that relate use
instead to a hypothetical meaning and re-establish a kind of
transcendence.


Analysis termed transcendental is precisely the determination of these
criteria, immanent to the field of the unconscious, insofar as they are
**opposed* to the transcendent exercises of a “What does it mean?”
Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis.
It is critical in the sense that it leads the criticism of Oedipus, or
leads Oedipus, to the point of its own self-criticism. It sets out to
explore a transcendental unconscious, rather than a metaphysical one; an
unconscious that is material rather than ideological; schizophrenic
rather than Oedipal; nonfigurative rather than imaginary; real rather
than symbolic; machinic rather than structural—an unconscious, finally,
that is molecular, microphysical, and micrological rather than molar or
gregarious; productive rather than expressive. And it is a matter here
of practical principles as directions for the “cure.”


Thus we have already seen how the immanent criteria of
desiring-production permitted a definition of legitimate uses of
syntheses, uses completely distinct from Oedipal uses. And in relation
to this desiring-production, the Oedipal illegitimate uses seemed to us
to be multiform, but always to revolve around the same error, and to
envelop theoretical and practical paralogisms. In the first place, a
partial and nonspecific use of the connective syntheses was found to be
in opposition to the Oedipal use, itself global and specific. This
global-specific use was found to have two aspects, parental and
conjugal, to which the triangular form of Oedipus and the reproduction
of this form corresponded. This use rested upon a paralogism of
extrapolation that in fact constituted Oedipus’s formal cause—an
extrapolation whose illegitimate nature weighed on the whole operation:
the extraction of a transcendent complete object from the signifying
chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the entire chain
thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each
position of desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion
that this loosened up and freed the elements of the chain.


In the second place, an inclusive or nonrestrictive use of the
disjunctive syntheses is in opposition to their Oedipal, exclusive,
restrictive use. This restrictive use in its turn has two poles,
imaginary and symbolic, since the only choice it permits is between the
exclusive symbolic differentiations and the undifferentiated Imaginary,
correlatively determined by Oedipus. This use demonstrates this time how
Oedipus proceeds, it demonstrates Oedipus’s method: a paralogism of the
double bind, the double impasse. (Or, in line with a suggestion made by
Henri Gobard, would it be better to translate this as “double hold,”
like a full nelson hold in wrestling, so as to better describe the
treatment forced on the unconscious when it is bound at both ends,
leaving it no other choice than to respond Oedipus, to cry Oedipus, in
sickness as in health, in its crises as in their outcome, in its
resolution as in its problem. In any case, the double bind is not the
schizophrenic process; on the contrary, the double bind is Oedipus
insofar as it arrests the motion of the process, or forces it to spin
around in the void.)


In the third place, a nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive
syntheses is opposed to the segregative and biunivocal use made of them.
There again this biunivocal use, illegitimate from the point of view of
the unconscious itself, has what appear to be two moments: first, a
moment that is racist, nationalistic, religious, etc., and that, by
means of a segregation, constitutes an aggregate of departure that is
always presupposed by Oedipus, even if in a totally implicit fashion;
next, a familial moment that constitutes the aggregate of destination by
means of an application. Whence the third paralogism, the paralogism of
application, which fixes the precondition for Oedipus by establishing a
set of biunivocal relations between the determinations of the social
field and the familial determinations, thereby making possible and
inevitable the reduction of libidinal investments to the eternal
daddy-mommy. We still have not exhausted all the paralogisms that lead
the practice of the cure in the direction of a frenzied oedipalization,
a betrayal of desire, the unconscious closeted in a day nursery, a
narcissistic machine for arrogant and mouthy little egos, a perpetual
absorption of capitalist surplus value, flows of words against flows of
money, the interminable story—psychoanalysis.


The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier.
It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception
of the unconscious. And it is futile to interpret these notions in terms
of a combinative apparatus (\emph{une combinatoire}) that makes of lack an
empty position and no longer a deprivation, that turns the law into a
rule of the game and no longer a commandment, and the signifier into a
distributor and no longer a meaning, for these notions cannot be
prevented from dragging their theological cortege behind—insufficiency
of being, guilt, signification. Structural interpretation challenges all
beliefs, rises above all images, and from the realm of the mother and
the father retains only functions, defines \emph{the prohibition and the
transgression} as structural operations. But what water will cleanse
these concepts of their background, their previous
existences—religiosity? Scientific knowledge as nonbelief is truly the
last refuge of belief, and as Nietzsche put it, there never was but one
psychology, that of the priest.


From the moment lack is reintroduced into desire, all of
desiring-production is crushed, reduced to being no more than the
production of fantasy; but the sign does not produce fantasies, it is a
production of the real and a position of desire within reality. From the
moment desire is welded again to the law—we needn’t point out what is
known since time began: that there is no desire without law—the eternal
operation of eternal repression recommences, the operation that closes
around the unconscious the circle of prohibition and transgression,
white mass and black mass; but the sign of desire is never a sign of the
law, it is a sign of strength (\emph{puissance}). And who would dare use the
term “law” for the fact that desire situates and develops its strength,
and that wherever it is, it causes flows to move and substances to be
intersected (“I am careful not to speak of chemical laws, the word has a
moral aftertaste”)? From the moment desire is made to depend on the
signifier, it is put back under the yoke of a despotism whose effect is
castration, there where one recognizes the stroke of the signifier
itself; but the sign of desire is never signifying, it exists in the
thousands of productive breaks-flows that never allow themselves to be
signified within the unary stroke of castration. It is always a
point-sign of many dimensions, polyvocity as the basis for a punctual
semiology.


It is said that the unconscious is dark and somber. Reich and Marcuse
are often reproached for their “Rousseauism,” their naturalism: a
conception of the unconscious that is thought to be too idyllic. But
doesn’t one indeed lend to the unconscious horrors that could only be
those of consciousness, and of a belief too sure of itself? Would it be
an exaggeration to say that in the unconscious there is necessarily less
cruelty and terror, and of a different type, than in the consciousness
of an heir, a soldier, or a Chief of State? The unconscious has its
horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the slumber of
reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.
The unconscious is Rousseauistic, being man-nature. And how much malice
and ruse there are in Rousseau! Transgression, guilt, castration: are
these determinations of the unconscious, or is this \emph{the way a priest
sees things}? Doubtless there are many other forces besides
psychoanalysis for oedipalizing the unconscious, rendering it guilty,
castrating it. But psychoanalysis reinforces the movement, it invents a
last priest. Oedipal analysis imposes a transcendent use on all the
syntheses of the unconscious, ensuring their \emph{conversion}.


The practical problem of schizoanalysis is, then, to ensure the
contrasting \emph{reversion}: restoring the syntheses of the unconscious to
their immanent use. De-oedipalizing, undoing the daddy-mommy spider web,
undoing the beliefs so as to attain the production of desiring-machines,
and to reach the level of economic and social investments where the
militant analysis comes into play. Nothing is accomplished as long as
machines are not touched upon. This implies interventions that are in
fact very concrete; in place of the benevolent pseudo neutrality of the
Oedipal analyst, who wants and understands only daddy and mommy, we must
substitute a malevolent, an openly malevolent activity: your Oedipus is
a fucking drag, keep it up and the analysis will be stopped, or else
we’ll apply a shock treatment to you; stop saying daddy-mommy; of course
“Hamlet lives in you as Werther lives in you,” and Oedipus too, and
anything you want, \emph{but} “you grow uterine arms and legs, uterine lips,
uterine mustache. In tracing back the ‘memory deaths’ your ego becomes a
sort of mineral theorem which constantly proves the futility of living
\dots{}. Were \emph{you} born Hamlet? Or \emph{did you not rather create the type in
yourself}? Whether this be so or not, what seems infinitely more
important is—\emph{why revert to myth}?”\footnote{“Letter to Michael Fraenkel by Henry Miller, May 7, 1936,” in Henry Miller, \emph{Hamlet} (Puerto Rico: Carrefour, 1939), Vol. 1, pp. 124–26.}


If myth is given up, a little joy, a little discovery, is restored to
psychoanalysis. For it has become very dismal, very sad, quite
interminable, with everything decided in advance. Will it be retorted
that the schizo is not joyous either? But doesn’t his sadness come from
the fact that he can no longer bear the forces of oedipalization and
hamletization that hem him in on all sides? Better to flee to the body
without organs and hide out there, closing himself up in it. The little
joy lies in schizophrenization as a process, not in the schizo as a
clinical entity. “You have pushed a process into a goal\dots{}” If we made a
psychoanalyst enter into the domains of the productive unconscious, he
would feel as out of place with his theater as an actress from the
Comédie-Française in a factory, a \emph{priest} from the Middle Ages on an
assembly line. We must set up units of production, plug in
desiring-machines. What takes place in this factory, what this process
is, its spasms and its glories, its labors and its joys, still remain
unknown.

\section{7. Social Repression and Psychic Repression}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-7}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-7}%


We have attempted to analyze the form, the reproduction, the (formal)
cause, the method, and the condition of the Oedipal triangle. But we
have postponed the analysis of the real forces, the real causes on which
the triangulation depends. The general line of the response is simple,
it has been sketched out by Reich: it is social repression, the forces
of social repression. This response, however, leaves two problems
untouched and makes them even more urgent: on the one hand, the specific
relationship between psychic repression and social repression; on the
other hand, the particular situation of Oedipus in this social
repression-psychic repression system. The two problems are obviously
linked because, \emph{if psychic repression did bear on incestuous desires},
it would thereby gain a certain independence and primacy, as a condition
for constituting a system of exchange or any society, in relation to
social repression, which would then concern only the returns of the
psychically repressed in a constituted society. Therefore we should
first of all consider the second question: does psychic repression bear
upon the Oedipus complex as an adequate expression of the unconscious?
Must we even follow Freud in saying that the Oedipus complex, according
to one or the other of its two poles, is either repressed (not without
leaving behind traces and returns that will be confronted by the
prohibitions), or suppressed (not without being passed on to the
children, with whom the same story begins all over again)?\footnote{Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924), \emph{Standard Edition}, Vol. 19, pp. 176–78.} We
wonder if Oedipus in fact expresses desire; if Oedipus is desired, then
it is indeed on it that psychic repression comes to bear. Now the
Freudian argument is of a nature to leave us wondering: Freud quotes a
remark by Sir J. G. Frazer according to which “the law only forbids men
to do what their instincts incline them to do; \dots{} Instead of assuming,
therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest that there is a natural
aversion to incest, we ought rather to assume that there is a natural
instinct in favor of it.”\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{Totem and Taboo}, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 123.} In other words: if it is prohibited, this
is because it is desired—there would be no need to prohibit what is not
desired. Once again, it is this confidence in the law, the unawareness
of the ruses and the procedures of the law, that leaves us wondering.


The immortal father of Céline’s \emph{Death on the Installment Plan} (\emph{Mort à
credit}) cries out: So you want to see me die, eh, is that what you
want, speak up? We didn’t want anything of the sort, however. We didn’t
want the train to be daddy, or the station mommy. We only wanted peace
and innocence, and to be left alone to machine our little machines, O
desiring-production. Of course pieces from the bodies of the mother and
the father are taken up in the connections, parental appellations crop
up in the disjunctions of the chain, the parents are there as ordinary
stimuli of an indifferent nature that trigger the becoming of
adventures, of races, and of continents. But what a bizarre Freudian
mania—to relate to Oedipus what overflows it on every side and from all
angles, beginning with the hallucination of books and the delirium of
apprenticeships (the teacher as father-substitute, and the book as
family romance). Freud couldn’t abide a simple humorous remark by Jung,
to the effect that Oedipus must not really exist, since even the
primitive prefers a pretty young woman to his mother or his grandmother.
If Jung betrayed everything, it was nevertheless not by way of this
remark, which can only suggest that the mother functions as a pretty
girl as much as the pretty girl functions as mother, since the main
thing for the primitive or the child is to form and put into motion
their desiring-machines, to make flows circulate and to perform breaks
in these flows.


The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill
your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so \emph{that’s} what I
wanted! Will it ever be suspected that the law discredits—and has an
interest in discrediting and disgracing—the person it presumes to be
guilty, the person the law wants to be guilty and wants to be made to
feel guilty? One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from
psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition
the nature of what is prohibited. There we have a typical paralogism—yet
another, a fourth paralogism that we shall have to call \emph{displacement}.
For what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is
perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the “instincts,” so as
to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to
this fiction. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip
on intention, of making the unconscious guilty. In short, we are not
witness here to a system of two terms where we could conclude from the
formal prohibition what is really prohibited. Instead we have before us
a system of three terms, where this conclusion becomes completely
illegitimate. Distinctions must be made: the repressing representation
which performs the repression; the repressed representative, on which
the repression actually comes to bear; the displaced represented, which
gives a falsified apparent image that is meant to trap desire.


Such is the nature of Oedipus—the sham image. Repression does not
operate through Oedipus, nor is it directed at Oedipus. It is not a
question of the return of the repressed. Oedipus is a factitious product
of psychic repression. It is only the represented, insofar as it is
induced by repression. Repression cannot act without displacing desire,
without giving rise to a \emph{consequent desire}, all ready, all warm for
punishment, and without putting this desire in the place of the
**antecedent desire* on which repression comes to bear in principle or in
reality (“Ah, so \emph{that’s} what it was!”).


D.H. Lawrence—who does not struggle against Freud in the name of the
rights of the Ideal, but who speaks by virtue of the flows of sexuality
and the intensities of the unconscious, and who is incensed and
bewildered by what Freud is doing when he closets sexuality in the
Oedipal nursery—has a foreboding of this operation of displacement, and
protests with all his might: no, Oedipus is not a state of desire and
the drives, it is an \emph{idea}, nothing but an idea that repression
inspires in us concerning desire; not even a compromise, but an idea in
the service of repression, its propaganda, or its propagation. “The
incest motive is a logical deduction of the human reason, which has
recourse to this last extremity, to save itself \dots{} which first and
foremost is a logical deduction made by the human reason, even if
unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective
passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for
action\dots{}. This has nothing to do with the active unconscious [which]
sparkles, vibrates, travels \dots{} we realize that the unconscious contains
nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the
least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the
conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or
should be, so impersonal that the so-called \emph{human} relations are not
involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological—a
fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” in \emph{Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious} (New York: Viking Press, 1969), pp. 11–30.}


Oedipal desires are not at all repressed, nor do they have any reason to
be. They are nevertheless in an intimate relationship with psychic
repression, but in a different manner. Oedipal desires are the bait, the
disfigured image by means of which repression catches desire in the
trap. If desire is repressed, this is not because it is desire for the
mother and for the death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes
that only because it is repressed, it takes on that mask only under the
reign of the repression that models the mask for it and plasters it on
its face. Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the
establishment of society, as the partisans of an \emph{exchangist} conception
claim. We have seen that there were other obstacles. The real danger is
elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of
desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the
established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the
contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of
being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what
some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its
essence—desire, not left-wing holidays!—and no society can tolerate a
position of real desire without its structures of exploitation,
servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.


If a society is identical with its structures—an amusing hypothesis—then
yes, desire threatens its very being. It is therefore of vital
importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something
more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy,
exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired. It is quite
troublesome to have to say such rudimentary things: desire does not
threaten a society because it is a desire to sleep with the mother, but
because it is revolutionary. And that does not at all mean that desire
is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not
live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces,
and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be
stocked within an established order. Desire does not “want” revolution,
it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by
wanting what it wants. From the beginning of this study we have
maintained both that social production and desiring-production are one
and the same, and that they have differing régimes, with the result that
a social form of production exercises an essential repression of
desiring-production, and also that desiring-production—a “real”
desire—is potentially capable of demolishing the social form. But what
is a “real” desire, since repression is also desired? How can we tell
them apart? We demand the right to a very deliberate analysis. For even
in their contrary uses, let us make no mistake about it, \emph{the same
syntheses are at issue}.


It is clear what psychoanalysis expects to gain from claiming a link,
where Oedipus would be the object of repression, and even its subject
through the intermediary of the superego. From this it expects a
cultural justification for psychic repression—a justification that makes
psychic repression move into the foreground and no longer considers the
problem of social repression as anything more than secondary from the
point of view of the unconscious. That is why critics have been able to
observe a conservative or reactionary turning point in Freud, from the
moment that he gave an autonomous value to psychic repression as a
condition of culture acting against the incestuous drives: Reich goes so
far as to say that the crucial turning point of Freudianism, \emph{the
abandonment of sexuality}, comes when Freud accepts the idea of a
primary anxiety that supposedly touches off psychic repression in an
endogenous fashion. Consider the 1908 article on “civilized sexual
morality”: Oedipus is not yet named here; psychic repression is
considered in terms of social repression, which gives rise to a
**displacement* and acts on the partial drives insofar as they represent
in their own fashion a sort of desiring-production, before being
exercised against the incestuous or other drives threatening legitimate
marriage. But it then becomes evident that, the more the problem of
Oedipus and incest comes to occupy center stage, the more psychic
repression and its correlates, suppression and sublimation, will be
founded on supposedly transcendent requirements of civilization, at the
same time that the psychoanalyst plunges deeper into a familialist and
ideological vision.


We do not need to relate again the reactionary compromises of
Freudianism, and even its “theoretical surrender”: this work has been
accomplished several times, in a profound way, rigorously, and with
nuances.\footnote{See the two classic accounts: Wilhelm Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm}, Ch. 6; Herbert Marcuse, \emph{Eros and Civilization} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), the chapter “Neo-Freudian Revisionism.” The question has been taken up more recently in some excellent articles in \emph{Partisans}, no. 46 (February 1969): François Gantheret, “Freud et la question socio-politique” (pp. 85ff.); Jean-Marie Brohm, “Psychanalyse et révolution” (pp. 97ff.).} We see no special problem in the possibility of a
coexistence of revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements at the
heart of the same theoretical and practical doctrine. We refuse to play
“take it or leave it,” under the pretext that theory justifies practice,
being born from it, or that one cannot challenge the process of “cure”
except by starting from elements drawn from this very cure. As if every
great doctrine were not a \emph{combined formation}, constructed from bits
and pieces, various intermingled codes and flux, partial elements and
derivatives, that constitute its very life or its becoming. As if we
could reproach someone for having an ambiguous relationship with
psychoanalysis, without first mentioning that psychoanalysis owes its
existence to a relationship, theoretically and practically ambiguous,
with what it discovers and the forces that it wields.


While the critical study of Freudian ideology has been done, and done
well, on the other hand the history of the movement has never even been
sketched out: the structure of the psychoanalytic group, its politics,
its tendencies and its focal points, its self-applications, its suicides
and its follies, the enormous group superego—everything that took place
on the body of the master. What has come to be called the monumental
work of Ernest Jones does not penetrate censorship, it codifies it. And
the way the three elements coexisted: the exploratory, pioneering,
revolutionary element, whereby desiring-production was discovered; the
classical cultural element, which reduces everything to a scene from
Oedipal theatrical representation (the return to myth!); and finally the
third element, the most disturbing, a sort of racket thirsting after
respectability, which will never have done with getting itself
recognized and institutionalized—a formidable enterprise of absorption
of surplus value, with its codification of the interminable cure, its
cynical justification of the role of money, and all the pledges it makes
to the established order. All these elements were present in Freud, a
fantastic Christopher Columbus, a brilliant bourgeois reader of Goethe,
Shakespeare, and Sophocles, a masked Al Capone.


The strength of Reich consists in having shown how psychic repression
depended on social repression. Which in no way implies a confusion of
the two concepts, since social repression needs psychic repression
precisely in order to form docile subjects and to ensure the
reproduction of the social formation, including its repressive
structures. But social repression should not be understood by using as a
starting point a familial repression coextensive with civilization—far
from it; it is civilization that must be understood in terms of a social
repression inherent to a given form of social production. Social
repression bears on desire—and not solely on needs or interests—only by
means of sexual repression. The family is indeed the delegated agent of
this psychic repression, insofar as it ensures “a mass psychological
reproduction of the economic system of a society.” Of course it should
not be concluded from this that desire is Oedipal. On the contrary, it
is the social repression of desire or sexual repression—that is, the
**stasis* of libidinal energy—that actualizes Oedipus and engages desire
in this requisite impasse, organized by the repressive society.


Reich was the first to raise the problem of the relationship between
desire and the social field (and went further than Marcuse, who treats
the problem lightly). He is the true founder of a materialist
psychiatry. Situating the problem in terms of desire, he is the first to
reject the explanations of a summary Marxism too quick to say the masses
were fooled, mystified. But since he had not sufficiently formulated the
concept of desiring-production, he did not succeed in determining the
insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the
insertion of the drives into social production. Consequently,
revolutionary investment seemed to him such that the desire moving
within it simply coincided with an economic rationality; as to the
reactionary mass investments, they seemed to him to derive from
ideology, so that psychoanalysis merely had the role of explaining the
subjective, the negative, and the inhibited, without participating
directly as psychoanalysis in the positivity of the revolutionary
movement or in the desiring-creativity. (To a certain extent, didn’t
this amount to a reintroduction of the error or the illusion?) The fact
remains that Reich, in the name of desire, caused a song of life to pass
into psychoanalysis. He denounced, in the final resignation of
Freudianism, a fear of life, a resurgence of the ascetic ideal, a
cultural broth of bad consciousness. Better to depart in search of the
Orgone, he said to himself, in search of the vital and cosmic element of
desire, than to continue being a psychoanalyst under those conditions.
No one forgave him this, whereas Freud got full pardon. Reich was the
first to attempt to make the analytic machine and the revolutionary
machine function together. In the end, he only had his own
desiring-machines, his paranoiac, miraculous, and celibate boxes, with
metallic inner walls lined with cotton and wool.


Psychic repression distinguishes itself from social repression by the
unconscious nature of the operation and by its result (“even the
inhibition of revolt has become unconscious”), a distinction that
expresses clearly the difference in nature between the two repressions.
But a real independence cannot be concluded from this. Psychic
repression is such that social repression becomes desired; it induces a
consequent desire, a faked image of its object, on which it bestows the
appearance of independence. Strictly speaking, psychic repression is a
means in the service of social repression. What it bears on is also the
object of social repression: desiring-production. But it in fact implies
an original double operation: the repressive social formation delegates
its power to an agent of psychic repression, and correlatively the
repressed desire is as though masked by the faked displaced image to
which the repression gives rise. Psychic repression is delegated by the
social formation, while the desiring-formation is disfigured, displaced
by psychic repression.


The family is the delegated agent of psychic repression, or rather the
agent delegated to psychic repression; the incestuous drives are the
disfigured image of the repressed. The Oedipus complex, the process of
oedipalization, is therefore the result of this double operation. \emph{It is
in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is
replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a
displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as
incestuous familial drives}. In this way the family\Slash{}drives relationship
is substituted for the relationship between the two orders of
production, in a diversion where the whole of psychoanalysis goes
astray. And the interest of such an operation, from the point of view of
social production, becomes evident, for the latter could not otherwise
ward off desire’s potential for revolt and revolution. By placing the
distorting mirror of incest before desire (that’s what you wanted, isn’t
it?), desire is shamed, stupefied, it is placed in a situation without
exit, it is easily persuaded to deny “itself” in the name of the more
important interests of civilization (what if everyone did the same, what
if everyone married his mother or kept his sister for himself? there
would no longer be any differentiation, any exchanges possible). We must
act quickly and soon. Incest, \emph{a slandered shallow stream}.


Although we can see social production’s interest in such an operation,
it is less clear what makes this operation possible from the point of
view of desiring-production itself. We do have, however, the elements of
a response. Social production would need at its disposal, on the
recording surface of the socius, an agent that is also capable of acting
on, of inscribing the recording surface of desire. Such an agent exists:
the family. It belongs essentially to the recording of social
production, as a system of reproduction of the producers. And doubtless,
at the other pole, the recording of desiring-production on the body
without organs is brought about through a genealogical network \emph{that is
not familial}: parents only intervene here as partial objects, flows,
signs, and agents of a process that outflanks them on all sides. At
most, the child innocently “relates” to his parents some part of the
astonishing productive experience he is undergoing with his desire; but
this experience is not related to them as such. Yet this is precisely
where the operation arises. Under the precocious action of social
repression, the family slips into and interferes with the network of
desiring-genealogy; it assumes the task of alienating the entire
genealogy; it confiscates the Numen (but see here, God is daddy). The
desiring-experience is treated as if it were intrinsically related to
the parents, and as if the family were its supreme law. Partial objects
are subjected to the notorious law of totality-unity acting as
“lacking.” The disjunctions are subjected to the alternative of the
undifferentiated or exclusion.


The family is therefore introduced into the production of desire and
will perform a displacement, an unparalleled repression of desire
commencing with the earliest age of the child. Social production
delegates the family to psychic repression. And if the family is able in
this manner to slip into the recording of desire, it is because the body
without organs on which this recording is accomplished already exercises
on its own account, as we have seen, a \emph{primal repression} of
desiring-production. It falls to the family to profit from this, and to
superimpose \emph{the repression that is properly termed secondary}, this
being a function delegated to the family or one to which the family is
delegated. (Psychoanalysis has clearly demonstrated the difference
between these two repressions, but has not shown the scope of this
difference or the distinction between their respective régimes.) That is
why psychic repression in the strict sense does not content itself with
repressing real desiring-production, but offers a displaced apparent
image of the repressed, by substituting a familial recording for the
recording of desire. Desiring-production taken as a whole does not
assume the well-known Oedipal figure except in the familial translation
of its recording. Translation-betrayal.


At times we say that Oedipus is nothing, almost nothing (within the
order of desiring-production, even in the child); at other times we say
that it is everywhere (in the enterprise of domesticating the
unconscious, of representing desire and the unconscious). To be sure, we
have never dreamed of saying that psychoanalysis invented Oedipus.
Everything points in the opposite direction: the subjects of
psychoanalysis arrive already oedipalized, they demand it, they want
more. News flash: Stravinsky declares before dying: “My misfortune, I am
sure of it, came from my father’s being so distant with me and from the
small amount of affection shown me by my mother. So I decided that one
day I would show them.” If even artists give in to this, it would be a
mistake to stand on ceremony and hold to the ordinary scruples of a
diligent psychoanalyst. If a musician tells us that music does not
attest to active and conquering forces, but to reactive forces, to
reactions to daddy-mommy, we have only to play again on a paradox dear
to Nietzsche, while barely modifying it: Freud-as-musician.


No, psychoanalysts invent nothing, though they have invented much in
another way, and have legislated a lot, reinforced a lot, injected a
lot. All that psychoanalysts do is to reinforce the movement; they add a
last burst of energy to the displacement of the entire unconscious. What
they do is merely to make the unconscious speak according to the
transcendent uses of synthesis imposed on it by other forces: Global
Persons, the Complete Object, the Great Phallus, the Terrible
Undifferentiated of the Imaginary, Symbolic Differentiations,
Segregation. What psychoanalysts invent is only the transference, a
transference Oedipus, a consulting-room Oedipus of Oedipus, especially
noxious and virulent, but where the subject finally has what he wants,
and sucks away at his Oedipus on the full body of the analyst. And
that’s already too much. But Oedipus takes shape in the family, not in
the analyst’s office, which merely acts as the last territoriality. And
Oedipus is not made by the family. The Oedipal uses of synthesis,
oedipalization, triangulation, castration, all refer to forces a bit
more powerful, a bit more subterranean than psychoanalysis, than the
family, than ideology, even joined together. There we have all the
forces of social production, reproduction, and repression. This can be
explained by the simple truth that very powerful forces are required to
defeat the forces of desire, lead them to resignation, and substitute
everywhere reactions of the daddy-mommy type for what is essentially
active, aggressive, artistic, productive, and triumphant in the
unconscious itself. It is in this sense, as we have seen, that Oedipus
is an application, and the family a delegated agent. Even by application
it is hard, it is difficult for a child to live and experience himself
as an angle,



\begin{quote}


Cet enfant il n ’est pas là, il n ’est qu’un angle, un angle à venir, et
il n’y à pas d’angle\dots{}. or ce monde du père-mère est justement ce qui
doit s’en aller, c’est ce monde dédoublé-double, en état de désunion
constante, en volonté d’unification constante aussi\dots{}. autour duquel
tourne tout le système de ce monde malignement soutenu par la plus
sombre organisation.\footnote{* Antonin Artaud, “Ainsi done la question\dots{}” in \emph{Tel Quel}, No. 30 (1967). “This child\Slash{}he is not there,\Slash{}he is but an angle,\Slash{}an angle to come,\Slash{}and there is no angle\dots{}.\Slash{}and yet it is precisely this world of father-mother which must go away,\Slash{}it is this world, split in two—doubled\Slash{}in a state of constant disunion, also willing a constant unification\dots{}.\Slash{}around which turns the entire system of this world\Slash{}maliciously sustained by the most somber organization.”}



\end{quote}

\section{8. Neurosis and Psychosis}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-8}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-8}%


In 1924 Freud proposed a simple criterion for distinguishing between
neurosis and psychosis: in neurosis the ego obeys the requirements of
reality and stands ready to repress the drives of the id, whereas in
psychosis the ego is under the sway of the id, ready to break with
reality. Freud’s ideas often took quite some time before making their
way into France. Not this one, however; that same year Capgras and
Carrette presented a case of schizophrenia with a delusion of doubles,
where the patient manifested a strong hatred for her mother and an
incestuous desire for her father, but under conditions of reality loss
where the parents were lived as false parents or “doubles.” From this
they drew the illustration of the inverse relationship: in neurosis the
object function of reality is preserved, but on condition that the
causal complex be repressed; in psychosis the complex invades
consciousness and becomes its object, at the price of a “repression”
that now bears on reality itself or the function of the real. Doubtless
Freud was merely insisting on the schematic character of the
distinction, for the rupture is also found in neurosis with the return
of the repressed (hysterical amnesia, obsessional cancellation), while
in psychosis a regaining of reality appears along with the delirious
reconstruction. The fact remains that Freud never dropped this simple
distinction.\footnote{The two 1924 articles are “Neurosis and Psychosis” and “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis.” See also J. Capgras and J. Carrette, “Illusion des sosies et complexe d’Oedipe,” \emph{Annales médico-psychologiques}. May 1924. Freud’s article “Fetishism” (1927) does not go back on the distinction, despite what is sometimes said, but confirms it: \emph{Collected Papers}, Vol. 5, pp. 198–204 (“I can thereby maintain my proposition\dots{}”).} And it seems important that, following an original
path, Freud encounters again an idea dear to traditional psychiatry:
that madness is fundamentally linked to a loss of reality. Thus there is
a convergence with the psychiatric elaboration of the notions of
dissociation and autism. Hence the reason, perhaps, for the rapid
diffusion that the Freudian account enjoyed.


What interests us is the precise role of the Oedipus complex in this
convergence. For if it is true that the familial themes often erupt into
the psychotic consciousness, we would be all the more surprised—in line
with a remark by Lacan—if Oedipus were in fact “discovered” in neurosis
where it is supposed to be latent, rather than in psychosis where it is
held to be patent.\footnote{Jacques Lacan, “La famille,” \emph{Encyclopédie française}, Vol. 8 (1938).} But isn’t it true instead that, in psychosis,
the familial complex appears precisely as a stimulus whose quality is a
matter of indifference, a simple inductor not playing the role of
organizer, where the intensive investments of reality bear on something
totally different (the social, historical, and cultural fields)? Oedipus
simultaneously invades consciousness and dissolves into itself,
testifying to its incapacity to be an “organizer.”


Once this is admitted, it is enough to measure psychosis against this
fake standard—enough to lead it to this false criterion, Oedipus—to
obtain the loss-of-reality effect. This is not an abstract operation: an
Oedipal “organization” is imposed on the psychotic, though for the sole
purpose of assigning the \emph{lack} of this organization in the psychotic,
in his very body. It is an exercise in naked flesh, in the depths of the
soul. The psychotic reacts with autism and the loss of reality. Could it
be that the loss of reality is not the effect of the schizophrenic
process, but the effect of its forced oedipalization, that is to say,
its interruption? Must we correct what we were saying a little earlier,
and suppose that some tolerate oedipalization less well than others?
Thus the schizo would not be ill within the Oedipus complex, from an
Oedipus arising all the more in his hallucinated consciousness as he
lacked it in the symbolic organization of “his” unconscious. On the
contrary, he is ill because of the oedipalization to which he is made to
submit the most somber organization—and which he can no longer tolerate:
he who has gone on a distant journey. As though one were constantly
bringing back home the person capable of setting whole continents and
cultures adrift. He is not suffering from a divided self or a shattered
Oedipus, but on the contrary, from having been brought back to
everything he had left. A drop in intensity to the body without organs
= 0, autism: the schizo has no other means of
reacting to this blocking of all his investments of reality, the
barriers placed before him by the Oedipal system of social and psychic
repression. As Laing says, they are interrupted in their journey. They
have lost reality. But when did they lose it? During the journey, or
during the interruption of the journey?


Hence another possible formulation of an inverse relationship: there
would be something like two groups, the psychotics and neurotics, those
who do not tolerate oedipalization, and those who tolerate it and are
even content with it and evolve within it. Those on whom the Oedipal
imprint does not take, and those on whom it does. “I believe my friends
cast off in a group at the start of the New Age, with forces for a
practical explosion that thrust them into a paternalistic deviation that
I find depraved\dots{}. \emph{A second group of loners}, of which I am a part,
doubtless constituted by centers of collarbones, was deprived of any
possibility of individual success at the moment they were engaged in
laborious studies in innate science. With regard to them, my rebellion
against \emph{the paternalism of the first group} placed me from the second
year in a socially difficult position that was growing more and more
suffocating. So, \emph{do you believe these two groups are capable of being
joined}? I am not too angry with these bastards of virile paternalism, I
am not vindictive\dots{}. In any case, if I have won, there will be no more
struggles between the Father and the Son! \dots{} I am speaking of God’s
people, naturally, not of those close to Him who take themselves for his
people.”\footnote{Jacques Besse, \emph{La grande pâque}, pp. 27, 61.} It is the recording of desire on the increate body without
organs, and the familial recording on the socius, that are in opposition
throughout the two groups. The innate science in psychosis and the
neurotic experimental sciences. The schizoid excentric circle and the
neurosis triangle.


On a more general level, it is the two kinds of use made of synthesis
that are in opposition. On the one hand there are the desiring-machines,
and on the other the Oedipal-narcissistic machine. In order to
understand the details of this struggle, it must be borne in mind that
the family relentlessly operates on desiring-production. Inscribing
itself into the recording process of desire, clutching at everything,
the family performs a vast appropriation of the productive forces; it
displaces and reorganizes in its own fashion the entirety of the
connections and the hiatuses that characterize the machines of desire.
It reorganizes them all along the lines of the universal castration that
conditions the family itself (“a dead rat’s ass,” said Artaud,
“suspended from the ceiling of the sky”), but it also redistributes
these breaks in accordance with its own laws and the requirements of
social production. The inscription performed by the family follows the
pattern of its triangle, by distinguishing what belongs to the family
from what does not. It also cuts inwardly, along the lines of
differentiation that form global persons: there’s daddy, there’s mommy,
there you are, and then there’s your sister. Cut into the flow of milk
here, it’s your brother’s turn, don’t take a crap here, cut into the
stream of shit over there. Retention is the primary function of the
family: it is a matter of learning what elements of desiring-production
the family is going to reject, what it is going to retain, what it is
going to direct along the dead-end roads leading to its own
undifferentiated (the miasma), and what on the contrary it is going to
lead down the paths of a contagious and reproduceable differentiation.
For the family creates at the same time its disgraces and its honors,
the nondifferentiation of its neurosis and the differentiation of its
ideal, which are distinguishable only in appearance.


While this is taking place, what is desiring-production doing? The
retained elements do not enter into the new use of synthesis that
imposes such a profound change on them without causing the whole
triangle to reverberate. The desiring-machines are at the door, they
make everything shake when they enter. Moreover, what does not enter
causes perhaps even more vibrations to be felt. The desiring-machines
reintroduce or attempt to reintroduce their deviant cuts and breaks. The
child feels the task required of him. But what is to be put into the
triangle, how are selections to be made? The father’s nose or the
mother’s ear—will that do, can that be retained, will that constitute a
good Oedipal incision? And the bicycle horn? What is part of the family?
It is the triangle’s job to vibrate, to resonate, under the pressure of
what it retains as much as what it thrusts aside. Resonance—here again,
either muffled or public, disgraceful or proud—is the family’s second
function. The family is at the same time an anus that retains, a voice
that resounds, and a mouth that consumes: its very own three syntheses,
since it is a matter of connecting desire to the ready-made objects of
social production. Go buy madeleines in Combray if you really want to
feel the vibrations.


We now come to the realization that the simple opposition between the
two groups is inadequate, an opposition that would allow one to define
neurosis as an intra-oedipal disorder, and psychosis as an extra-oedipal
escape. It is not even enough to state that the two groups are “capable
of being joined.” Rather it is the possibility of discriminating
directly between the two that creates the difficulty. How can we
distinguish between the pressure that familial reproduction exercises on
desiring-production, and the pressure that desiring-production exercises
on familial reproduction? The Oedipal triangle vibrates and trembles,
but is this in terms of the hold over the machines of desire that it
constantly guarantees itself, or in terms of these machines that escape
the Oedipal imprint and cause the triangle to release its grip? Where
does the resonance of the triangle reach its limit? A familial romance
expresses an effort to save the Oedipal genealogy, but it also expresses
a free thrust of non-oedipal genealogy. Fantasies are never pregnant
forms, but border or frontier phenomena ready to cross over to one side
or the other. In short, \emph{Oedipus is strictly undecidable}. It can be
found everywhere all the more readily for being undecidable, and in this
sense it is correct to say that Oedipus is strictly good for nothing.


Let us turn to the beautiful story of Gérard de Nerval: he wants
Aurélie, his fondest love, to be the same as Adrienne, the little girl
of his childhood; he “perceives” them as identical.\footnote{Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie,” in \emph{Selected Writings}, trans. Geoffrey Wagner (New York: Grove Press, N.Y., 1957). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} And Aurélie and
Adrienne, both in one, are his mother. Will it be said that the
identification as “a perceptual identity” is here a sign of psychosis?
One then encounters the criterion of reality: the complex invades the
psychotic consciousness only at the price of a rupture with the real,
whereas in neurosis the identity remains that of unconscious
representations and does not compromise perception. But what is there to
gain from inscribing everything in Oedipus, even psychosis? One step
further and Aurélie, Adrienne, \emph{and} the mother are the Virgin. Nerval
seeks the point where the vibration of the triangle is at its limit.
“You are simply seeking for drama,” says Aurélie. Everything is not
inscribed in Oedipus without everything at its extreme fleeing beyond
the reach of Oedipus. These identifications were not identifications
with persons from the viewpoint of perception, but identifications of
names with regions of intensity that provide the impetus toward other
still more intense regions, stimuli of one sort or another that set in
motion another journey altogether, stases that prepare for other
breakthroughs, other movements where the mother is no longer
encountered, but the Virgin and God: “\emph{And twice I have crossed and
conquered the Acheron}.”\footnote{“El Desdichado,” in \emph{Selected Writings}, p. 213. (Translators’note.)} Thus the schizo will accept the reduction
of everything to the mother, since it is of no importance whatsoever: he
is sure of being able to make everything rise again from the mother, and
to keep for his own secret use all the Virgins that had been placed
there.


Everything can be converted into neurosis, or warped out of shape into
psychosis: it is therefore not in this fashion that the question must be
posed. It would be inaccurate to maintain an Oedipal interpretation for
the neuroses, and to reserve an extra-oedipal explanation for the
psychoses. There are not two groups, there is no difference in nature
between neuroses and psychoses. \emph{For in any case desiring-production is
the cause}, the ultimate cause of both the psychotic subversions that
shatter Oedipus or overwhelm it, and of the neurotic reverberations that
constitute it. Such a principle takes on its full meaning if it is
related to the problem of “actual factors.” One of the most important
points of psychoanalysis was the evaluation of the role of these actual
factors, even in neurosis, insofar as they are distinguishable from the
familial infantile factors; all the major dissensions were linked to
this evaluation. The difficulties bore on several aspects. First, the
nature of these factors: were they somatic, social, metaphysical? Were
they the famous “problems of living,” through which a very pure
desexualized idealism was reintroduced into psychoanalysis? In the
second place, the modality of these factors: did they act in a negative,
privative fashion, by mere frustration? Finally, their moment, their own
time: was it not self-evident that the actual factor arose \emph{afterward},
and signified “recent,” in opposition to the infantile or the oldest
factor that could be sufficiently explained by the familial complex?
Even a writer like Reich—so careful to situate desire in relation to the
forms of social production, demonstrating thereby that there is no
psychoneurosis that is not also an actual neurosis—continues to present
the actual factors as acting by means of a repressive deprivation (the
“sexual stasis”) and as arising afterward. Which leads him to maintain a
kind of diffuse oedipalism, since the stasis or the actual privative
factor only defines the energy of the neurosis, but not the content that
for its own part refers to the infantile Oedipal conflict, this old
conflict becoming reactivated by the actual stasis.\footnote{* Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm}, p. 112: “All neurotic fantasies can be traced back to the child’s early sexual relationship to the parents. However, if it were not continually nourished by the contemporary stasis of excitation which it initially produced, the child-parent conflict could not by itself cause a permanent disturbance of the psychic equilibrium.”}


But the oedipalists are not saying anything different from this when
they remark that an actual deprivation or frustration cannot be
experienced except in the midst of an older internal qualitative
conflict, which blocks not merely the roads prohibited by reality, but
also those that reality leaves open and that the ego forbids itself in
its turn (the double-impasse formula): “Could one find examples
[illustrating the diagram of actual neuroses] in the prisoner or the
concentration-camp victim or the worker harassed by work? It is not
certain that they would furnish a large quota\dots{}. Our systematic tendency
is not to accept the evident iniquities of reality without taking stock
of them, without trying to disclose in what sense the disorder of the
world is manifested in the subjective disorder, even if it is, \emph{with the
passing of time}, inscribed within more or less irreversible
structures.”\footnote{Jean Laplanche, “La réalité dans la névrose et la psychose,” a lecture given at the Société Française de Psychanalyse in 1961. See also J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, \emph{The Language of Psycho-Analysis}, trans. Donald Micholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), the articles “Frustration” and “Actual Neurosis.”} We understand this sentence, but can’t help finding
its tone disturbing. The following choice is imposed on us: either the
actual factor is conceived in a totally exterior privative fashion
(which is an impossibility), or it descends into an internal qualitative
conflict that is necessarily understood in relation to Oedipus.
(Oedipus, the fountainhead where the psychoanalyst washes his hands of
the world’s iniquities.)


In an altogether different direction, if we consider the idealist
deviations of psychoanalysis, we see in them an interesting attempt at
giving the actual factors a status other than ulterior or privative.
This came about as two concerns were found to be linked in an apparent
paradox, for example in Jung: the concern for curtailing the
interminable cure by addressing oneself to the present or actual state
of the disorder, and the concern for going further than Oedipus, even
further than the pre-oedipal, for going much further back—as if what was
most actual was also the most primary, the shortest, the furthest
removed.\footnote{* The same remark applies to Otto Rank: the birth trauma not only implies going further back than Oedipus, and the pre-oedipal phase, but should also be a means for shortening the cure. Freud notes with bitterness in the beginning of “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”: “Rank hoped that if this primal trauma were dealt with by a subsequent analysis the whole neurosis would be got rid of. Thus this one small piece of analytic work would save the necessity for all the rest.”} Jung presents his archetypes as actual factors that extend
in fact beyond the familial images in the transference, as well as being
archaic factors infinitely older and from an order of time which is not
that of the infantile factors themselves. But nothing has been gained
thereby, since the actual factor ceases to be privative only provided it
enjoys the rights of the Ideal, and does not cease to be an afterward
except by becoming a beyond, which must be signified anagogically by
Oedipus instead of depending on it analytically. This necessarily
results in the reintroduction of the afterward in the temporal
difference, as the astonishing distribution proposed by Jung attests:
for the young, whose problems concern the family and love, Freud’s
method! For those less young, whose problems have to do with social
adaptation, Adler! And Jung for the adults and the old people, whose
problems have to do with the Ideal.\footnote{C. G. Jung, \emph{Contributions to Analytical Psychology} (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), Ch. 1–4 and p. 345.} And we have seen what remains
common to Freud and Jung: the unconscious always measured against myths
(and not against the units of production), although the measuring is
done in two contrary directions. But what does it matter, after all, if
morality or religion find an analytical and regressive meaning in
Oedipus, or if Oedipus finds an anagogical and prospective meaning in
morality or religion?


We maintain that the cause of the disorder, neurosis or psychosis, is
always in desiring-production, in its relation to social production, in
their different or conflicting régimes, and the modes of investment that
desiring-production performs in the system of social production. \emph{The
actual factor is desiring-production} insofar as it is caught up in this
relationship, this conflict, and these modalities. Nor is this factor
either ulterior or privative. Being constitutive of the full life of
desire, it is contemporary with the most tender age, and it accompanies
this life with every step. It does not arise after Oedipus, it in no way
presupposes an Oedipal organization, nor a pre-oedipal preorganization.
On the contrary, \emph{it is Oedipus that depends on desiring-production,
either as a stimulus of one form or another, a simple inductor through
which the anoedipal organization of desiring-production is formed,
beginning with early childhood, or as an effect of the psychic and
social repression imposed on desiring-production by social reproduction
by means of the family}. The term “actual” is not used because it
designates what is most recent, and because it would be opposed to
“former” or “infantile”; it is used in terms of its difference with
respect to “virtual.” \emph{And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual,
either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a
derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered
and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same
factor}. It is indeed in this sense that the idea of the afterward
seemed to us to be a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and
practice; active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from
the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical
relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations, but
that on the contrary will \emph{be applied} to the underlying Oedipal
constellation defined by reaction, or else will exclude this
constellation from the field of investment constituting their activity.
**Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactional* (\emph{réactionnel}), such is
Oedipus. It is only a reactional formation, a formation that results
from a reaction to desiring-production. It is a serious mistake to
consider this formation in isolation, abstractly, independently of the
actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.


Yet this is what psychoanalysis does when it closets itself in Oedipus,
and determines its progressions and regressions in terms of Oedipus, or
even in relationship to it: thus the idea of pre-oedipal regression, by
means of which one sometimes attempts to characterize psychosis. It is
like a Cartesian devil;\footnote{* A Cartesian devil, or bottle imp, is a small hollow glass figure used in physics. Immersed in a closed vessel of water, it can be made to rise or sink by varying the pressure, and hence the amount of water in the figure. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} the regressions and progressions are made
only within the artificially closed vessel of Oedipus, and in reality
depend on a state of forces that is changing, yet always actual and
contemporary, within \emph{anoedipal} desiring-production.
Desiring-production has solely an actual existence; progressions and
regressions are merely the effectuations of a virtuality that is always
fulfilled as perfectly as it can be by virtue of the states of desire.
Rarely have psychiatrists and psychoanalysts been able to establish a
really inspired direct relationship with either child or adult
schizophrenics; Gisela Pankow and Bruno Bettelheim break new ground in
this area by the force of their theory and the efficacy of their
therapy. It is not by chance that both of them call into question the
notion of regression. Taking the example of the bodily cares
administered to a schizophrenic—massages, baths, swathings—Gisela Pankow
asks if it is a matter of reaching the invalid at the point of his
regression, in order to give him indirect symbolic satisfactions that
would allow him to resume a progression, to take up a progressive pace.
It is not at all a question, she says, “of administering care that the
schizophrenic presumably did not receive when he was a baby. It is a
question of giving the patient tactile and other bodily sensations that
lead him to a recognition of the limits of his body\dots{}. It is a question
of the \emph{recognition} of an unconscious desire, and not of this desire’s
satisfaction.”\footnote{Gisela Pankow, \emph{L’homme et sa psychose} (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 24–26. The reader is referred to the very fine theory of the sign developed by Pankow in \emph{Structuration dynamique dans la schizophrénie} (Paris: Huber, 1956). For Bettelheim’s critique of regression, see Bruno Bettelheim, \emph{The Empty Fortress} (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 294–96.} Recognizing the desire is tantamount to setting
desiring-production back into motion on the body without organs, in the
very place to which the schizo had retreated in order to silence and
suffocate this production. This recognition of desire, this position of
desire, this \emph{Sign} refers to an order of real and actual productivity
that is not to be confused with an indirect or symbolic satisfaction,
and that, in its stops as in its starts, is as distinct from a
pre-oedipal regression as from a progressive restoration of Oedipus.

\section{9. The Process}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-2-section-9}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-2-section-9}%


Between neurosis and psychosis there is no difference in nature,
species, or group. Neurosis can no more be explained oedipally than can
psychosis. It is rather the contrary; neurosis explains Oedipus. Then
how do we conceive of the relationship between psychosis and neurosis?
Everything changes depending on whether we call psychosis the process
itself, or on the contrary, an interruption of the process (and what
type of interruption?). Schizophrenia as a process is
desiring-production, but it is this production as it functions at the
end, as the limit of social production determined by the conditions of
capitalism. It is our very own “malady,” modern man’s sickness. The end
of history has no other meaning. In it the two meanings of process meet,
as the movement of social production that goes to the very extremes of
its deterritorialization, and as the movement of metaphysical production
that carries desire along with it and reproduces it in a new Earth. “The
desert grows \dots{} the sign is near.” The schizo carries along the decoded
flows, makes them traverse the desert of the body without organs, where
he installs his desiring-machines and produces a perpetual outflow of
acting forces. He has crossed over the limit, the schiz, which
maintained the production of desire always at the margins of social
production, tangential and always repelled.


The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as
simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is
strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of another world, he
is not from another world: even when he is displacing himself in space,
his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is
erected here and remains here. For here is the desert propagated by our
world, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which
the schizos revolve, planets for a new sun. These men of desire—or do
they not yet exist?—are like Zarathustra. They know incredible
sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. They have their specters. They
must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free
man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do
something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire
lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that
no longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased being afraid
of becoming mad. He experiences and lives himself as the sublime
sickness that will no longer affect him. Here, what is, what would a
psychiatrist be worth?


In the whole of psychiatry only Jaspers, then Laing have grasped what
process signified, and its fulfillment—and so escaped the familialism
that is the ordinary bed and board of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. “If
the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our
enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably
be able to savor the irony of this situation with more amusement than we
can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call
‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite
ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our
all-too-closed minds\dots{}. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be
breakthrough\dots{}. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental
experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he
might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily
to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have
become confused\dots{}. From the alienated starting point of our
pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not ‘true’ sanity.
Their madness is not ‘true’ madness. The madness of our patients is an
artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us and by them on
themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than
that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in ‘patients’ is a
gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural
healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True
sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal
ego.”\footnote{* Laing, \emph{The Politics of Experience}, pp. 129, 133, 138, 144. In a closely connected sense Michel Foucault announced: “Perhaps one day one will no longer know clearly what madness really was\dots{}. Artaud will belong to the ground of our language, and not to its rupture\dots{}. Everything that we experience today in the mode of the limit, or of strangeness, or of the unbearable, will have joined again with the serenity of the positive. And what for us currently designates this Exterior stands a chance, one day of designating us\dots{}. Madness is breaking its kinship ties with mental illness,\dots{} madness and mental illness are ceasing to belong to the same anthropological entity” (“La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre,” \emph{La Table ronde}, May 1964).}


The visit to London is our visit to Pythia. Turner is there. Looking at
his paintings, one understands what it means to scale the wall, and yet
to remain behind; to cause flows to pass through, without knowing any
longer whether they are carrying us elsewhere or flowing back over us
already. The paintings range over three periods. If the psychiatrist
were allowed to speak here, he could talk about the first two, although
they are in fact the most reasonable. The first canvases are of
end-of-the-world catastrophes, avalanches, and storms. That’s where
Turner begins. The paintings of the second period are somewhat like the
delirious reconstruction, where the delirium hides, or rather where it
is on a par with a lofty technique inherited from Poussin, Lorrain, or
the Dutch tradition: the world is reconstructed through archaisms having
a modern function. But something incomparable happens at the level of
the paintings of the third period, in the series Turner does not
exhibit, but keeps secret. It cannot even be said that he is far ahead
of his time: there is here something ageless, and that comes to us from
an eternal future, or flees toward it. The canvas turns in on itself, it
is pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion. The
themes of the preceding paintings are to be found again here, their
meaning changed. The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates
it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog, intense,
intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breadth: the
schiz. Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the
breakthrough—not the breakdown—occurs.


Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence
to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to
circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They
overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of
course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do
so. The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization,
America, the return to the native land—or else the perversion of the
exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse still, an old
fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles.
But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves,
irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a
stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is
too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted
destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity
that returns to haunt all relations. How poorly the problem of
literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the
co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which
will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which never cease
extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion
because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary
machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign
breaks through this “form of the content” that was attempting to
maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a
long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an
author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and
causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and
despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a
revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather
the absence of style—asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language
is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a
signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to
explode—desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not
a goal, a production and not an expression.


Here again, oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the
reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the
established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm. It is not a
question here of the personal oedipalization of the author and his
readers, but of the \emph{Oedipal form} to which one attempts to enslave the
work itself, to make of it this minor expressive activity that secretes
ideology according to the dominant codes. The work of art is supposed to
inscribe itself in this fashion between the two poles of Oedipus,
problem and solution, neurosis and sublimation, desire and truth—the one
regressive, where the work hashes out and redistributes the nonresolved
conflicts of childhood, and the other prospective, by which the work
invents the paths leading toward a new solution concerning the future of
man. It is said that the work is constituted by a conversion interior to
itself as “cultural object.” From this point of view, there is no longer
even any need for applying psychoanalysis to the work of art, since the
work itself constitutes a successful psychoanalysis, a sublime
“transference” with exemplary collective virtualities. The hypocritical
warning resounds: a little neurosis is good for the work of art, good
material, but not psychosis, especially not psychosis; we draw a line
between the eventually creative neurotic aspect, and the psychotic
aspect, alienating and destructive. As if the great voices, which were
capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and of
making all language a desire, were not speaking from the depths of
psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit an
eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.


It is correct to measure established literature against an Oedipal
psychoanalysis, for this literature deploys a form of superego proper to
it, even more noxious than the nonwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact
literary before being psychoanalytic. There will always be a Breton
against Artaud, a Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against Hölderlin, in
order to superegoize literature and tell us: Careful, go no further! No
“errors for lack of tact”! Werther yes, Lenz no! The Oedipal form of
literature is its commodity form. We are free to think that there is
finally even less dishonesty in psychoanalysis than in the established
literature, since the neurotic pure and simple produces a solitary work,
irresponsible, illegible, and nonmarketable, which on the contrary must
pay not only to be read, but to be translated and reduced. He makes at
least an economic error, an error in tact, and does not spread his
values. Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit—that is to
say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself,
instead of being a process that “ploughs the crap of being and its
language,” transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least
spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is
that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a
counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to
explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.


But some reply: Artaud does not belong to the realm of literature, he is
outside it because he is schizophrenic. Others retort: he is not
schizophrenic, since he belongs to literature, and the most important
literature at that, the textual. Both groups hold at least one thing in
common; they subscribe to the same puerile and reactionary conception of
schizophrenia, and the same marketable neurotic conception of
literature. A shrewd critic writes: one need understand nothing of the
concept of the signifier “in order to declare absolutely that Artaud’s
language is that of a schizophrenic; the psychotic produces an
involuntary discourse, fettered, subjugated: \emph{therefore} in all respects
the contrary of textual writing.” But what is this enormous textual
archaism, the signifier, that subjects literature to the mark of
castration and sanctifies the two aspects of its Oedipal form? And who
told this shrewd critic that the discourse of the psychotic was
“involuntary, fettered, subjugated”? Not that it is more nearly the
opposite, thank God. But these very oppositions are singularly lacking
in relevance. \emph{Artaud makes a shambles of psychiatry, precisely because
he is schizophrenic and not because he is not}. Artaud is the
fulfillment of literature, precisely because he is schizophrenic and not
because he is not. It has been a long time since he broke down the wall
of the signifier: Artaud the Schizo. From the depths of his suffering
and his glory, he has the right to denounce what society makes of the
psychotic in the process of decoding the flows of desire (\emph{Van Gogh, the
Man Suicided by Society}), but also what it makes of literature when it
opposes literature to psychosis in the name of a neurotic or perverse
recoding (Lewis Carroll, or the coward of belles-lettres).


Very few accomplish what Laing calls the breakthrough of this
schizophrenic wall or limit: “quite ordinary people,” nevertheless. But
the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. Better to fall
back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated
in Oedipus. So they displace the limit, they make it pass into the
interior of the social formation, between the social production and
reproduction that they invest, and the familial reproduction that they
fall back on, to which they apply all the investments. They make the
limit pass into the interior of the domain thus described by Oedipus,
between the two poles of Oedipus. They never stop involuting and
evolving between these two poles. Oedipus as the last rock, and
castration as the cavern: the ultimate territoriality, although reduced
to the analyst’s couch, rather than the decoded flows of desire that
flee, slip away, and take us where? Such is neurosis, the displacement
of the limit, in order to create a little colonial world of one’s own.
But others want virgin lands, more truly exotic, families more
artificial, societies more secret that they design and institute along
the length of the wall, in the locales of perversion. Still others,
sickened by the utensility (\emph{l’ustensilité}) of Oedipus, but also by the
shoddiness and aestheticism of perversions, reach the wall and rebound
against it, sometimes with an extreme violence. Then they become
immobile, silent, they retreat to the body without organs, still a
territoriality, but this time totally desert-like, where all
desiring-production is arrested, or where it becomes rigid, feigning
stoppage: psychosis.


These catatonic bodies have fallen into the river like lead weights,
immense transfixed hippopotamuses who will not come back up to the
surface. They have entrusted all their forces to primal repression, in
order to escape the system of social and psychic repression that
fabricates neurotics. But a more naked repression befalls them that
declares them identical with the hospital schizo, the great autistic
one, the clinical entity that “lacks” Oedipus. Why the same word,
schizo, to designate both the process insofar as it goes beyond the
limit, and the result of the process insofar as it runs up against the
limit and pounds endlessly away there? Why the same word to designate
both the eventual breakthrough and the possible breakdown, and all the
transitions, the intrications of the two extremes? In point of fact, of
the three preceding adventures, the adventure of psychosis is the most
intimately related to the process: in the sense of Jaspers’
demonstration, when he shows that the “demonic”—ordinarily
repressed—erupts by means of such a state, or gives rise to such states,
which endlessly run the risk of making it topple into breakdown and
disintegration.


We no longer know if it is the process that must truly be called
madness, the sickness being only disguise or caricature, or if the
sickness is our only madness and the process our only cure. But in any
case, the intimate nature of the relationship appears directly in
inverse ratio: the more the process of production is led off course,
brutally interrupted, the more the schizo-as-entity arises as a specific
product. That is why, on the other hand, we were unable to establish any
direct relationship between neurosis and psychosis. The relationships of
neurosis, psychosis, and also perversion depend on the situation of each
one with regard to the process, and on the manner in which each one
represents a mode of interruption of the process, a residual bit of
ground to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the
deterritorialized flows of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus,
perverse territorialities of the artifice, psychotic territoriality of
the body without organs: sometimes the process is caught in the trap and
made to turn about within the triangle, sometimes it takes itself as an
end-in-itself, other times it continues on in the void and substitutes a
horrible exasperation for its fulfillment. Each of these forms has
schizophrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the only
universal. Schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breaking through this
wall, and the failures of this breakthrough: “How does one get through
this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and
penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience, as I see it”.\footnote{Vincent Van Gogh, “Letter of September 8, 1888,” cited in \emph{Artaud Anthology}, trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), p. 150.}
What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the
artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine
will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in the
deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or
they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds
one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled
for a generalized explosion—the schiz and not the signifier.

\chapter{3. Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3}%

\section{1. The Inscribing Socius}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-1}%


If the universal comes at the end—the body without organs and
desiring-production—under the conditions determined by an apparently
victorious capitalism, where do we find enough innocence for generating
universal history? Desiring-production also exists from the beginning:
there is desiring-production from the moment there is social production
and reproduction. But in a very precise sense it is true that
precapitalist social machines are inherent in desire: they code it, they
code the flows of desire. To code desire—and the fear, the anguish of
decoded flows—is the business of the socius. As we shall see, capitalism
is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded
flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract
quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the
flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit
and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly
opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it
toward this limit. At capitalism’s limit the deterritorialized socius
gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw
themselves into desiring-production. Hence it is correct to
retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism,
provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly.


First of all, universal history is the history of contingencies, and not
the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity. For
great accidents were necessary, and amazing encounters that could have
happened elsewhere, or before, or might never have happened, in order
for the flows to escape coding and, escaping, to nonetheless fashion a
new machine bearing the determinations of the capitalist socius. Thus
the encounter between private property and commodity production, which
presents itself, however, as two quite distinct forms of decoding, by
privatization and by abstraction. Or, from the viewpoint of private
property itself, the encounter between flows of convertible wealth owned
by capitalists and a flow of workers possessing nothing more than their
labor capacity\footnote{* \emph{force de travail}. Here we have followed Martin Nicolaus’s translation of Marx’s \emph{Grundrisse} in translating this Marxian term as “labor capacity” instead of “labor power.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} (here again, two distinct forms of
deterritorialization). In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of
society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the
dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. Then again, if
we say that capitalism determines the conditions and the possibility of
a universal history, this is true only insofar as capitalism has to deal
essentially with its own limit, its own destruction—as Marx says,
insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain point:
the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that counteracts
the tendency).\footnote{* Marx, \emph{Grundrisse} (see reference note 63 [87 in this version]), pp. 104–108. Maurice Godelier comments: “The West’s line of development, far from being universal because it will recur everywhere, appears universal because it recurs nowhere else\dots{}. It is typical therefore because, in its singular progress, it has obtained a universal result. It has furnished a practical base (industrial economy) and a theoretical conception (socialism) that permit it to leave behind, and to cause all other societies to leave behind, the most ancient and the most recent forms of exploitation of man by man\dots{}. The authentic universality of the West’s line of development lies therefore in its singularity, in its difference, not in its resemblance to the other lines of evolution.” (Godelier [see reference note 47 [62 in this version]], pp. 92–96.)} In a word, universal history is not only
retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.


The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. For
the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labor, it is
also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body that falls back on
the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the
natural or divine precondition. While the ground can be the productive
element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great
unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions
the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. It is the
surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which
the forces and means of labor are recorded, and the agents and the
products distributed. It appears here as the quasi cause of production
and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound
to its own repression). The \emph{territorial machine} is therefore the first
form of socius, the machine of primitive inscription, the “megamachine”
that covers a social field. It is not to be confused with technical
machines. In its simplest, so-called manual forms, the technical machine
already implies an acting, a transmitting, or even a driving element
that is nonhuman, and that extends man’s strength and allows for a
certain disengagement from it. The social machine, in contrast, has men
for its parts, even if we view them \emph{with} their machines, and integrate
them, internalize them in an institutional model at every stage of
action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social machine fashions a
memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his
(technical) machines. The latter do not in fact contain the conditions
for the reproduction of their process; they point to the social machines
that condition and organize them, but also limit and inhibit their
development. It will be necessary to await capitalism to find a
semiautonomous organization of technical production that tends to
appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of
the exploitation of man; but as a matter of fact, this organization
presupposes a dismantling of the great social machines that preceded it.


The same machine can be both technical and social, but only when viewed
from different perspectives: for example, the clock as a technical
machine for measuring uniform time, and as a social machine for
reproducing canonic hours and for assuring order in the city. When Lewis
Mumford coins the word “megamachine” to designate the social machine as
a collective entity, he is literally correct (although he limits its
application to the barbarian despotic institution): “If, more or less in
agreement with Reuleaux’s classic definition, one can consider the
machine to be the combination of solid elements, each having its
specialized function and operating under human control in order to
transmit a movement and perform a task, then the human machine was
indeed a true machine.”\footnote{Lewis Mumford, “La première mégamachine”, \emph{Diogène}, July 1966.} The social machine is literally a machine,
irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor
and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements
are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are
distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the
social machine’s supreme task, inasmuch as the apportioning of
production corresponds to extractions from the chain, resulting in a
residual share for each member, in a global system of desire and destiny
that organizes the productions of production, the productions of
recording, and the productions of consumption. Flows of women and
children, flows of herds and of seed, sperm flows, flows of shit,
menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding. The primitive territorial
machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already a social
machine, a megamachine, that codes the flows of production, the flows of
means of production, of producers and consumers: the full body of the
goddess Earth gathers to itself the cultivable species, the agricultural
implements, and the human organs.


Meyer Fortes makes a passing remark that is joyous and refreshingly
sound: “The circulation of women is not the problem\dots{}. A woman circulates
of herself. She is not at one’s disposal, but the juridical rights
governing progeniture are determined for the profit of a specific
person.”\footnote{Meyer Fortes, \emph{Recherches voltaïques}, 1967, pp. 135–37.} We see no reason in fact for accepting the postulate that
underlies exchangist notions of society; society is not first of all a
milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to
cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the
essential thing is to mark and to be marked. There is circulation only
if inscription requires or permits it. The method of the primitive
territorial machine is in this sense the collective investment of the
organs; for flows are coded only to the extent that the organs capable
respectively of producing and breaking them are themselves encircled,
instituted as partial objects, distributed on the socius and attached to
it. A mask is such an institution of organs. Initiation societies
compose the pieces of a body, which are at the same time sensory organs,
anatomical parts, and joints. Prohibitions (see not, speak not) apply to
those who, in a given state or on a given occasion, are deprived of the
right to enjoy a collectively invested organ. The mythologies sing of
organs-partial objects and their relations with a full body that repels
or attracts them: vaginas riveted on the woman’s body, an immense penis
shared by the men, an independent anus that assigns itself a body
without anus. A Gourma story begins: “When the mouth was dead, the other
parts of the body were consulted to see which of them would take charge
of the burial\dots{}.” The unities in question are never found in persons, but
rather in \emph{series} which determine the connections, disjunctions, and
conjunctions of organs. That is why fantasies are group fantasies. It is
the collective investment of the organs that plugs desire into the
socius and assembles social production and desiring-production into a
whole on the earth.


Our modern societies have instead undertaken a vast privatization of the
organs, which corresponds to the decoding of flows that have become
abstract. The first organ to suffer privatization, removal from the
social field, was the anus. It was the anus that offered itself as a
model for privatization, at the same time as money came to express the
flows’ new state of abstraction. Hence the relative truth of
psychoanalytic remarks concerning the anal nature of monetary economy.
But the “logical” order is the following: the substitution of abstract
quantity for the coded flows; the resulting collective disinvestment of
the organs, on the model of the anus; the constitution of private
persons as individual centers of organs and functions derived from the
abstract quantity. One is even compelled to say that, while in our
societies the penis has occupied the position of a detached object
distributing lack to the persons of both sexes and organizing the
Oedipal triangle, it is the anus that in this manner detaches it, it is
the anus that removes and sublimates the penis in a kind of \emph{Aufhebung}
that will constitute the phallus. Sublimation is profoundly linked to
anality, but this is not to say that the latter furnishes a material to
be sublimated, for want of another use. Anality does not represent a
lower requiring conversion to a higher. It is the anus itself that
ascends on high, under the conditions (which we must analyze) of its
removal from the field, conditions that do not presuppose sublimation,
since on the contrary sublimation results from them. It is not the anal
that presents itself for sublimation, it is sublimation in its entirety
that is anal; moreover, the simplest critique of sublimation is the fact
that it does not by any means rescue us from the shit (only the mind is
capable of shitting). Anality is all the greater once the anus is
disinvested. The libido is indeed the essence of desire; but when the
libido becomes abstract quantity, the elevated and disinvested anus
produces the global persons and the specific egos that serve this same
quantity as units of measure. Artaud expresses it well: this “dead rat’s
ass suspended from the ceiling of the sky,” whence issues the
daddy-mommy-me triangle, “the uterine mother-father of a frantic
anality,” whose child is only an angle, this “kind of covering eternally
hanging on something that is the self.”


**The whole of Oedipus is anal* and implies an individual overinvestment
of the organ to compensate for its collective disinvestment. That is why
the commentators most favorable to the universality of Oedipus recognize
nonetheless that one does not encounter in primitive societies any of
the mechanisms or any of the attitudes that make it a reality in our
society. No superego, no guilt. No identification of a specific ego with
global persons—but group identifications that are always partial,
following the compact, agglutinated series of ancestors, and the
fragmented series of companions and cousins. No anality—although, or
rather because, there is a collectively invested anus. What remains then
for the making of Oedipus?\footnote{* Paul Parin et al., \emph{Les blancs pensent trop} (Paris: Payot, 1963): “The pre-object relations with the mothers pass over and are divided into relations of identification with the group of companions of the same age. The conflict with the fathers finds itself neutralized in relations of identification with the group of older brothers\dots{}” (pp. 428–36). Similar analysis and results in M. C. and Edmond Ortigues, \emph{Oedipe africain} (reference note 22), pp. 302–305. But these authors indulge in a strange gymnastics to maintain the existence of an Oedipal problem or complex, despite all the reasons they advance to the contrary, and although they say this complex is not “clinically accessible.”} The structure—that is to say, an
unrealized potentiality? Are we to believe that a universal Oedipus
haunts all societies, but exactly as capitalism haunts them, \emph{that is to
say}, as the nightmare and the anxious foreboding of what might result
from the decoding of flows and the collective disinvestment of organs,
the becoming-abstract of the flows of desire, and the becoming-private
of the organs?


The primitive territorial machine codes flows, invests organs, and marks
bodies. To such a degree that circulating—exchanging—is a secondary
activity in comparison with the task that sums up all the others:
marking bodies, which are the earth’s products. The essence of the
recording, inscribing socius, insofar as it lays claim to the productive
forces and distributes the agents of production, resides in these
operations: tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying,
mutilating, encircling, and initiating. Nietzsche thus defined the
“\emph{morality of mores} (\dots{})—the labor performed by man upon himself during
the greater part of the existence of the human race, his entire
**prehistoric* labor”;\footnote{F. Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals} (New York: Random House, 1969), II, 2–7. But these authors indulge in a strange gymnastics to maintain the existence of an Oedipal problem or complex, despite all the reasons they advance to the contrary, and although they say this complex is not “clinically accessible.”} a system of evaluations possessing the force
of law concerning the various members and parts of the body. Not only is
the criminal deprived of organs according to a régime (\emph{ordre}) of
collective investments; not only is the one who has to be eaten, eaten
according to social rules as exact as those followed in carving up and
apportioning a steer; but the man who enjoys the full exercise of his
rights and duties has his whole body marked under a régime that consigns
his organs and their exercise to the collectivity (the privatization of
the organs will only begin with “the shame felt by man \emph{at the sight of}
man”\footnote{Ibid. Section 4.}). For it is a founding act—that the organs be hewn into the
socius, and that the flows run over its surface—through which man ceases
to be a biological organism and becomes a full body, an earth, to which
his organs become attached, where they are attracted, repelled,
miraculated, following the requirements of a socius. Nietzsche says: it
is a matter of creating a memory for man; and man, who was constituted
by means of an active faculty of forgetting (\emph{oubli}), by means of a
repression of biological memory, must create an \emph{other} memory, one that
is collective, a memory of words (\emph{paroles}) and no longer a memory of
things, a memory of signs and no longer of effects. This organization,
which traces its signs directly on the body, constitutes a system of
cruelty, a terrible alphabet: “Perhaps indeed there was nothing more
fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his
**mnemotechnics* (\dots{}) Man could never do without blood, torture, and
sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the
most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (\dots{}), the most repulsive mutilations
(\dots{}), the cruelist rites of all the religious cults \dots{} one has only to
look at our former codes of punishments to understand what effort it
costs on this earth to breed a ‘nation of thinkers’!”\footnote{Ibid. Section 3.}


Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that
might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the
movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them,
belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the
movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects production
into desire, and conversely, it forcibly inserts desire into social
production and reproduction. For even death, punishment, and torture are
desired, and are instances of production (compare the history of
fatalism). It makes men or their organs into the parts and wheels of the
social machine. The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs
are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one
wants to call this inscription in naked flesh “writing,” then it must be
said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel
system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and
gives him a memory of the spoken word.

\section{2. The Primitive Territorial Machine}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-2}%


The notion of territoriality merely appears ambiguous. For if it is
taken to mean a principle of residence or of geographic distribution, it
is obvious that the primitive social machine is not territorial. Only
the apparatus of the State will be territorial in this sense because,
following Engel’s formula, it “subdivides not the people but the
territory,” and substitutes a geographic organization for the
organization of \emph{gens}. Yet even where kinship seems to predominate over
the earth, it is not difficult to show the importance of local ties.
This is because the primitive machine subdivides the people, but does so
on an indivisible earth where the connective, disjunctive, and
conjunctive relations of each section are inscribed along with the other
relations (thus, for example, the coexistence or complementarity of the
section chief and the guardian of the earth). When the division extends
to the earth itself, by virtue of an administration that is landed and
residential, this cannot be regarded as a promotion of territoriality;
on the contrary, it is rather the effect of the first great movement of
deterritorialization on the primitive communes. The immanent unity of
the earth as the immobile motor gives way to a transcendent unity of an
altogether different nature—the unity of the State; the full body is no
longer that of the earth, it is the full body of the Despot, the
Unengendered, which now takes charge of the fertility of the soil as
well as the rain from the sky and the general appropriation of the
productive forces. Hence the savage, primitive socius was indeed the
only territorial machine in the strict sense of the term. And the
functioning of such a machine consists in the following: \emph{the declension
of alliance and filiation}—declining the lineages on the body of the
earth, before there is a State.


If declension characterizes the primitive machine, it is because it is
not possible simply to deduce alliance from filiation, the alliances
from the filiative lines. It would be erroneous to ascribe to alliance
no more than an individuating power over the persons of a lineage; it
produces instead a generalized distinguishability. E. R. Leach cites
cases of very diverse matrimonial régimes where no difference in
filiation can be inferred among the corresponding groups. In many
analyses, “the stress has been upon ties within the unilineal
corporation or between different corporations linked by ties of common
descent. The structural ties deriving from marriage between members of
different corporations have been largely ignored or else assimilated
into the all-important descent concept. Thus Fortes (1953), while
recognizing that ties of affinity have comparable importance to ties of
descent, disguises the former under his expression \emph{complementary
filiation}. The essence of this concept, which resembles the Roman
distinction between agnation and cognation, is that any Ego is related
to the kinsman of his two parents because he is the descendant of both
parents and not because his parents were married\dots{}. [However] the cross
ties linking the different patrilineages laterally are \emph{not} felt by the
peoples themselves to be of the nature of descent. The continuity of the
structure vertically through time is adequately expressed through the
agnatic transmission of a patrilineage name. But the continuity of the
structure laterally is not so expressed. Instead, it is maintained by a
continuing chain of debt relationships of an economic kind\dots{}. It is the
existence of these outstanding debts which assert the continuance of the
affinal relationship.”\footnote{E. R. Leach, \emph{Rethinking Anthropology} (London: Athlone Press, 1966), pp. 122–23.}


Filiation is administrative and hierarchical, but alliance is political
and economic, and expresses power insofar as it is not fused with the
hierarchy and cannot be deduced from it, and the economy insofar as it
is not identical with administration. Filiation and alliance are like
the two forms of a primitive capital: fixed capital or filiative stock,
and circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts. There are two
memories that correspond to them, the one biofiliative, the other a
memory of alliance and of words. While production is recorded in the
network of filiative disjunctions on the socius, the connections of
labor still must detach themselves from the productive process and pass
into the element of recording that appropriates them for itself as quasi
cause. But it can accomplish this only by reclaiming the connective
régime for its own, in the form of an affinal tie or a pairing of
persons that is compatible with the disjunctions of filiation. It is in
this sense that the economy goes by way of alliance. In the production
of children, the child is inscribed in relation to the disjunctive lines
of its father or mother, but inversely, the disjunctive lines inscribe
it only through a connection represented by the marriage of the father
and the mother. At no time, therefore, does alliance derive from
filiation, but both form an essentially open cycle where the socius acts
on production, but also where production reacts on the socius.


Marxists are right to remind us that if kinship is dominant in primitive
society, it is determined as dominant by economic and political factors.
And if filiation expresses what is dominant while being itself
determined, alliance expresses what is determinant, or rather the return
of the determinant in the determinate system of dominance. That is why
it is essential to take into consideration how ties of alliance combine
concretely with relations of filiation on a given territorial surface.
Leach has specifically underscored the importance of \emph{local lineages}
insofar as they are differentiated from lineages of filiation, and
insofar as they operate at the level of small segments: it is these
groups of men residing in the same area, or in neighboring areas, who
arrange marriages and shape concrete reality to a much greater extent
than do the systems of filiation and the abstract matrimonial classes. A
kinship system is not a structure but a practice, a praxis, a method,
and even a strategy. Louis Berthe, analyzing a relationship of alliance
and hierarchy, shows convincingly that a village intervenes as a third
party to permit matrimonial connections between elements that the
disjunction of two moieties would forbid from the strict viewpoint of
structure: “The third term must be interpreted much more as a method
than as a true structural element.”\footnote{* Louis Berthe, “Ainés et cadets, l’alliance et la hiérarchie chez les Baduj,” \emph{L’Homme}, July 1965. See Luc de Heusch’s statement, in “Lévi-Strauss,” \emph{L‘Arc}, no. 26: “A kinship system is also and first of all a praxis” (p. 11).} Every time one interprets
kinship relations in the primitive commune in terms of a structure
unfolding in the mind, one relapses into an ideology of large segments
that makes alliance depend on the major filiations, and that finds
itself contradicted by \emph{practice}. “It is necessary to ask if there
exists in the asymmetrical systems of alliance a fundamental tendency
toward generalized exchange, that is to say, toward the closing of the
cycle. I have been unable to find anything of that nature among the
Mru\dots{}. Everyone behaves as if he were, ignorant of the compensation that
would result from the closing of the cycle, and everyone stresses the
relationship of asymmetry, emphasizing the creditor-debtor
behavior.”\footnote{L. G. Löffier, “L’alliance asymétrique chez les Mru,” \emph{L’Homme}, July 1966, pp. 78–79. Leach, in \emph{Rethinking Anthropology}, analyzes the difference between ideology and practice apropos of the Kachin marriage (pp. 81–82); he greatly advances the critique of conceptions of kinship as a closed system (pp. 89–90).} A kinship system only appears closed to the extent that
it is severed from the political and economic references that keep it
open, and that make alliance something other than an arrangement of
matrimonial classes and filiative lineages.


It is the same for the whole project of coding the flows. How does one
ensure reciprocal adaptation, the respective embrace of a signifying
chain and flows of production? The great nomad hunter follows the flows,
exhausts them in place, and moves on with them to another place. He
reproduces in an accelerated fashion his entire filiation, and contracts
it into a point that keeps him in a direct relationship with the
ancestor or the god. Pierre Clastres describes the solitary hunter who
becomes identical with his force and his destiny, and delivers his song
in a language that becomes increasingly rapid and distorted: Me, me, me,
“I am a powerful nature, a nature incensed and aggressive!”\footnote{Pierre Clastres, “L’arc et le panier,” \emph{L’Homme}, April 1966, p. 20.} Such
are the two characteristics of the hunter, the great paranoiac of the
bush or the forest: real displacement with the flows and direct
filiation with the god. It has to do with the nature of nomadic space,
where the full body of the socius is as if adjacent to production; it
has not yet brought production under its sway. The space of the
encampment remains adjacent to that of the forest; it is constantly
reproduced in the process of production, but has not yet appropriated
this process. The apparent objective movement of inscription has not
suppressed the real movement of nomadism. But a pure nomad does not
exist; there is always and already an encampment where it is a matter of
stocking—however little—and where it is a matter of inscribing and
allocating, of marrying, and of feeding oneself. (Clastres shows well
how, among the Guayaki, the \emph{connection} between the hunters and the
living animals is succeeded in the encampment by a \emph{disjunction} between
the dead animals and the hunters—a disjunction similar to an incest
prohibition, since the hunter cannot consume his own kill.) In short, as
we shall see elsewhere, there is always a pervert who succeeds the
paranoiac or accompanies him—sometimes the same man in two situations:
the bush paranoiac and the village pervert.


Once the socius becomes fixed, falling back on the productive forces and
appropriating them for its own, the problem of coding can no longer be
resolved by the simultaneity of a displacement from the standpoint of
the flows, and an accelerated reproduction from the standpoint of the
chain. The flows must be the object of \emph{deductions} (\emph{prélèvements})
that constitute a minimum of stock, and the signifying chain must be the
object of \emph{detachments} (\emph{détachements}) that constitute a minimum of
mediations. A flow is coded insofar as detachments from the chain and
deductions from the flows are effected in correspondence, united in a
mutual embrace. And this is already the highly perverse activity of
local groups who arrange marriages on the surface of the primitive
territoriality: a normal or nonpathological perversity, as Henry Ey
would say, referring to other cases where “a psychic work of selection,
refinement, and calculation” was manifested. And this is the case from
the start, since there does not exist a pure nomad who can be afforded
the satisfaction of drifting with the flows and singing direct
filiation, but always a socius waiting to bear down, already deducting
and detaching.


The flow deductions constitute a filiative stock in the signifying
chain; but inversely, the detachments from the chain constitute mobile
debts of alliance that guide and direct the flows. On the blanket that
serves as a familial stock, affinal stones or cowries are made to
circulate. There is a sort of vast cycle of flows of production and
chains of inscription, and a lesser cycle, between the stocks of
filiation that connect or encaste (\emph{encastent}) the flows, and the
blocks of alliance that cause the chains to flow. Descent is at the same
time flow of production and chain of inscription, stock of filiation and
fluxion of alliance. Everything takes place as though the stock
constituted a surface energy of inscription or recording, the potential
energy of the apparent movement; but debt is the actual direction of
this movement, a kinetic energy that is determined by the respective
paths of the gifts and countergifts on the surface. Among the Kula, the
circulation of necklaces and bracelets comes to a standstill in certain
places, on certain occasions, so that a stock may be re-formed. There
are no productive connections without disjunctions of filiation that
appropriate them, but there are no disjunctions of filiation that do not
reconstitute lateral connections across the alliances and pairings of
persons. Not only the flows and the chains, but the fixed stocks and the
mobile debts—insofar as they in turn imply relations between chains and
flows in both directions—are in a state of perpetual relativity: their
elements vary—women, consumer goods, ritual objects, rights, prestige,
status.


If one postulates that somewhere there has to be a kind of equilibrium
of prices, one is compelled to see in the manifest disequilibrium of the
relations a pathological consequence, which one explains by saying that
the supposedly closed system extends in one direction and opens as the
prestations become wider and more complex. But such a conception is in
contradiction with the primitive “cold economy,” which is without net
investment, without money or market, and without exchangist commodity
relations. The mainspring of such an economy is a veritable \emph{surplus
value of code}: each detachment from the chain produces, on one side or
the other in the flows of production, phenomena of excess and
deficiency, phenomena of lack and accumulation, which will be
compensated for by nonexchangeable elements of the acquired-prestige or
distributed-consumption type. (“The chief converts this perishable
wealth into imperishable prestige through the medium of spectacular
feasting. The ultimate consumers are in this way the original
producers.”)\footnote{* Leach, \emph{Rethinking Anthropology}, p. 89. Also the criticism Leach addresses to Lévi-Strauss: “Lévi-Strauss rightly argues that the structural implications of a marriage can only be understood if we think of it as one item in a whole series of transactions between kin groups. So far, so good. But in none of the examples which he provides in his book does he carry this principle far enough\dots{}. Fundamentally he is not really interested in the nature and significance of the counter-prestations that serve as equivalents for women in the systems he is discussing\dots{}. We cannot predict from first principles how the different categories of prestation will be evaluated in any particular society\dots{}. It is very important to distinguish between consumable and non-consumable materials; it is also very important to appreciate that quite intangible elements such as ‘rights’ and ‘prestige’ form part of the total inventory of ‘things’ exchanged” (pp. 90, 100).} Surplus value of code is the primitive form of surplus
value, inasmuch as it corresponds to Mauss’s celebrated formula: the
spirit of the thing given, or the force of circumstance that requires
that gifts be reciprocated with interest, being territorial signs of
desire and power (\emph{puissance}), and principles of abundance and the
fructification of wealth. Far from being a pathological consequence, the
disequilibrium is functional and fundamental. Far from being the
extension of a system that is at first closed, the opening is primary,
founded in the heterogeneity of the elements that compose the
prestations and that compensate for the disequilibrium by displacing it.
In short, the detachments from the signifying chain, in accordance with
the relations of alliance, engender surplus values of code at the level
of the flows, whence are derived differences in status between the
filiative lines (for example, the superior or inferior ranks of the
givers and receivers of wives). The surplus value of code carries out
the diverse operations of the primitive territorial machine: detaching
segments from the chain, organizing selections from the flows, and
allocating the portions due each person.


The idea that primitive societies have no history, that they are
dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is especially weak and
inadequate. This idea was not conceived by ethnologists, but by
ideologists in the service of a tragic Judaeo-Christian consciousness
that they wished to credit with the “invention” of history. If what is
called history is a dynamic and open social reality, in a state of
functional disequilibrium, or an oscillating equilibrium, unstable and
always compensated, comprising not only institutionlized conflicts but
conflicts that generate changes, revolts, ruptures, and scissions, then
primitive societies are fully inside history, and far distant from the
stability, or even from the harmony, attributed to them in the name of a
primacy of a unanimous group. The presence of history in every social
machine plainly appears in the disharmonies that, as Lévi-Strauss says,
“bear the unmistakable stamp of time elapsed.”\footnote{* Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{Structural Anthropology}, trans. Claire Jacobs and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, Harper Torchbooks, 1963), p. 117. (\emph{Translators’ note:} The French reads: “la marque, impossible à méconnaître, de l’événement.” The above translation misses the impact of \emph{marque} [mark] and \emph{événement} [event].)} It is true that
there are several ways to interpret such disharmonies: ideally, by the
gap between the real institution and the assumed ideal model; morally,
by invoking a structural bond between law and transgression; physically,
as though it were a question of attrition that would cause the social
machine to lose its capacity to wield its materials. But here too it
seems that the correct interpretation would be, above all, actual and
functional: it is \emph{in order to function} that a social machine must \emph{not
function well}. This has been shown precisely with regard to the
segmentary system, which is always destined to reconstitute itself on
its own ruins; and likewise for the organization of the political
function in these systems, which in effect is exercised only by
indicating its own impotence.\footnote{Jeanne Favret, “La segmentarité au Maghreb,” \emph{L’Homme}, April 1966; Pierre Clastres, “Echange et pouvoir,” \emph{L’Homme}, January 1962.} Ethnologists are constantly saying
that kinship rules are neither applied nor applicable to real marriages:
not because these rules are ideal but rather because they determine
critical points where the apparatus starts up again—provided it is
blocked, and where it necessarily places itself in a negative relation
to the group. Here it becomes apparent that the social machine is
identical with the desiring-machine. The social machine’s limit is not
attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and
starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions.
The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to
function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of
cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a
disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a
habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises
they provoke, on the anxieties they \emph{engender}, and on the infernal
operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased
doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the
possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever
died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it
schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.


But this is already the point of view required—given a change of
perspective—for examining the primitive socius, the territorial machine
for declining alliances and filiations. This machine is \emph{segmentary}
because, through its double apparatus of tribe and lineage, it cuts up
segments of varying lengths: genealogical filiative units of major,
minor, and minimal lineages, with their hierarchy, their respective
chiefs, their elders who guard the stocks and organize marriages;
territorial tribal units of primary, secondary, and tertiary sections,
also having their dominant roles and their alliances. “The point of
separation between the tribal sections becomes the point of divergence
in the clan structure of the lineages associated with each section. For,
as we have seen, clans and their lineages are not distinct corporate
groups, but are embodied in local communities, through which they
function structurally.”\footnote{Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan,” in \emph{African Political Systems}, ed. Meyer Fortes and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 287.} The two systems intersect, each segment
being associated with the flows and the chains, with the stocked flows
and the passing flows, with selections from the flows and detachments
from the chains (certain production projects are executed in the
framework of the tribal system, others in the framework of the lineage
system). The variability and relativity of the segments are responsible
for all sorts of penetrations between the inalienable elements of
filiation and the mobile elements of alliance. This is explained by the
fact that the length of each segment—or even its existence as such—is
determined only by its opposition to other segments in a series of
interrelated stages. The segmentary machine mixes rivalries, conflicts,
and ruptures throughout the variations of filiation and the fluctuations
of alliance. The whole system evolves between two poles: that of fusion
through opposition to other groups, and that of scission through the
constant formation of new lineages aspiring to independence, with
capitalization of alliances and filiation. From one pole to the other,
all the misfirings and failures in a system that is constantly reborn of
its own disharmonies. What does Jeanne Favret mean when she shows, along
with other ethnologists, that “the persistence of a segmentary
organization requires paradoxically that its mechanisms be ineffectual
enough so that fear remains the motor of the whole”? And what is this
fear? It would appear that social formations experienced a morbid and
mournful foreboding of things to come, although what comes to them
always comes from without, rushing in through their opening. Perhaps it
is even for this reason that it arrives from without; they suffocate its
inner potentiality, at the cost of the dysfunctions that constitute an
integral part of the functioning of their system.


The segmentary territorial machine makes use of scission to exorcise
fusion, and impedes the concentration of power by maintaining the organs
of chieftainry in a relationship of impotence with the group: as though
the savages themselves sensed the rise of the imperial Barbarian, who
will come nonetheless from without and will overcode all their codes.
But the greatest danger would be yet another dispersion, a scission such
that all the possibilities of coding would be suppressed: decoded flows,
flowing on a blind, mute, deterritorialized socius—such is the nightmare
that the primitive social machine exorcises with all its forces, and all
its segmentary articulations. The primitive machine is not ignorant of
exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them,
cordons them off, encastes them, and maintains the merchant and the
blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that the flows of exchange and
the flows of production do not manage to break the codes in favor of
their abstract or fictional quantities. And isn’t that also what
Oedipus, the fear of incest, is about: the fear of a decoded flow? If
capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes
capitalism \emph{the negative} of all social formations. It is the thing, the
unnamable, the generalized decoding of flows that reveals \emph{a contrario}
the secret of all these formations, coding the flows, and even
overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding. Primitive
societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at
the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of
contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end. It cannot be
said that the previous formations did not foresee this Thing that only
came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be
prevented from rising. Whence the possibility of a retrospective reading
of all history in terms of capitalism. It is already possible to see
signs of classes in precapitalist societies. But ethnologists observe
how difficult it is to distinguish those protoclasses from the castes
organized by the imperial machine and from the rankings distributed by
the segmentary primitive machine. The criteria that distinguish classes,
castes, and ranks must not be sought in a fixity or a permeability, nor
in a relative closing or opening; these criteria always reveal
themselves to be deceptive, eminently misleading. But the ranks are
inseparable from the primitive territorial coding process, just as
castes are inseparable from the overcoding practiced by the imperial
State, while classes are relative to the process of an industrial and
commodity production decoded under the conditions of capitalism. All
history can therefore be read under the sign of classes, but by
observing the rules set forth by Marx, and bearing in mind that classes
are the “negative” of castes and ranks. For it is certain that the
régime of decoding does not signify the absence of organization, but
rather the most somber organization, the harshest compatibility, with
the axiomatic replacing the codes and incorporating them, always \emph{a
contrario}.

\section{3. The Problem of Oedipus}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-3}%


The full body of the earth is not without distinguishing
characteristics. Suffering and dangerous, unique, universal, it falls
back on production, on the agents and connections of production. But on
it, too, everything is attached and inscribed, everything is attracted,
miraculated. It is the basis of the disjunctive synthesis and its
reproduction: a pure force of filiation or genealogy, Numen. The full
body is the unengendered, but filiation is the first character of
inscription marked on this body. And we know the nature of this
intensive filiation, this inclusive disjunction where everything
divides, but into itself, and where the same being is everywhere, on
every side, at every level, \emph{differing only in intensity}. The same
included being traverses indivisible distances on the full body, and
passes through all the singularities, all the intensities of a synthesis
that shifts and reproduces itself. It serves no purpose to recall that
genealogical filiation is social rather than biological, for it is
necessarily biosocial inasmuch as it is inscribed on the cosmic egg of
the full body of the earth. It has a mythical origin that is the One, or
rather the primitive one-two. Should one say the twins or the twin?
Which divides and unites into itself—the Nommo, or the Nommos? The
disjunctive synthesis distributes the primordial ancestors, but each
member of the primitive community is himself a complete full body, male
and female, binding to itself all the partial objects, with variations
that are solely intensive, and that correspond to the internal zigzag of
the Dogon egg. Each one intensively repeats the entire genealogy for
himself. And everywhere it is the same, at both ends of the indivisible
distance and on every side, a litany of twins, an intense filiation. At
the beginning of \emph{Le renard pâle}, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen
sketch out a splendid theory of the sign: the signs of filiation,
guide-signs and master-signs, signs of desire, intensive at first, which
fall in a spiral and traverse a series of explosions before extending
into images, figures, and drawings.


If the full body falls back on the productive connections and inscribes
them in a network of intensive and inclusive disjunctions, it still has
to find again and reanimate lateral connections in the network itself,
and it must attribute them to itself as though it were their cause.
These are the two aspects of the full body: an enchanted surface of
inscription, the fantastic law, or the apparent objective movement; but
also a magical agent or fetish, the quasi cause. It is not content to
inscribe all things, it must act as if it produced them. It is necessary
that the connections reappear in a form compatible with the inscribed
disjunctions, even if they react in turn on the form of these
disjunctions. Such is alliance, the second characteristic of
inscription: alliance imposes on the productive connections the
extensive form of a pairing of persons, compatible with the disjunctions
of inscription, but inversely reacts on inscription by determining an
exclusive and restrictive use of these same disjunctions. It is
therefore inevitable that alliance be mythically represented as
supervening at a certain moment in the filiative lines (although in
another sense it is already there from time immemorial). Marcel Griaule
describes how, among the Dogons, something is produced at a certain
moment, at the level and on the side of the eighth ancestor: a
derailment of the disjunctions, which cease to be inclusive and become
exclusive. Once this occurs, there is a dismembering of the full body, a
canceling of twinness (\emph{la gémelléité}), a separation of the sexes
marked by circumcision, but also a recomposition of the body according
to a new model of connection or conjugation, an articulation of bodies
for and between themselves, a lateral inscription with articulatory
stones of alliance, in short, a whole \emph{ark} of alliance.\footnote{Marcel Griaule, \emph{Dieu d’eau} (Paris: Fayard, 1948), especially pp. 46–52.} Alliances
never derive from filiations, nor can they be deduced from them. But,
this principle once established, we must distinguish between two points
of view: the one economic and political, where alliance is there from
time immemorial, combining and declining itself with the extended
filiative lineages that do not exist prior to alliances in a system
assumed to be given in extended form; the other mythical, which shows
how the extension of a system takes form and delimits itself, proceeding
from intense and primordial filiative lineages that necessarily lose
their inclusive or nonrestrictive use. From this viewpoint the extended
system is like a memory of alliance and of words, implying an active
repression of the intense memory of filiation. For if genealogy and
filiations are the object of an ever vigilant memory, it is to the
degree that they are already apprehended in an extensive sense that they
certainly did not possess before the determinations of alliances
conferred it on them. On the contrary, as intensive filiations they
become the object of a separate memory, nocturnal and biocosmic—the
memory that indeed must suffer repression in order for the new extended
memory to be established.


We can better understand why the problem does not in the least consist
of going from filiations to alliances, or of deducing the latter from
the former. The problem is one of passing from an intensive energetic
order to an extensive system, which comprises both qualitative alliances
and extended filiations. Nothing is changed by the fact that the primary
energy of the intensive order—the Numen—is an energy of filiation, for
this intense filiation is not yet extended, and does not as yet comprise
any distinction of persons, nor even a distinction of sexes, but only
prepersonal variations in intensity, taking on the same twinness or
bisexuality in differing degrees. The signs belonging to this order are
therefore fundamentally neuter or ambiguous (according to an expression
employed by Leibnitz to designate a sign that can be + as well as −). It
is a question of knowing how, starting from this primary intensity, it
will be possible to pass to a system in extension where (1) the
filiations will be filiations extended in the form of lineages,
comprising distinctions of persons and of parental appellations; (2) the
alliances will be at the same time qualitative relations, which the
filiations presuppose as much as vice versa; (3) in short, the ambiguous
intense signs will cease to be ambiguous and will become positive or
negative.


This may be seen clearly in a passage from Lévi-Strauss, explaining for
the simple forms of marriage the prohibition of parallel cousins and the
approbation of cross-cousins: each marriage between two lines A and B
bears a (+) or (−) sign, according to whether this couple results from a
woman being lost to or acquired by line A or B. In this regard it is not
important whether the régime of filiation is patrilineal or matrilineal.
In a patrilineal or patrilocal régime, for example, “related women are
women lost; women brought in by marriage are women gained. Each family
descended from these marriages thus bears a sign, which is determined,
for the initial group, by whether the children’s mother is a daughter or
a daughter-in-law\dots{}. The sign changes in passing from the brother to the
sister, since the brother gains a wife, while the sister is lost to her
own family.” But, as Lévi-Strauss remarks, one also changes signs \emph{in
passing from one generation to the next}: “It depends upon whether, from
the initial group’s point of view, the father has received a wife, or
the mother has been transferred outside, whether the sons have the right
to a woman or owe a sister. Certainly, in real life this difference does
not mean that half the male cousins are destined to remain bachelors.
However, at all events, it does express the law that a man cannot
receive a wife except from the group from which a woman can be claimed,
because in the previous generation a sister or a daughter was lost,
while a brother owes a sister (or a father, a daughter) to the outside
world if a woman was gained in the previous generation\dots{}. The
pivot-couple, formed by an A man married to a B woman, obviously has two
signs, according to whether it is envisaged from the viewpoint of A, or
that of B, and the same is true for children. It is now only necessary
to look at the cousins’ generation to establish that all those in the
relationship (++) or (−−) are parallel to one another, while all those
in the relationship (+−) or (−+) are cross.”\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 130–31.}


But once the problem is put in this way, it is less a question of
applying a logical combinative apparatus governing an interplay of
exchanges, as Lévi-Strauss would have it, than one of establishing a
physical system that will express itself naturally in terms of debts. It
seems to us very significant that Lévi-Strauss himself invokes the
co-ordinates of a physical system, although he sees this as nothing more
than a metaphor. In the physical system in extension, something passes
**through* that is of the nature of an energy flow (+− or −+), \emph{something
does not pass or remains blocked} (++ or −−), and something blocks, or
on the contrary causes, passage. Something or someone. In this system in
extension there is no primary filiation, nor is there a first generation
or an initial exchange, but there are always and already alliances, at
the same time as the filiations are extended, expressing both what must
remain blocked in the filiation and what must pass through in the
alliance.


The essential is not that the signs change according to the sexes and
the generations, but that one passes from the intensive to the
extensive, that is to say, from an order of ambiguous signs to an order
of signs that are changing but determined. It is here that resorting to
myth is indispensable, not because the myth would be a transposed or
even an inverse representation of real relations in extension, but
because only the myth can determine the intensive conditions of the
system (the system of production included) in conformity with indigenous
thought and practice. That is why a text of Marcel Griaule’s, which
looks to myth for a principle that would explain the avunculate, seems
decisive to us, and seems to avoid the reproach of idealism that usually
greets this kind of attempt. We have a similar view of the recent
article in which Adler and Cartry return to the question.\footnote{Marcel Griaule, “Remarques sur l’oncle utérin au Soudan,” \emph{Cahiers internationaux de sociologie}, January 1954. Alfred Adler and Michel Cartry, “La transgression et sa dérision,” \emph{L’Homme}, July 1971.} These
authors are right in remarking that Lévi-Strauss’s kinship atom—with its
four relationships: brother-sister, husband-wife, father-son, maternal
uncle-sister’s son—presents itself as a ready-made whole from which the
mother as such is strangely excluded, although, depending on the
circumstances, she can be more or less a “kinswoman” or more or less an
“affine” in relation to her children. Now this is indeed where the myth
takes root, the myth that does not express but conditions. As Griaule
relates it, the Yourougou, breaking into the piece of placenta he has
stolen, is like the brother of his mother, with whom he is united by
that fact: “This individual went away into the distance carrying with
him a part of the nourishing placenta, which is to say a part of his own
mother. He saw this organ as his own and as forming a part of his own
person, in such a way that he identified himself with the one who gave
birth to him. She was the matrix of the world, and he considered himself
to be placed \emph{on the same plane as she from the viewpoint of the
generations}\dots{}. He senses unconsciously his symbolic membership in his
mother’s generation and his detachment from the real generation of which
he is a member\dots{}. Being, according to him, \emph{of the same substance and
generation as his mother}, he likens himself to a male twin of his
genetrix, and the mythical rule of the union of two paired members
proposes him as the ideal husband. Hence, in his capacity as pseudo
brother to his genetrix, he should be in the position of his maternal
uncle, the designated husband of this woman.”\footnote{Griaule, “Remarques sur l’oncle utérin au Soudan.”}


Doubtless all the dramatis personae will be found to come into play from
this point on: mother, father, son, mother’s brother, son’s sister. But
it is evident and striking that these are not persons. Their names do
not designate persons, but rather the intensive variations of a
“vibratory spiraling movement,” inclusive disjunctions, necessarily twin
states through which a subject passes on the cosmic egg. Everything must
be interpreted in intensity. The egg and the placenta itself, swept by
an unconscious life energy “susceptible to augmentation and diminution.”
The father is in no way absent. But Amma, the father and genitor, is
himself a high intensive part, immanent to the placenta, inseparable
from the twinness, which relates him to his feminine part. And if the
Yourougou son carries away a part of the placenta in his turn, it is in
an intensive relationship with another part that contains his own sister
or twin sister. But, aiming too high, the part he carries away makes him
the sister of his mother, who eminently replaces the sister, and to whom
he becomes united by replacing Amma. In short, a whole world of
ambiguous signs, included divisions and bisexual states. I am the son,
and also my mother’s brother and my sister’s husband and my own father.
Everything rests on the placenta, which has become the earth, the
unengendered, the full body of antiproduction where the organs-partial
objects of a sacrificed Nommo are attached. It is because the placenta,
as a substance common to the mother and the child, a common part of
their bodies, makes it such that these bodies are not like cause and
effect, but are both products derived from this same substance, in
relation to which the son is his mother’s twin: such is indeed the axis
of the Dogon myth related by Griaule. Yes, I have been my mother and I
have been my son. It is rare that one sees myth and science saying the
same thing from such a great distance: the Dogon narrative develops a
mythical Weismannism, where the germinative plasma forms an immortal and
continuous lineage that does not depend on bodies; on the contrary, the
bodies of the parents as well as the children depend on it. Whence the
distinction between two lines, the one continuous and germinal, but the
other discontinuous and somatic, it alone being subjected to a
succession of generations. (T.D. Lysenko employed a naturally Dogon
tone, turning it back against Weismann, to reproach him for making the
son the genetic or germinal brother of the mother: “The
Morganists-Mendelians, following Weismann, start from the idea that the
parents are not genetically the parents of their children; if we are to
believe their doctrine, parents and children are brothers and
sisters.”\footnote{T.D. Lysenko, \emph{La situation dans la science biologique}, French edition (Moscow, 1949), p. 16.})


But the son is not somatically his mother’s brother and twin. That is
why he cannot marry her (bearing in mind what we said earlier to be the
meaning of “that is why”). The one who should have married the mother
was therefore the maternal uncle. The first consequence of this is that
incest with the sister is not a substitute for incest with the mother,
but on the contrary the intensive model of incest as a manifestation of
the germinal lineage. Then again, Hamlet is not an extension of Oedipus,
an Oedipus to the second degree; on the contrary, a negative or inverse
Hamlet is primary in relation to Oedipus. The subject does not reproach
the uncle for having done what he himself wanted to do; he reproaches
him for \emph{not} having done what he the son could not do. And why didn’t
the uncle marry the mother, his somatic sister? Because he \emph{must} not,
except in the name of this germinal filiation, marked by ambiguous signs
of twinness and bisexuality, according to which the son \emph{could have}
done it as well, and could have been himself this uncle in an intense
relationship with the mother-twin. The vicious circle of the germinal
lineage closes (the primitive double bind): neither can the uncle marry
his sister, the mother, nor from that moment can the son marry his own
sister—the Yourougou female twin will be delivered over to the Nommos as
a potential affine. The somatic order causes the whole intensive scale
to collapse again. Actually, if the son cannot marry his mother, it is
not because he is somatically from a different generation. Arguing
against Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated convincingly that the
mixing of generations was not in the least feared as such, and that the
incest prohibition could not be explained in this manner.\footnote{\emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, pp. 485–88.} This is
because the mixing of the generations in the son-mother case has the
same effect as their correspondence in the case of the uncle-sister,
that is, it testifies to one and the same intensive germinal filiation
that must be repressed in both cases. In short, a somatic system in
extension can constitute itself only insofar as the filiations become
extended, correlatively to lateral alliances that become established. It
is through the prohibition of incest with the sister that the lateral
alliance is sealed, it is through the prohibition of incest with the
mother that the filiation becomes extended. There we find no repression
of the father, no foreclosure of the name of the father. The respective
position of the mother or father as kin or affine, the patrilineal or
matrilineal character of the filiation, and the patrilateral or
matrilateral character of the marriage, are active elements of the
repression, and not objects at which the repression is directed. It is
not even the memory of filiation in general that is repressed by a
memory of alliance. It is the great nocturnal memory of the intensive
germinal filiation that is repressed for the sake of an extensive
somatic memory, created from filiations that have become extended
(patrilineal \emph{or} matrilineal) and from the alliances that they imply.
The entire Dogon mythology is a patrilineal version of the opposition
between the two genealogies and the two filiations: in intensity and in
extension, the intense germinal order and the extensive régime of the
somatic generations.


The system in extension is born of the intensive conditions that make it
possible, but it reacts on them, cancels them, represses them, and
allows them no more than a mythical expression. The signs cease to be
ambiguous at the same time as they are determined in relation to the
extended filiations and the lateral alliances: the disjunctions become
exclusive, restrictive (the “either\Slash{}or else” replaces the intense
“either \dots{} or \dots{} or\dots{}”); the names, the appellations no longer designate
intensive states, but discernible persons. Discernibility settles on the
sister and the mother as prohibited spouses. The reason is that persons,
with the names that now designate them, do not exist prior to the
prohibitions that constitute them as such. Mother and sister do not
exist prior to their prohibition as spouses. Robert Jaulin says it well:
“The mythical discourse has as its theme the passage from indifference
to incest to its prohibition. Implicit or explicit, this theme underlies
all the myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language.”\footnote{Robert Jaulin, \emph{La mort sara} (Paris: Plon, 1967), p. 284.}
We must conclude that, strictly speaking, incest does not and cannot
exist. We are always on this side of incest, in a series of intensities
that is ignorant of discernible persons; or else beyond incest, in an
extension that recognizes them, that constitutes them, but that does not
constitute them without rendering them impossible as sexual partners.
One can commit incest only after a series of substitutions that always
moves us away from it, that is to say, with a person who is equivalent
to the mother or the sister only by virtue of not being either: she who
is discernible as a possible spouse. Such is the meaning of preferential
marriage: the first incest that is permitted. But it is not by chance
that this kind of marriage rarely occurs, as though it were still too
close to the nonexistent impossible (for example, the preferential Dogon
marriage with the uncle’s daughter, she being equivalent to the aunt,
who is herself equivalent to the mother).


Griaule’s article is without doubt the text most profoundly inspired by
psychoanalysis in the whole of anthropology. Yet it leads to conclusions
that cause the whole of Oedipus to shatter, because it is not content to
pose the problem in extension, thereby assuming its solution. These are
the conclusions drawn by Adler and Cartry: “It is customary to consider
incestuous relations in myth either as the expression of the desire or
the nostalgia for a world where such relations would be possible or
would meet with indifference, or as the expression of a structural
function of the inversion of the social rule, a function destined to
found the prohibition and its transgression\dots{}. In both instances, one
takes as something already constituted what is in fact the emergence of
an order that the myth narrates and explains. In other words, one
reasons as if the myth placed on the stage persons defined as father,
mother, brother, and sister, whereas these roles belong to the order
constituted by the prohibition\dots{}: \emph{incest does not exist}.”\footnote{* Adler and Cartry (see reference note 13 [19 in this version]). Jacques Derrida wrote, in a commentary of Rousseau: “Before the feast there was no incest because there was no prohibition of incest. After the feast there is no longer any incest because it is prohibited\dots{}. The feast \emph{itself} would be the incest \emph{itself} if any such thing—\emph{itself}—could take place” (\emph{De la grammatologie} [see reference note 53 [69 in this version]], pp. 372–77).} Incest
is a pure limit. Provided that two false beliefs concerning the limit
are avoided: one that makes the limit a matrix or an origin, as though
the prohibition proved that the thing was “first” desired as such;
another that makes the limit a structural function, as though the
supposedly “fundamental” relationship between desire and law were
manifested in transgression. It is necessary to recall once more that
the law proves nothing about an original reality of desire because it
essentially disfigures the desired; and that the trangression proves
nothing about a functional reality of the law because, far from being a
mockery of the law, it is itself derisory in relation to what the law
prohibits in reality (the reason why revolutions have nothing to do with
transgressions). In short, the limit is neither a this-side-of nor a
beyond: it is the boundary line between the two—\emph{Incest, that slandered
shallow stream}—always crossed already or not yet crossed. For incest is
like this motion, it is impossible. And it is not impossible in the same
sense that the Real would be impossible, but quite the contrary, in the
sense that the Symbolic is.


But what does it mean to say that incest is impossible? Isn’t it
possible to go to bed with one’s sister or mother? And how do we
dispense with the old argument: it must be possible since it is
prohibited? The problem lies elsewhere. The possibility of incest would
require \emph{both persons and names}—son, sister, mother, brother, father.
Now in the incestuous act we can have persons at our disposal, but they
lose their names inasmuch as these names are inseparable from the
prohibition that proscribes them as partners; or else the names subsist,
and designate nothing more than prepersonal intensive states that could
just as well “extend” to other persons, as when one calls his legitimate
wife “mama,” or one’s sister his wife. It is in this sense that we said
we are always on this side of it or beyond. Our mothers and our sisters
melt in our arms; their names slide on their persons like a stamp that
is too wet. This is because one can never enjoy the person and the name
at the same time—yet this would be the condition for incest. Granted,
incest is a lure, it is impossible. But the problem is only deferred. Is
that not the nature of desire, that one desires the impossible? At least
in this instance, the platitude is not even true. We are reminded how
illegitimate it is to conclude from the prohibition anything regarding
the nature of what is prohibited; for the prohibition proceeds by
dishonoring the guilty, that is to say, by inducing a disfigured or
displaced image of the thing that is really prohibited or desired.
Indeed, this is how social repression prolongs itself by means of a
psychic repression without which it would have no grip on desire. What
is desired is the intense germinal or germinative flow, where one would
look in vain for persons or even functions discernible as father,
mother, son, sister, etc., since these names only designate intensive
variations on the full body of the earth determined as the germen. It is
always possible to use the term incest, as well as indifference to
incest, for this régime composed of one and the same being or flow,
varying in intensity according to inclusive disjunctions. But that is
precisely the problem; one cannot confound incest as it would be in this
intensive nonpersonal régime that would institute it, with incest as
represented in extension in the state that prohibits it, and that
defines it as a transgression against persons. Jung is therefore
entirely correct in saying that the Oedipus complex signifies something
altogether different from itself, and that in the Oedipal relation the
mother is also the earth, and incest is an infinite renaissance. (He is
wrong only in thinking that he has thus “transcended” sexuality.) The
**somatic complex* refers to a \emph{germinal implex}. Incest refers to a
this-side-of that cannot be represented as such in the complex, since
the complex is an element derived from this this-side-of. Incest as it
is prohibited (the form of discernible persons) is employed to repress
incest as it is desired (the substance of the intense earth). The
intensive germinal flow is the representative of desire; it is against
this flow that the repression is directed. The extensive Oedipal figure
is its displaced represented (\emph{le représenté déplacé}), the lure or fake
image, born of repression, that comes to conceal desire. It matters
little that this image is “impossible”: it does its work from the moment
that desire lets itself be caught as though by the impossible itself.
You see, \emph{that} is what you wanted! However it is this conclusion, going
directly from the repression to the repressed, and from the prohibition
to the prohibited, that already implies the whole paralogism of social
repression.


But why is the germinal implex or influx repressed, since it is
nevertheless the territorial representative of desire? Because the thing
it refers to, in its capacity as representative, is a flow that would
not be codable, that would not let itself be coded—specifically, the
terror of the primitive socius. No chain could be detached, nothing
could be selected; nothing would pass from filiation to descent, but
descent would be perpetually reduced to filiation in the act of
re-engendering oneself; the signifying chain would not form any code, it
would only emit ambiguous signs and be perpetually eroded by its own
energetic support; what would flow on the full body of the earth would
be as unfettered as the noncoded flows that shift and slide on the
desert of a body without organs. For it is less a question of abundance
or scarcity, of a spring or the exhaustion of a spring (even the drying
up of a spring is a flow), than of what is codable or noncodable. The
germinal flow is such that it amounts to the same to say that everything
would pass or flow with it, or on the contrary, that everything would be
blocked. For the flows to be codable, their energy must allow itself to
be quantified and qualified; it is necessary that selections from the
flows be made in relation to detachments from the chain: something must
pass through but something must also be blocked, and something must
block and cause to pass through. Now this is possible only in the system
in extension that renders persons discernible, that makes a determinate
use of signs, an exclusive use of the disjunctive syntheses, and a
conjugal use of the connective syntheses. Such is indeed the meaning of
the incest prohibition conceived as the establishment of a physical
system in extension: one must look in each case for the part of the flow
of intensity that passes through, for what does not pass, and for what
causes passage or prevents it, according to the patrilateral or
matrilateral nature of the marriages, according to the patrilineal or
matrilineal nature of the lineages, according to the general régime of
the extended filiations and the lateral alliances.


Let us return to the Dogon preferential marriage as analyzed by Griaule:
what is blocked is the relationship with the aunt as a substitute for
the mother, in the form of a make-believe parent; what passes through is
the relationship with the aunt’s daughter as a substitute for the aunt,
as the first possible or permitted incest; what does the blocking of
causes passage is the maternal uncle. What passes through leads to—as
compensation for what is blocked—a veritable \emph{surplus value of code},
which falls to the uncle insofar as he causes passage, while he suffers
a kind of “minus value” insofar as he does the blocking (thus the ritual
thefts perpetrated by the nephews in the uncle’s house, but also, as
Griaule says, “the augmentation and fructification” of the uncle’s
possessions when the oldest of the nephews comes to live with him). The
fundamental problem—who has the right to the matrimonial prestations in
a given system?—cannot be resolved independently of the lines of passage
and the lines of blockage, as if what was blocked or prohibited
reappeared “in marriages in spectral form,”\footnote{Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, p. 309. Lévi-Strauss analyzes cases, abnormal or paradoxical on the surface, of beneficiaries of matrimonial prestations.} coming to demand its
due. Löffler writes of a specific case: “Among the Mru, the patrilineal
model predominates over the matrilineal tradition: the brother-sister
relationship, which is transmitted from father to son and from mother to
daughter, can be transmitted indefinitely through the father-son
relationship, but not through the mother-daughter relationship, which
terminates with the daughter’s marriage. A married daughter transmits to
her own daughter a new relationship, namely that which joins her to her
own brother. At the same time, a daughter who marries becomes detached
not from her brother’s line, but solely from that of her mother’s
brother. The significance of the payments to the mother’s brother upon
the marriage of his niece can be understood only in the following way:
the girl leaves the previous family group, to which her mother belongs.
The niece becomes herself a mother and the point of departure for a new
brother-sister relationship, on which a new alliance is founded.”\footnote{Löffier, “L’alliance asymétrique chez les Mru,” p. 80.}
What is prolonged, what comes to a halt, what is detached, and the
different relationships according to which these actions and passions
are distributed, help us to understand the formation mechanism of the
surplus value of code as an indispensable element of any coding of
flows.


We are now able to outline the various instances of \emph{territorial
representation} in the primitive socius. In the first place, the
germinal influx of intensity conditions all representation: it is the
**representative* of desire. But if it is termed representative, this is
because it is equivalent to the noncodable, noncoded, or decoded flows.
In this sense it implies, in its own way, the socius’s limit, the limit
or the negative of every socius; the repression of this limit is
possible only to the extent that the representative itself undergoes a
repression. This repression determines what part of the influx will pass
through and what will not in the system in extension, what will remain
blocked or stocked in the extended filiations, and on the contrary, what
will move and flow following the relations of alliance, in such a way
that the systematic coding of the flows will be carried out. We call
this second instance—the \emph{repressing representation} itself—alliance,
since the filiations become extended only in terms of lateral alliances
that measure their variable segments. Whence the importance of these
“local lines” that Leach has identified and which, two by two, organize
the alliances and arrange (\emph{machine}) the marriages. When we ascribed to
them a perverse-normal activity, we meant that these local groups were
the agents of repression, the great coders. Wherever men meet and
assemble to take wives for themselves, to negotiate for them, to share
them, etc., one recognizes the perverse tie of a primary homosexuality
between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood
partners.


Underlining the universal fact that marriage is not an alliance between
a man and a woman, but “an alliance between two families,” “a
transaction between men concerning women,” Georges Devereux drew the
correct conclusion of a basic homosexual motivation of a group
character.\footnote{Georges Devereux, “Considérations ethnopsychanalytiques sur la notion de parenté,” \emph{L’Homme}, July 1965.} Through women, men establish their own connections;
through the man-woman disjunction, which is always the outcome of
filiation, alliance places in connection men from different filiations.
The question why a female homosexuality hasn’t given rise to Amazon
groups capable of negotiating for men perhaps finds its reply in women’s
affinity with the germinal influx, resulting in the enclosed position of
women in the midst of extended filiations (filiation hysteria as opposed
to alliance paranoia). Male homosexuality is therefore the
representation of alliance that represses the ambiguous signs of intense
bisexual filiation. However, Devereux seems to us to be wrong on two
occasions. First, when he admits having recoiled too long before this—so
serious (he says)—discovery of a homosexual representation (there we
merely see a primitive version of the formula “All men are homosexuals,”
and to be sure, they are never more so than when they arrange
marriages). Then again—and this is his most serious error when he wants
to make of this homosexuality of alliance a product of the Oedipus
complex as something repressed. Alliance can never be deduced from the
lines of filiation through the intermediary of Oedipus; on the contrary,
alliance articulates them, impelled by the action of the local lines and
their non-oedipal primary homosexuality. And if it is true that there
exists an Oedipal or filiative homosexuality, this should be understood
merely as a secondary reaction to this group homosexuality, non-oedipal
at first.


As for Oedipus in general, it is not the repressed—that is, the
representative of desire, which is on this side of and completely
ignorant of daddy-mommy. Nor is it the repressing representation, which
is beyond, and which renders the persons discernible only by subjecting
them to the homosexual rules of alliance. Incest is only the retroactive
effect of the repressing representation on the repressed representative:
the representation disfigures or displaces this representative against
which it is directed; it projects onto the representative, categories,
rendered discernible, that it has itself established; it applies to the
representative terms that did not exist before the alliance organized
the positive and the negative into a system in extension—the
representation reduces the representative to what is blocked in this
system. Hence Oedipus is indeed the limit, but the displaced limit that
now passes into the interior of the socius. Oedipus is the baited image
with which desire allows itself to be caught (\emph{That’s} what you wanted!
The decoded flows were incest!). Then a long story begins, the story of
oedipalization. But to be exact, everything begins in the mind of Laius,
the old group homosexual, the pervert, who sets a trap for desire. For
desire is that, too: a trap. Territorial representation comprises these
three instances: the \emph{repressed representative}, \emph{the repressing
representation}, and the \emph{displaced represented}.

\section{4. Psychoanalysis and Ethnology}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-4}%


We are moving too fast, acting as if Oedipus were already installed
within the savage territorial machine. However, as Nietzsche says with
regard to bad conscience, such a plant does not grow on that kind of
terrain. This is explained by the fact that the necessary conditions for
Oedipus as a “familial complex,” existing in the framework of the
familialism suited to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, are obviously not
present. Primitive families constitute a praxis, a politics, a strategy
of alliances and filiations; formally, they are the driving elements of
social reproduction; they have nothing to do with an expressive
microcosm; in these families the father, the mother, and the sister
always also function as something other than father, mother, or sister.
And in addition to the father, the mother, etc., there is the affine,
who constitutes the active, concrete reality and makes the relations
between families coextensive with the social field. It would not even be
exact to say that the family determinations burst apart at every corner
of this field and remain attached to strictly social determinations,
since both kinds of determinations form one and the same component in
the territorial machine. Since familial reproduction is not yet a simple
means, or a material at the service of a social reproduction of another
nature, there is no possibility of reducing (\emph{rabattre sur}) social
reproduction to familial reproduction, nor is it possible to establish
one-to-one relations between the two that would confer on any familial
complex whatever an expressive value and an apparent autonomous form. On
the contrary, it is evident that the individual in the family, however
young, directly invests a social, historical, economic, and political
field that is not reducible to any mental structure or affective
constellation. That is why, when one considers pathological cases and
processes of cure in primitive societies, it seems to us entirely
insufficient to compare them with psychoanalytic procedure by relating
them to criteria borrowed from the latter: for example, a familial
complex, even if it differs from our own, or cultural material (\emph{des
contenus culturels}), even if it is brought into relation with an ethnic
unconscious—as seen in attempted parallelisms between the psychoanalytic
cure and the shamanistic cure (Devereux, Lévi-Strauss). Our definition
of schizoanalysis focused on two aspects: the destruction of the
expressive pseudo forms of the unconscious, and the discovery of
desire’s unconscious investments of the social field. It is from this
point of view that we must consider many primitive cures; they are
schizoanalysis in action.


Victor Turner gives a remarkable example of such a cure among the
Ndembu.\footnote{Victor W. Turner, “Magic, Faith, and Healing,” in \emph{An Ndembu Doctor in Practice} (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1964).} The example is the more striking—to our perverted eyes—for
the fact that, at first glance, everything appears Oedipal. Effeminate,
insufferable, vain, failing at everything he tries, the sick K is preyed
upon by the ghost of his maternal grandfather, who cruelly reproaches
him. Although the Ndembu are matrilineal and must live with their
maternal kin, K has stayed an exceptionally long time in the
matrilineage of his father, whose favorite he was, and has entered into
marriage with paternal cousins. But with the death of his father he is
driven away, and returns to the maternal village. There his house
expresses his situation well, being wedged between two sectors, the
houses of the members of the paternal group and those belonging to his
own matrilineage. How does the divination, responsible for indicating
the cause of the illness, proceed, and the medical cure responsible for
treating it? The teeth are the cause, the two top incisors of the
ancestor hunter, contained in a sacred pouch, but which can escape from
the pouch and penetrate the body of the sick man. In order to diagnose
and ward off the effects of the incisor, the soothsayer and the medicine
man launch into a social analysis concerning the territory and its
environs, the chieftainship and its subchieftainships, the lineages and
their segments, the alliances and the filiations: they constantly bring
to light desire in its relations with political and economic units—the
very point on which, moreover, the witnesses try to mislead them.
“Divination becomes a form of social analysis in the course of which
hidden struggles between individuals and factions are brought to light,
in such a way that they can be treated by traditional ritual methods\dots{},
the vague nature of mystical beliefs allowing them to be manipulated in
relation to a great number of social situations.” It seems that the
pathological incisor is indeed mainly that of the maternal grandfather.
But the latter was a great chief; his successor, the “real chief,” had
had to relinquish the throne for fear of being bewitched, and his
would-be heir, intelligent and ambitious, does not exercise the power;
the actual chief is not the real chief, as for the sick K, he has not
been able to assume the role of mediator that could have made him a
candidate for chief. Everything becomes complicated because of the
colonizer-colonized relations: the English have not recognized the
chieftainship; the impoverished village is falling into decrepitude (the
two sectors of the village result from a fusion of two groups that have
fled the English; the elders bemoan the current decadence). The medicine
man does not organize a sociodrama, but a veritable group analysis
centering on the sick individual. Giving him potions, attaching horns to
his body for drawing up the incisor, making the drums beat, the medicine
man proceeds with a ceremony interrupted by halts and fresh departures,
flows of all sorts, flows of words and breaks: the members of the
village come to talk, the sick subject talks, the ghost is invoked, the
medicine man explains, everything recommences, drums, chants, trances.
It is not only a question of discovering the preconscious investments of
a social field by interests, but—more profoundly—its unconscious
investments by desire, such as they pass by way of the sick person’s
marriages, his position in the village, and all the positions of a chief
lived in intensity within the group.


We said that the point of departure seemed Oedipal. It was only the
point of departure \emph{for us}, conditioned to say Oedipus every time
someone speaks to us of father, mother, grandfather. In fact, the Ndembu
analysis was never Oedipal: it was directly plugged into social
organization and disorganization; sexuality itself, through the women
and the marriages, was just such an investment of desire; the parents
played the role of stimuli in it, and not the role of group organizers
(or disorganizers)—the role held by the chief and his personages. Rather
than everything being reduced to the name of the father, or that of the
maternal grandfather, the latter opened onto all the names of history.
Instead of everything being projected onto a grotesque hiatus of
castration, everything was scattered in the thousand breaks-flows of the
chieftainships, the lineages, the relations of colonization. The whole
interplay of races, clans, alliances, and filiations, this entire
historical and collective drift: exactly the opposite of the Oedipal
analysis, when it stubbornly crushes the content of a delirium, when it
stuffs it with all its might into “the symbolic void of the father.” Or
rather, if it is true that the analysis doesn’t even begin as Oedipal,
except to our way of seeing, doesn’t it become Oedipal nevertheless, in
a certain way—and in what way? Yes, it becomes Oedipal in part, under
the effect of colonization. The colonizer, for example, abolishes the
chieftainship, or uses it to further his own ends (and he uses many
other things besides: the chieftainship is only a beginning). The
colonizer says: your father is your father and nothing else, or your
maternal grandfather—don’t mistake them for chiefs; you can go have
yourself triangulated in your corner, and place your house between those
of your paternal and maternal kin; your family is your family and
nothing else; sexual reproduction no longer passes through those points,
although we rightly need your family to furnish a material that will be
subjected to a new order of reproduction. Yes, then, an Oedipal
framework is outlined for the dispossessed primitives: a shantytown
Oedipus. We have seen, however, that the colonized remained a typical
example of resistance to Oedipus: in fact, that’s where the Oedipal
structure does not manage to close itself, and where the terms of the
structure remained stuck to the agents of oppressive social
reproduction, either in a struggle or in a complicity: the White Man,
the missionary, the tax collector, the exporter of goods, the person
with standing in the village who becomes the agent of the
administration, the elders who curse the White Man, the young people who
enter into a political struggle, etc. Both are true: the colonized
resists oedipalization, and oedipalization tends to close around him
again. To the degree that there is oedipalization, it is due to
colonization, and it is necessary to add oedipalization to all the
methods that Jaulin was able to describe in \emph{La paix blanche}. “The
condition of the colonized can lead to a reduction in the humanization
of the universe, so that any solution that is sought will be a solution
on the scale of the individual and the restricted family, with, by way
of consequence, an extreme anarchy or disorder at the level of the
collective: an anarchy whose victim will always be the individual—with
the exception of those who occupy the key positions in such a system,
namely the colonizers, who, during this same period when the colonized
reduce the universe, will tend to extend it.”\footnote{* Robert Jaulin, \emph{La paix blanche: introduction à l’ethnocide} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 309. Jaulin analyzes the situation of those Indians whom the Capucines “persuaded” to abandon the collective house in favor of “small personal houses” (pp. 391–400). In the collective house the familial apartment and personal intimacy were based on a relationship with the neighbor defined as an \emph{ally}, so that interfamilial relations were coextensive with the social field. In the new situation, on the contrary, “there occurred an excessive ferment of the elements of the couple affecting the couple itself” and the children, so that the restrictive family closes into an expressive microcosm where each person reflects his own lineage while the social and productive destiny (\emph{devenir}) escapes him more and more. For Oedipus is not only an ideological process, but the result of a destruction of the environment, the habitat, etc.} Oedipus is something
like euthanasia within ethnocide. The more social reproduction escapes
the members of the group, in nature and in extension, the more it falls
back on them, or reduces them to a restricted and neuroticized familial
reproduction whose agent is Oedipus.


After all, how are we to understand those who claim to have discovered
an Indian Oedipus or an African Oedipus? They are the first to admit
that they re-encounter \emph{none} of the mechanisms or attitudes that
constitute our own Oedipus (our own presumed Oedipus). No matter, they
say that the structure is there, although it has no existence whatever
that is “accessible to clinical practice”; or that the problem, the
point of departure, is indeed Oedipal, although the developments and the
solutions are completely different from ours (Parin, Ortigues). They say
that “there is no end to the existence of this Oedipus,” when in fact it
does not even have (apart from colonization) the necessary conditions to
begin to exist. If it is true that thought can be evaluated in terms of
the degree of oedipalization, then yes, whites think too much. The
competence, the honesty, and the talent of these authors—psychoanalysts
specializing in Africa—are beyond question. But the same applies to them
as to certain psychotherapists here: it would seem that they don’t know
what they are doing. We have psychotherapists who sincerely believe they
are engaged in progressive work when they apply new methods for
triangulating the child: but watch out—a structural Oedipus, and this
time it isn’t imaginary! The same is true of the psychoanalysts in
Africa who apply the yoke of a structural or “problematical” Oedipus, in
the service of their progressive intentions. There or here, it’s the
same thing: Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is
the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we
Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education.


How are we to understand the phrases with which M. C. and Edmond
Ortigues conclude their book? “Illness is considered as a sign of an
election, of a special attention coming from supernatural powers, or as
a sign of an aggression of a magical nature, an idea that is difficult
to express in profane terms. Analytic psychotherapy can intervene only
starting from the moment a demand can be formulated by the subject. Our
entire research was therefore conditioned by the possibility of
establishing a psychoanalytic domain. When a subject adhered fully to
the traditional norms and had nothing to say in his own name, he allowed
himself to be taken into the care of the traditional therapists and the
familial group, or into that of the medical practice of ‘medicines.’ At
times, the fact that he wanted to speak to us about traditional
treatments corresponded to a beginning of psychotherapy and became for
him a means of situating himself personally in his own society\dots{}. At
other times, the analytic dialogue was able to unfold to a greater
extent, and in this case the Oedipal problem tended to assume its
diachronic dimension, causing the generation gap to appear.”\footnote{M. C. and Edmond Ortigues, \emph{Oedipe africain} (Paris: Plon, 1966), p. 305.} Why
think that supernatural powers and magical aggressions constitute a myth
that is inferior to Oedipus? On the contrary, is it not true that they
move desire in the direction of more intense and more adequate
investments of the social field, in its organization as well as its
disorganizations? Meyer Fortes at least showed Job’s place beside
Oedipus. And what entitles one to determine that the subject has nothing
to say in his own name so long as he adheres to the traditional norms?
Doesn’t the Ndembu cure demonstrate just the opposite? Could it not be
said that Oedipus is also a traditional norm—our own, to be exact? How
can one say that Oedipus makes us speak in our own name, when one also
goes on to say that its resolution teaches us “the incurable inadequacy
of being” and universal castration? And what is this “demand” that is
invoked to justify Oedipus? It goes without saying, the subject demands
and redemands daddy-mommy: but which subject, and in what state? Is that
the means “to situate oneself personally in one’s own society”? And
which society? The neocolonized society that is constructed for the
subject, and that finally succeeds in what colonization was only able to
outline: an effective reduction of the forces of desire to Oedipus, to a
father’s name, in the grotesque triangle?


Let us return to the well-known and inexhaustible debate between
culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts: Is Oedipus universal? Is
Oedipus the great paternal catholic symbol, the meeting place of all the
churches? The debate began between Malinowski and Jones, it continued
between Kardiner and Fromm on one side, and Roheim on the other. It is
still pursued between certain ethnologists and certain disciples of
Lacan—those who offered not only an oedipalizing interpretation of
Lacan’s doctrine, but also an ethnographic extension to this
interpretation. On the side of the universal there are two poles:
one—outdated, it would seem—that makes of Oedipus an original affective
constellation, and that constitutes an extreme position arguing that
Oedipus was a real event whose effects were transmitted through
phylogenetic heredity. And the other pole, which makes Oedipus into a
structure, a pole whose extreme position argues the possibility of
discovering the structure in fantasy, in relation to biological
prematuration and neoteny. Two very different conceptions of the limit,
one as original matrix, the other as structural function. But in both
these senses of the universal, we are invited to “interpret,” since the
latent presence of Oedipus appears only through its patent absence,
understood as an effect of psychic repression—or, better still, since
the structural constant is discovered only through its imaginary
variations, attesting to the need for a symbolic foreclosure (the father
as an empty position). Oedipus-as-universal recommences the old
metaphysical operation that consists in interpreting negation as a
deprivation, as a lack: the symbolic lack of the dead father, or the
Great Signifier. Interpretation is our modern way of believing and of
being pious. Already Geza Roheim proposed organizing primitives into a
series of variables converging toward the structural neotenic
constant.\footnote{Geza Roheim, \emph{Psychoanalysis and Anthropology} (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), pp. 490–91.} It was he who said in all seriousness that the Oedipus
complex was not to be found if it wasn’t looked for. And that one wasn’t
looking if one hadn’t had oneself analyzed. And that is why your
daughter is mute, which is to say: the tribes, daughters of the
ethnologist, do not say Oedipus, although it is Oedipus who makes them
speak. Roheim added that it was ridiculous to think that the Freudian
theory of censorship depended on the repressive régime in the empire of
Franz Joseph. He did not seem to see that Franz Joseph was not a
pertinent historical break (\emph{coupure}), but that perhaps the oral, the
written, or even the “capitalist” civilizations were such breaks with
which the nature of social repression (\emph{répression}), and the meaning
and scope of psychic repression (\emph{refoulement}), would vary.


This story of psychic repression is quite complicated. Things would be
simpler if the libido or the affect were repressed, in the most general
sense of the word (suppressed, inhibited, or transformed)—at the same
time as the supposed Oedipal representation. But such is not the case:
most ethnologists have clearly noted the sexual nature of affects in the
public symbols of primitive societies, and this nature remains
integrally lived by the members of these societies, even though they
have not been psychoanalyzed, and in spite of the displacement of the
representation. As Leach says apropos of the sex\Slash{}hair relationship,
“displaced phallic symbolism is very common, but the phallic origin of
the symbolism is not repressed”.\footnote{E. R. Leach, “Magical Hair,” in \emph{Myth and Cosmos} (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 92.} Must it be said that primitives
repress the representation and keep the affect intact? And would the
contrary be true in our case, in the patriarchal organization where the
representation would remain clear, but with the affects suppressed,
inhibited, or transformed? No, in fact: psychoanalysis tells us that we
too repress the representation. And everything tells us that we too
often keep the full sexuality of the affect; we know perfectly well what
it is about, without having been psychoanalyzed. But what enables one to
speak of an Oedipal representation that would be the object of
repression? Is it because incest is prohibited? We always fall back on
this pale rationale: incest is desired because it is prohibited. The
prohibition of incest would therefore imply an Oedipal representation,
and it would be born of the repression of this representation and of the
latter’s return. Now the opposite is clearly the case; not only does the
Oedipal representation presuppose the prohibition of incest, but it is
not even possible to say that the representation is born of the
prohibition or results from it.


Adopting Malinowski’s arguments, Reich added a profound remark: desire
is all the more Oedipal as the prohibitions are aimed, not simply at
incest, but “at \emph{all other types} of sexual relations,” blocking the
other paths.\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, \emph{Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral} (Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1932), p. 6. (\emph{The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality} [New York: Farrar, Straus \& Giroux, 1971].)} In a word, the repression of incest is not born of a
repressed Oedipal representation any more than it provokes this
repression. But—and this is something altogether different—the general
social repression-psychic repression system gives rise to an Oedipal
image as a disfiguration of the repressed. The fact that this image in
turn finally suffers a repression, that it comes to take the place of
the repressed or of the thing that is effectively desired, insofar as
sexual repression is directed at \emph{something other} than incest—such is
the long history of our society. But the repressed is not first of all
the Oedipal representation. What is repressed is desiring-production. It
is the part of this production that does not enter into social
production or reproduction. It is what would introduce disorder and
revolution into the socius, the noncoded flows of desire. The part that
passes, on the contrary, from desiring-production to social production
forms a direct sexual investment of this social production, without any
repression of a sexual nature of the symbolism and the corresponding
affects, and above all, without any reference to an Oedipal
representation that could be held to be originally repressed or
structurally foreclosed. The animal in us is not merely the object of a
preconscious investment determined by interest, but the object of a
libidinal investment of desire that only secondarily derives an image of
the father from desiring-production. The same holds true for the
libidinal investment of food, wherever a fear of going hungry is
evident, or a pleasure at not being hungry, and this investment refers
only secondarily to an image of the mother.\footnote{* In his Study of the Marquesa Islands, Abram Kardiner has convincingly demonstrated the role of a collective or economic alimentary anxiety that, even from the viewpoint of the unconscious, does not allow itself to be reduced to the familial relationship with the mother: \emph{The Individual and His Society} (See reference note 28 [38 in this version]), pp. 223ff.} We have already seen
how the prohibition of incest referred, not to Oedipus, but to the
noncoded flows that constitute desire, and to their representative, the
intense prepersonal flow. As for Oedipus, it is another way of coding
the uncodable, of codifying what eludes the codes, or of displacing
desire and its object, a way of entrapping them.


Culturalists and ethnologists have demonstrated that institutions are
primary in relation to affects and structures. For structures are not
mental, they are present in things (\emph{elles sont dans les choses}), in
the forms of social production and reproduction. Even an author like
Marcuse, whom one would not suspect of complaisance in this regard,
acknowledges that culturalism started on the right track: introducing
desire into production, strengthening the link “between instinctual and
economic structure; and at the same time [indicating] the possibility of
progress beyond the ‘patricentric-acquisitive’ culture.”\footnote{Herbert Marcuse, \emph{Eros and Civilization} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 220.} Then what
caused culturalism to go wrong? And here again there is no contradiction
in the fact that it started on the right track, and that it went wrong
from the start. Perhaps the answer lies in the postulate common to
Oedipal relativism and Oedipal absolutism—i.e., the stubborn maintenance
of a familialist perspective, which wreaks havoc everywhere. For if the
institution is first understood as a familial institution, it matters
little to say that the familial complex varies with the institutions, or
that Oedipus is to the contrary a nuclear constant around which families
and institutions turn. The culturalists invoke other triangles—maternal
uncle-aunt-nephew, for example; but the oedipalists have no difficulty
in demonstrating that these are imaginary variations of one and the same
structural constant, different figures of one and the same symbolic
triangulation, which are not identical either with the personages who
come to realize the triangulation, or with the attitudes that come to
place these personages in relation to each other. But inversely, the
invocation of such a transcendent symbolism does not rescue the
structuralists from the narrowest familial point of view. The same holds
for the endless debates on “Is it daddy? Is it mommy?” (You are
neglecting the mother! No, \emph{you}’re the one who fails to see the father
off to the side, as the empty position!)


The conflict between culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts has often
been reduced to these evaluations of the respective roles of the mother
and the father, or of the pre-oedipal and the Oedipal, without allowing
either side to leave the family or even Oedipus, always oscillating
between the famous two poles, the pre-oedipal maternal pole of the
Imaginary, and the Oedipal paternal pole of the structural, both on the
same axis, both speaking the same language of a familialized social
realm, where one pole designates the customary maternal dialects, while
the other designates the imperative law of the language of the father.
The ambiguity of what Kardiner called the “primary institution” has been
clearly shown. In certain cases it can be a question of the way desire
invests the social field from childhood, and under the familial stimuli
coming from the adult: all the conditions would then be given for an
adequate (extrafamilial) understanding of the libido. But more often it
is solely a question of the familial organization in itself, which is
thought to be lived first by the child as a microcosm, then projected
into the adult and social development (\emph{devenir}).\footnote{* Mikel Dufrenne, analyzing the concepts of Kardiner, raises these essential questions: Is it the family that is “primary,” while the political, the economic, and the social are merely secondary? Which comes first from the viewpoint of the libido, the familial investment or the social investment? And methodologically is it necessary to go from the child to the adult, or from the adult to the child? (Mikel Dufrenne, \emph{La personnalité de base} [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953], pp. 287ff.)} From this point
of view, the discussion can only go round in circles between the holders
of a cultural interpretation and the holders of a symbolic or structural
interpretation of this same organization.


A second postulate common to the culturalists and the symbolists should
be added. They all agree that, in our patriarchal and capitalist society
at least, Oedipus is a sure thing (even if they underline, as does
Fromm, the elements of a new matriarchy). They all agree that our
society is the stronghold of Oedipus: the starting point for
re-encountering an Oedipal structure everywhere; or on the contrary,
they hold that the terms and the relations should be made to vary within
non-oedipal complexes that are no less “familial” on that account. That
is why our preceding criticism was directed at Oedipus as it is meant to
command our respect and to function for us: it is not at the weakest
point—the primitives—that Oedipus must be attacked, but at the strongest
point, at the level of the strongest link, by revealing the degree of
disfiguration it implies and brings to bear on desiring-production, on
the syntheses of the unconscious, and on libidinal investments \emph{in our
cultural and social milieu}. Not that Oedipus counts for nothing in our
society: we have said repeatedly that Oedipus is demanded, and demanded
again and again; and even an attempt as profound as Lacan’s at shaking
loose from the yoke of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for
means of making it heavier still and of resecuring it on the baby and
the schizo. To be sure, it is not only legitimate but indispensable that
the ethnological or historical explanation not be in contradiction with
our social organization, or that this organization contain in its own
way the basic elements of the ethnological hypothesis. This is what Marx
was saying as he recalled the requirements of a universal history—but,
as he went on to say, provided that the current organization be capable
of conducting its own criticism. And yet Oedipus’s autocritique is
something rarely seen in our organization, of which psychoanalysis forms
a part. In certain respects it is correct to question all social
formations starting from Oedipus. But not because Oedipus might be a
truth of the unconscious that is especially visible where we are
concerned; on the contrary, because it is a mystification of the
unconscious that has only succeeded with us by assembling the parts and
wheels of its apparatus from elements of the previous social formations.
It is universal in that sense. Thus it is indeed within capitalist
society that the critique of Oedipus must always resume its point of
departure and find again its point of arrival.


Oedipus is a limit. But “limit” has many different meanings, since it
can be at the beginning as an inaugural event, in the role of a matrix;
or in the middle as a structural function ensuring the mediation of
personages and the ground of their relations; or at the end as an
eschatological determination. Now we have seen that it is only in this
last sense that Oedipus is a limit. This is also the case for
desiring-production. But in fact this last sense itself can be
understood in many different ways. In the first place,
desiring-production is situated at the limits of social production; the
decoded flows, at the limits of the codes and the territorialities; the
body without organs, at the limits of the socius. We shall speak of an
**absolute limit* every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall,
scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body
without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the
decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse. Secondly,
however, the \emph{relative limit} is no more nor less than the capitalist
social formation, because the latter engineers (\emph{machine}) and mobilizes
flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for the
codes a quantifying axiomatic (\emph{une axiomatique comptable}) that is even
more oppressive. With the result that capitalism—in conformity with the
movement by which it counteracts its own tendency—is continually drawing
near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall further way.
Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative
limit. Thirdly, there is no social formation that does not foresee, or
experience a foreboding of, the real form in which the limit threatens
to arrive, and which it wards off with all the strength it can command.
Whence the obstinacy with which the formations preceding capitalism
encaste the merchant and the technician, preventing flows of money and
flows of production from assuming an autonomy that would destroy their
codes. Such is the \emph{real limit}.


When such societies are confronted with this real limit, repressed from
within, but which returns to them from without, they regard this event
with melancholy as the sign of their approaching death. For example, the
Bohannans describe the Tiv economy, which codes three kinds of flows:
consumer goods, prestige goods, and women and children. When money
supervenes, it can only be coded as an object of prestige, yet merchants
use it to lay hold of sectors of consumer goods traditionally held by
the women: all the codes vacillate. Doubtless, to begin with money and
to finish with money is an operation that cannot be expressed in terms
of a code; seeing the trucks that leave loaded with export goods, “the
Tiv elders deplore this situation, and know what is happening, but do
not know where to place their blame”\footnote{Laura and Paul Bohannan, \emph{The Tiv of Central Nigeria} (London: International African Institute, 1953).}—a harsh reality. But,
fourthly, this limit inhibited from the interior was already projected
onto a primordial beginning, a mythical matrix as the \emph{imaginary limit}.
How can this nightmare be imagined: the invasion of the socius by
noncoded flows that move like lava? An irrepressible wave of shit, as in
the Fourbe myth; or the intense germinal influx, the this-side-of
incest, as in the Yourougou myth, which introduces disorder into the
world by acting as the representative of desire. Whence, in the fifth
and last instance, the importance of the task of displacing the limit:
causing it to pass into the interior of the socius, in the middle,
between a beyond of alliance and a filiative this-side-of, between a
representation of alliance and the representative of filiation, as one
attempts to tame the dreaded forces of a river by digging an artificial
river bed, or by diverting it into a thousand shallow little streams.
Oedipus is this \emph{displaced limit}. Yes, Oedipus is universal. But the
error lies in having believed in the following alternative: either
Oedipus is the product of the social repression-psychic repression
system, in which case it is not universal; or it is universal, and a
position of desire. In reality, it is universal because it is the
displacement of the limit that haunts all societies, the displaced
represented (\emph{le représenté déplacé}) that disfigures what all societies
dread absolutely as their most profound negative: namely, the decoded
flows of desire.


This is not to say that the universal Oedipal limit is “occupied,”
strategically occupied in all social formations. We must take Kardiner’s
remark seriously: a Hindu or an Eskimo can dream of Oedipus, without
however being subjected to the complex, without “having the
complex.”\footnote{Abram Kardiner, \emph{The Individual and His Society} (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 248.} For Oedipus to be occupied, a certain number of
conditions are indispensable: the field of social production and
reproduction must become independent of familial reproduction, that is,
independent of the territorial machine that declines alliances and
filiations; the detachable fragments of the chain must be converted, by
virtue of this independence, into a transcendent detached object that
crushes their polyvocal character; the detached object (phallus) must
perform a kind of folding operation—a kind of application or reduction
(\emph{rabattement}): a reduction of the social field, defined as the
aggregate of departure, to the familial field, now defined as the
aggregate of destination—and it must establish a network of one-to-one
relations between the two. For Oedipus to be occupied, it is not enough
that it be a limit or a displaced represented in the system of
representation; it must \emph{migrate} to the heart of this system and itself
come to occupy the position of the representative of desire. These
conditions, inseparable from the paralogisms of the unconscious, are
realized in the capitalist formation; furthermore, they imply certain
archaisms borrowed from the imperial barbarian formations—in particular,
the position of the transcendent object. The capitalist style has been
described by D.H. Lawrence: “our democratic, industrial order of things
whose style is my-dear-little-lamb-I-want-to-see-mommy.”


Now on the one hand, it is evident that the primitive formations do not
come close to fulfilling these conditions. Precisely because the family,
when opened to alliances, is coextensive with and adequate to the social
historical field; because it animates social reproduction itself,
because it mobilizes or causes passage of the detachable fragments
without ever converting them into a detached object—no reduction
whatever, no application is possible that would answer to the formula
3+1 (the four corners of the field folded into three, like a tablecloth,
plus the transcendent term that performs the folding operation).
“Speaking, dancing, exchanging, and allowing to flow, and even
urinating, in the midst of the community of men,” as Parin himself puts
it, to express the fluidity of the flows and the primitive codes.\footnote{* Paul Parin et al., \emph{Les blancs pensent trop}, p. 432. Regarding the coextensivity of marriages with the primitive social held, see Jaulin’s remarks, \emph{La poix blanche}, p. 256: “Marriages are not governed by kinship laws, they obey a dynamic that is infinitely more complex, less rigid, whose invention at each moment utilizes a number of co-ordinates of another order of importance\dots{}. Marriages are more apt to be a speculation on the future than on the past, and in any case these marriages and their speculation derive from what is complex, not from what is elementary, and never from what is rigidly fixed. The reason for this is not by any means that man knows laws only so that he may violate them\dots{}” Whence the stupidity of the concept of transgression.}
At the heart of primitive production one always finds oneself at 4+\emph{n},
in the system of ancestors and affines. Far from being able to claim
that here there is no end to Oedipus, one sees that it never manages to
begin; one is always brought to a halt well before 3+1, and if there is
a primitive Oedipus, it is a neg-Oedipus, in the sense of a neg-entropy.
Oedipus is indeed a limit or a displaced represented, but precisely in
such a way that each member of the group is always on this side of or
beyond, without ever occupying the position (Kardiner has understood
this very well in the formula we cited). It is colonization that causes
Oedipus to exist, but an Oedipus that is taken for what it is, a pure
oppression, inasmuch as it assumes that these Savages are deprived of
the control over their own social production, that they are ripe for
being reduced to the only thing they have left, the familial
reproduction imposed on them being no less oedipalized by force than it
is alcoholic or sickly.


On the other hand, when the requisite conditions are realized in
capitalist society, it should not be thought on that account that
Oedipus ceases to be what it is, the simple displaced represented that
comes to usurp the place of the representative of desire, snaring the
unconscious in the trap of its paralogisms, crushing the whole of
desiring-production, replacing it with a system of beliefs. Oedipus is
never a cause: it depends on a previous social investment of a certain
type, capable of falling back on (\emph{se rabattre sur}) family
determinations. It will be objected that such a principle is perhaps
valid for the adult, but surely not for the child. But in effect,
Oedipus begins in the mind of the father. And the beginning is not
absolute: it is only constituted starting from investments of the social
historical field that are effected by the father. And if it passes over
to the son, this is not by virtue of a familial heredity, but by virtue
of a much more complex relationship that depends on the communication of
the unconsciouses. With the result that, even in the child, what is
invested through the familial stimuli is still the social field, and a
whole system of breaks and extrafamilial flows. The fact that the father
is first in relation to the child can only be understood analytically in
terms of another primacy, that of social investments and
counterinvestments in relation to familial investments: this will be
seen later, at the level of an analysis of deliriums. But already, if it
appears that Oedipus is an effect, this is because it forms an aggregate
of destination (the family become microcosm) on which capitalist
production and reproduction fall back. The organs and the agents of the
latter no longer pass through a coding of flows of alliance and
filiation, but through an axiomatic of decoded flows. Consequently, the
capitalist formation of sovereignty will need an intimate colonial
formation that corresponds to it, to which it will be applied, and
without which it would have no hold on the productions of the
unconscious.


Given these conditions, what is there to say about the relationship
between ethnology and psychoanalysis? Must we be content with an
uncertain parallelism where each contemplates the other with perplexity,
placing in opposition two irreducible sectors of symbolism? A social
sector of symbols, and a sexual sector that would constitute a kind of
private universal, a kind of individual-universal? (Transversals between
the two, since social symbolism can become a sexual material, and
sexuality, a ritual of social aggregation.) But the problem is too
theoretical when posed this way. Practically speaking, the psychoanalyst
often claims to explain to the ethnologist the meaning of the symbol: it
means phallus, castration, Oedipus. But the ethnologist asks other
questions, and sincerely asks himself \emph{of what use can psychoanalytic
interpretations be to me}? Hence the duality is displaced, it is no
longer between two sectors, but between two kinds of questions, “What
does it mean?” and “What purpose does it serve?” Of what use is it not
only to the ethnologist, but what purpose does it serve and how does it
work in the very formation that makes use of the symbol?\footnote{* Roger Bastide has systematically developed the theory of the two symbolic sectors, in \emph{Sociologie et psychanalyse} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). But, starting from a viewpoint that is analogous at first, E. R. Leach is led to displace the duality, causing it to pass between the question of meaning and that of use, thereby changing the scope of the problem: see Magical Hair (reference note 24).} Whatever
may be the meaning of a thing, it is not certain that the thing serves
any useful purpose whatever. It is possible, for example, that Oedipus
serves no useful purpose, either for psychoanalysts or for the
unconscious. And to what use could the phallus be put, since it is
inseparable from the castration that deprives us of its use? Of course
we are told not to confuse the signified with the signifier. But does
the signifier take us beyond the question, “What does it mean?” Is it
anything other than this same question, only this time barred? This is
still the domain of representation.


The true misunderstandings, the misunderstandings between ethnologists
(or Hellenists) and psychoanalysts, do not come from a faulty knowledge
or recognition of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the phallic nature
of symbolism. In theory, everyone could reach an agreement on this
point: everything is sexual or sex-influenced (\emph{sexué}) from one end to
the other. Everyone knows this, beginning with the users. The practical
misunderstandings come rather from the profound difference between the
two sorts of questions. Without always formulating it clearly, the
ethnologists and the Hellenists think that a symbol is not defined by
what it means, but by what it does and by what is done with it. It
always means the phallus or something similar, except that what it means
does not tell what purpose it serves. In a word, there is no
ethnological interpretation for the simple reason that there is no
ethnographic material: there are only uses and functionings (\emph{des
fonctionnements}). On this point, it could be that psychoanalysts have
much to learn from ethnologists: about the unimportance of “What does it
mean?” When Hellenists place themselves in opposition to the Freudian
Oedipus, it should not be thought that they put forward other
interpretations to replace the psychoanalytic interpretation. It could
be that ethnologists and Hellenists will compel psychoanalysts for their
part to make a similar discovery: namely, that there is no unconscious
material either, nor is there a psychoanalytic interpretation, but only
uses, analytic uses of the syntheses of the unconscious, which do not
allow themselves to be defined by an assignment of a signifier any more
than by the determination of signifieds. How it works is the sole
question. Schizoanalysis foregoes all interpretation because it foregoes
discovering an unconscious material: the unconscious does not mean
anything. On the other hand the unconscious constructs machines, which
are machines of desire, whose use and functioning schizoanalysis
discovers in their immanent relationship with social machines. The
unconscious does not speak, it engineers. It is not expressive or
representative, but productive. A symbol is nothing other than a social
machine that functions as a desiring-machine, a desiring-machine that
functions within the social machine, an investment of the social machine
by desire.


It has often been said and demonstrated that an institution cannot be
explained by its use, any more than an organ can. Biological formations
and social formations are not formed in the same way in which they
function. Nor is there a biological, sociological, linguistic, etc.,
functionalism at the level of large determinate aggregates (\emph{des grands
ensembles spécifiés}). But the same does not hold true in the case of
desiring-machines as molecular elements: there, use, functioning,
production, and formation are one and the same process. And it is this
synthesis of desire that, under certain determinate conditions, explains
the molar aggregates (\emph{les ensembles molaires}) \emph{with} their specific
use in a biological, social, or linguistic field. This is because the
large molar machines presuppose pre-established connections that are not
explained by their functioning, since the latter results from them. Only
desiring-machines produce connections according to which they function,
and function by improvising and forming the connections. A molar
functionalism is therefore a functionalism that did not go far enough,
that did not reach those regions where desire engineers, independently
of the macroscopic nature of what it is engineering: organic, social,
linguistic, etc., elements, all tossed into the same pot to stew. The
only unities-multiplicities that functionalism must know are the
desiring-machines themselves and the configurations they form in all the
sectors of a field of production (the “total fact”). A magical chain
brings together plant life, pieces of organs, a shred of clothing, an
image of daddy, formulas and words: we shall not ask what it means, but
what kind of machine is assembled in this manner—what kind of flows and
breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows.


Analyzing the symbolism of the forked branch among the Ndembu, Victor
Turner shows that the names given to them form a part of a chain that
mobilizes the species and the properties of the trees from which the
branches are taken, as well as the names of these species in turn, and
the technical procedures with which they are treated. Selections are
made from signifying chains no less than from material flows. The
exegetical meaning (what is said about the thing) is only one element
among others, and is less important than the operative use (what is done
with the thing) or the positional functioning (the relationship with
other things in one and the same complex), according to which the symbol
is never in a one-to-one relationship with what it means, but always has
a multiplicity of referents, being “always multivocal and
polysemous.”\footnote{Victor Turner, “Themes in the Symbolism of Ndembu Hunting Ritual,” in \emph{Myth and Cosmos} (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 249–69.} Analyzing the magical object \emph{buti} among the Kukuya
of the Congo, Pierre Bonnafé shows how it is inseparable from the
practical syntheses that produce, record, and consume it: the partial
and nonspecific connection that combines fragments from the body of the
subject with those of an animal; the inclusive disjunction that
inscribes the object in the body of the subject, and transforms the
latter into a man-animal; the residual conjunction that causes the
“residue” to submit to a long voyage before burying or immersing
it.\footnote{* Pierre Bonnafé, “Objet magique, sorcellerie et fétichisme?”, \emph{Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse}, no. 2 (1970): “The Kukuya affirm that the nature of the object matters little: the essential thing is that it acts.” See also Alfred Adler, “L’ethnologue et les fétiches.” The interest of this issue of the \emph{N.R.P.}, devoted to “objects of fetishism,” is that in its pages ethnologists do not place one theory in opposition to another, but reflect on the bearing of psychoanalytic interpretations on their own ethnological practice, and on the social practices they study. In a paper entitled “Les interprétations de Turner” (Faculté de Nanterre), Eric Laurent was able to make explicit in a profound way the problems of method in this regard: the necessity for performing a series of reversals, for privileging use over exegesis or justification; productivity over expressivity; the actual state of the social field over the cosmological myths; the exact ritual over structural models; the “social drama,” the political tactic, and strategy over kinship diagrams.} If present-day ethnologists are again evincing a lively
interest in the hypothetical concept of the fetish, this is
unquestionably due to the influence of psychoanalysis. But it would seem
that psychoanalysis offers them just as many reasons for doubting the
notion as it offers for attracting their interest. For psychoanalysis
has never said Phallus-Oedipus-Castration more often than apropos of the
fetish. While for his part, the ethnologist senses that there is a
problem of political power and economic and religious force inseparable
from the fetish, even when its use is individual and private. Hair, for
example—the rituals of hair-cutting and coiffure: is there any interest
in referring these rituals to the phallus entity as signifying the
“separate thing,” and in everywhere re-encountering the father as the
symbolic representative of the separation? Wouldn’t this be tantamount
to remaining at the level of what it means? The ethnologist finds
himself before a flow of hair, with the breaks in such a flow, and with
what passes from one state into another through the break. As Leach
says, hair as a partial object or as a separable part of the body does
not represent an aggressive and separate phallus; hair \emph{is} a thing in
its own right, a material part in an aggressing apparatus, in a
separating machine.


Once again, it is not a question of knowing if the essence of a ritual
is sexual, or if it is necessary to take into account political,
economic, and religious dimensions that would go beyond sexuality. So
long as the problem is put in this manner, so long as a choice is
imposed between libido and numen, the misunderstanding between
ethnologists and psychoanalysts can only be aggravated—just as it
continues to grow between Hellenists and psychoanalysts apropos of
Oedipus. Oedipus, the clubfooted despot, who clearly invokes an entire
political history that brings into conflict the despotic machine and the
old primitive territorial machine—whence derive both the negation and
the persistence of autochthony, brought into clear relief by
Lévi-Strauss. But this is not enough to desexualize the drama. On the
contrary. In reality, it is a question of knowing how one conceives of
sexuality and libidinal investment. Must they be referred to an event or
to something that is “felt,” which remains familial and intimate in
spite of everything, an intimate Oedipal feeling, even when it is
interpreted structurally, on behalf of the pure signifier? Or rather is
it necessary to open sexuality and libidinal investment onto the
determinations of a sociohistorical field, where the economic, the
political, and the religious are things that are invested by the libido
for themselves, and not the derivatives of a daddy-mommy? In the first
instance one studies large molar aggregates, large social machines—the
economic, the political, etc.—and this entails searching for \emph{what they
mean} by applying them to an abstract familial whole that is thought to
contain the secret of the libido: in this way, one remains in the
framework of representation.


In the second instance one goes beyond these large aggregates, including
the family, toward the molecular elements that form the parts and wheels
of desiring-machines. One searches for the way in which these machines
**function*, for how they invest and underdetermine (\emph{subdéterminent})
the social machines that they constitute on a large scale. One then
reaches the regions of a productive, molecular, micrological, or
microphysical unconscious that no longer means or represents anything.
Sexuality is no longer regarded as a specific energy that unites persons
derived from the large aggregates, but as the molecular energy that
places molecules-partial objects (libido) in connection, that organizes
inclusive disjunctions on the giant molecule of the body without organs
(numen), and that distributes states of being and becoming according to
domains of presence or zones of intensity (voluptas). For
desiring-machines are precisely that: the microphysics of the
unconscious, the elements of the microunconscious. But as such they
never exist independently of the historical molar aggregates, of the
macroscopic social formations that they constitute statistically. In
this sense, there is only desire and the social. Beneath the conscious
investments of economic, political, religious, etc., formations, there
are unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the
way in which desire is present in a social field, and joins this field
to itself as the statistically determined domain that is bound to it.
Desiring-machines function within social machines, as though they
maintained their own régime in the molar aggregates that they form at
the level of large numbers. Symbols and fetishes are manifestations of
desiring-machines. Sexuality is by no means a molar determination that
is representable in a familial whole; it is the molecular
underdetermination functioning within social and secondarily familial
aggregates that trace desire’s field of presence and its field of
production: an entire non-Oedipal unconscious that will only produce
Oedipus as one of its secondary statistical formations (“complexes”), at
the end of a history bringing into play the destiny of social machines,
their régime compared to that of desiring-machines.

\section{5. Territorial Representation}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-5}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-5}%


While representation is always a social and psychic repression of
desiring-production, it should be borne in mind that this repression is
exercised in very diverse ways, according to the social formation
considered. The system of representation comprises three elements that
vary in depth: the repressed representative, the repressing
representation, and the displaced represented. But the agents (\emph{les
instances}) that come to carry them into effect are themselves variable;
there are migrations in the system. We see no reason for believing in
the universality of one and the same apparatus of sociocultural
repression (\emph{refoulement}). One can speak instead of a coefficient of
affinity that varies in degree between social machines and
desiring-machines, according to whether their respective régimes are
more or less similar; according to whether the desiring-machines have a
greater or lesser chance of causing their connections and interactions
to pass into the régime of the social machines; according to whether the
social machines execute more or less of a movement of detachment
(\emph{décollement}) in relation to the desiring-machines; and whether the
death-carrying elements remain caught in the machinery of desire,
encasted in the social machine, or on the contrary join together to form
a death instinct that extends throughout the social machine, crushing
desire.


The principal factor in each of these respects is the type or genus of
social inscription, its alphabet, its characteristics: the inscription
on the socius is in fact the agent of a secondary psychic repression, or
repression “in the proper sense of the term,” that is necessarily
situated in relation to the desiring-inscription of the body without
organs, and in relation to the primary repression that the latter
already performs in the domain of desire—a relation that is essentially
variable. There is always social repression (\emph{refoulement}), but the
apparatus of repression varies, depending in particular on what plays
the role of the representative on which the repression is brought to
bear. In this sense it is possible that the primitive codes, at the
moment they are acting on the flows of desire with a maximum of
vigilance and extension, binding them in a \emph{system of cruelty}, maintain
an infinitely greater affinity with desiring-machines than does the
capitalist axiomatic, which nonetheless liberates the decoded flows.
This is because in the primitive socius desire is not yet trapped, not
yet introduced into a set of impasses, the flows have lost none of their
polyvocity, and the simple represented in representation has not yet
taken the place of the representative. In order to evaluate in every
instance the nature of the apparatus and its effects on
desiring-production, it is therefore necessary to take into account not
only the elements of representation as they are organized in depth, but
the manner in which representation itself is organized at the surface,
on the inscription surface of the socius.


Society is not exchangist, the socius is inscriptive: not exchanging but
marking bodies, which are part of the earth. We have seen that the
régime of debt directly resulted from this savage inscription. For debt
is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is
alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt,
creates for man a memory of words (\emph{paroles}). It is alliance that
represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx
as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of
submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with
the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge
a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of
nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche
described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelist
mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on
the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt
as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of
making it—and the inscriptions themselves—into an indirect means of
universal exchange.


There is a question that Marcel Mauss at least left open: is debt
primary in relation to exchange, or is it merely a mode of exchange, a
means in the service of exchange? But Lévi-Strauss seems to have closed
the question again with a categorical reply: debt is no more than a
superstructure, a conscious form whereby the unconscious social reality
of exchange is converted into cash.\footnote{* Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, \emph{Sociologie et anthropologie} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 38–39. And Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, p. 181: “\dots{} to explain why the system of generalized exchange has remained subjacent and why the explicit system is formulated in very different terms.” To see how, sorting from this principle, Lévi-Strauss arrives at a conception of the unconscious as an empty form, indifferent to the drives of desire, see his \emph{Structural Anthropology}, p. 203. It is true that Lévi-Strauss’s \emph{Mythologiques} series elaborates a theory of primitive codes, and of codings of flows and of organs, that goes beyond the exchangist conception on all sides.} What is involved is not a
theoretical discussion of the first principles of anthropology: the
whole notion of social practice, and the postulates conveyed by this
practice, are at issue here—and the whole problem of the unconscious.
For if exchange underlies everything, why is it that what takes place
looks like anything but an exchange? Why must it be a gift, or a
countergift, and not an exchange? And why is it necessary that the giver
also be in the position of someone who has been robbed, so as to
demonstrate clearly that he does not expect an exchange, not even a
deferred exchange? It is theft that prevents the gift and the
countergift from entering into an exchangist relation. Desire knows
nothing of exchange, \emph{it knows only theft and gift}, at times the one
within the other under the effect of a primary homosexuality. Thus the
antiexchangist amorous machine encountered by Joyce in \emph{Exiles}, and by
Klossowski in \emph{Roberte}. “In Gourma ideology, it is as though a wife
could only be given (the lityuatieli), or carried away, kidnapped, hence
in a certain sense stolen (the lipwotali); every union that could too
manifestly appear to be the result of a direct exchange between two
lineages or lineage segments is, in this society, if not prohibited, at
least widely disapproved of.”\footnote{Michel Cartry, “Clans, lignages et groupements familiaux chez les Gourmantché,” \emph{L’Homme}, April 1966, p. 74.}


Will it be said that, if desire knows nothing of exchange, it is because
exchange is desire’s unconscious? Will this be explained by the
exigencies of generalized exchange? But what entitles one to declare
that shares of debt are secondary compared with a totality that is “more
real”? Yet exchange is known, well known in the primitive socius—but as
that which must be exorcised, encasted, severely restricted, so that no
corresponding value can develop as an exchange value that would
introduce the nightmare of a commodity economy. The primitive market
operates through bargaining rather than by fixing an equivalent that
would lead to a decoding of flows and a collapse of the mode of
inscription on the socius. We are brought back to our point of
departure: the fact that exchange is inhibited and exorcised by no means
attests to its primary reality, but demonstrates on the contrary that
the essential process is not exchanging, but inscribing or marking. And
when exchange is made into an unconscious reality, structural rights are
invoked in vain—along with the necessary inadequation of attitudes and
ideologies in relation to this structure—for one does nothing more than
hypostatize the principles of an exchangist psychology to account for
institutions that on the other hand are recognized to be nonexchangist.
And above all, what is made of the unconscious itself, if not its
explicit reduction to an \emph{empty form}, from which desire itself is
absent and expelled? Such a form can serve to define a preconscious, but
certainly not the unconscious. For if it is true that the unconscious
has no material or content, this is assuredly not because it is an empty
form, but rather because it is always and already a functioning machine,
a desiring-machine and not an anorexic structure.


The difference between machine and structure appears in the postulates
that implicitly animate the structural and exchangist conception of the
socius, with the correctives that must be introduced into this
conception so that the structure is able to function. First of all, when
considering kinship structures, it is difficult not to proceed as though
the alliances derived from the lines of filiation and their
relationships, although the lateral alliances and the blocks of debt
condition the extended filiations in the system in extension, and not
the opposite. Secondly, there is a tendency to make the system in
extension into a logical combinative arrangement, instead of taking it
for what it is: a physical system where intensities are distributed,
where some cancel out and block a current, where others cause the
current to circulate, etc. The objection according to which the
qualities developed in the system are not only physical objects, “but
also honors, responsibilities, privileges,” seems to indicate a
misunderstanding of the role of the incommensurable elements and the
inequalities in the conditions of the system. More precisely, in the
third place, the structural exchangist conception tends to postulate a
kind of primary equilibrium of prices, a primary equivalence or equality
in the underlying principles, which allows it to explain that the
inequalities are necessarily introduced in the consequences.


Nothing is more significant in this regard than the controversy between
Lévi-Strauss and Leach concerning the Kachin marriage system. Invoking a
“conflict between the egalitarian conditions of generalized exchange,
and its aristocratic consequences,” Lévi-Strauss acts as though he
thought the system were in a state of equilibrium. However, the problem
is altogether different: it is a question of knowing if the
disequilibrium is pathological and a manifestation of consequences, as
Lévi-Strauss maintains, or functional and fundamental, as Leach
argues.\footnote{Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, p. 267; also, regarding his way of presenting Leach’s argument, pp. 221ff. But with respect to this argument itself, see Leach, \emph{Rethinking Anthropology}, pp. 60–64, 81–95.} Is the instability derived in relation to an ideal of
exchange, or is it already given in the preconditions, included in the
heterogeneity of the terms that compose the prestations and
counterprestations? The more one directs one’s attention to the economic
and political compromises conveyed by the alliances, to the nature of
the counterprestations that come to compensate the disequilibrium of the
prestations of wives, and generally the original manner in which the
aggregate of prestations is evaluated in a particular society, the more
clearly the necessarily open nature of the system in extension appears,
as in the case of the primitive mechanism of surplus value as a surplus
value of code. But—and this is the fourth point—the exchangist
conception finds it necessary to postulate a closed system,
statistically closed, and to shore up the structure with a psychological
conviction (“confidence that the cycle will reclose”). Thus not only the
essential opening of the blocks of debts according to the lateral
alliances and the successive generations, but above all the relationship
of the statistical formations to their molecular elements, find
themselves brought back to the simple empirical reality, insofar as it
is not adequate to the structural model.\footnote{Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Elementary Structures of Kinship}, pp. 193–95. See the statistical comparison with the “cyclists.”}


All this depends, finally, on a postulate that burdens ethnology to the
same extent that it has determined bourgeois political economy: the
reduction of social reproduction to the sphere of circulation. One
retains the apparent objective movement as it is described on the
socius, without taking into account the real instance that inscribes it,
and the forces—economic and political—with which it is inscribed; one
fails to see that alliance is the form in which the socius appropriates
the connections of labor in the disjunctive order of its inscriptions.
“From the viewpoint of the relations of production, in fact, the
circulation of women appears as a distribution of labor capacity, but in
the ideological representation that the society gives itself of its
economic base, this aspect fades before the relations of exchange, which
are, however, merely the form this distribution takes within the sphere
of circulation: by isolating the moment of circulation in the
reproduction process, ethnology ratifies this representation,” and
grants bourgeois economy its whole colonial extension.\footnote{Emmanuel Terray, \emph{Le Marxisme devant les sociétés primitives} (Paris: Maspero, 1969), p. 164.} In this
sense the essential thing seemed to us to be, not exchange and
circulation, which closely depend on the requirements of inscription,
but inscription itself, with its imprint of fire, its alphabet inscribed
in bodies, and its blocks of debts. The soft structure would never
function, would never cause a circulation, without the hard machinic
element that presides over inscriptions.


Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a
graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the
body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations
are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system that is
independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voice and
not subordinate to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated “in an
organization that is radiating, as it were,” and multidimensional. (And
it must be said that this graphic system is linear writing’s contrary:
civilizations cease being oral only through losing the independence and
the particular dimensions of the graphic system; by aligning itself on
the voice, graphism supplants the voice and induces a fictitious voice.)
André Leroi-Gourhan has admirably described these two heterogeneous
poles of the savage inscription process or territorial representation:
the couple voice-audition and hand-graphics.\footnote{André Leroi-Gourhan, \emph{Le geste et la parole, technique et langage} (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), pp. 270ff., 290ff.} How does such a
machine work? For it \emph{does} work: the voice is like a voice of alliance
to which, on the side of the extended filiation, a graphics is
co-ordinated that bears no resemblance. The calabash of the excision is
placed on the body of the young woman. Furnished by the husband’s
lineage, the calabash serves as a conductor for the voice of alliance;
but the graphism must be traced by a member of the young woman’s clan.
The articulation of the two elements takes place on the body itself, and
constitutes the sign, which is not a resemblance or imitation, nor an
effect of a signifier, but rather a position and a production of desire:
“In order for the young woman’s transformation to be fully effective, a
direct contact must take place between her stomach, on the one hand, and
the calabash and the signs inscribed on her, on the other hand. The
young woman must become physically saturated with the signs of
procreation and she must incorporate them. The young women are never
taught the meaning of the ideograms during their initiation. The sign
acts through its inscription in the body\dots{}. The inscription of a mark on
the body does not merely possess a message value here, but is an
instrument of action that acts on the body itself\dots{}. The signs command
the things they signify, and far from being a mere imitator, the artisan
of the signs accomplishes a work that calls to mind the divine
creation.”\footnote{Michel Cartry, “La calebasse de l’excision en pays gourmantché,” \emph{Journal de la Société des africanistes}, no. 2 (1968), pp. 223–25.}


But how does one explain the role played by sight, indicated by
Leroi-Gourhan, in the contemplation of the face that is speaking, as
well as in the reading of the manual graphism? Or more precisely, what
enables the eye to grasp a terrible equivalence between the voice of
alliance that inflicts and constrains, and the body afflicted by the
sign that a hand is carving in it? Isn’t it necessary to add a third
element of the sign: eye-pain, in addition to voice-audition and
hand-graphics? In the rituals of affliction the patient does not speak,
but receives the spoken word. He does not act, but is passive under the
graphic action; he receives the stamp of the sign. And what is his pain
if not a pleasure for the eye that regards it, the collective or divine
eye that is not motivated by any idea of revenge, but is alone capable
of grasping the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the
body and the voice issuing from a face—between the mark and the mask.
Between these two elements of the code, pain is like the surplus value
that the eye extracts, taking hold of the effect of active speech on the
body, but also of the reaction of the body insofar as it is acted upon.
This is indeed what must be called a debt system or territorial
representation: a voice that speaks or intones, a sign marked in bare
flesh, an eye that extracts enjoyment from the pain; these are the three
sides of a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and
retention, a \emph{theater of cruelty} that implies the triple independence
of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye.
Such is the manner in which territorial representation organizes itself
at the surface, still quite close to a desiring-machine of
eye-hand-voice. A magic triangle. Everything in this system is active,
acted upon, or reacted to: the action of the voice of alliance, the
passion of the body of filiation, the reaction of the eye evaluating the
declension of the two. To choose the stone that will make a man of the
young Guayaki, with \emph{enough} pain and suffering, by cleaving the length
of his back: “It must have a good cutting edge”—says Clastres in an
admirable text—“but not like a sliver of bamboo, which cuts too easily.
Choosing the right stone therefore requires \emph{a practiced eye}. The whole
apparatus of this new ceremony is reduced to that: a rock\dots{}. Furrowed
skin, scarified earth, one and the same mark.”\footnote{Pierre Clastres, \emph{Chroniques des indiens Guayaki} (Paris: Plon, 1972).}


The great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s \emph{The Gift} as
Nietzsche’s \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}. At least it should be. For the
**Genealogy*, the second essay, is an attempt—and a success without
equal—at interpretating primitive economy in terms of debt, in the
debtor-creditor relationship, by eliminating every consideration of
exchange or interest “à l’anglaise.” And if they are eliminated from
psychology, it is not in order to place them in structure. Nietzsche has
only a meager set of tools at his disposal—some ancient Germanic law, a
little Hindu law. But he does not hesitate, as does Mauss, between
exchange and debt. (Georges Bataille, motivated by a Nietzschean
inspiration, will not hesitate either.) The fundamental problem of the
primitive socius, which is the problem of inscription, of coding, of
marking, has never been raised in such an incisive fashion. Man must
constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal
influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every
attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be
created for man—a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances
that declines the alliances with the extended filiations, that endows
him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection
(\emph{prélèvement}) and detachment, and that effects in this way the coding
of the flows of desire as a condition of the socius? The answer is
simple, it is debt—open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: this
extraordinary composite of the speaking voice, the marked body, and the
enjoying eye. All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all
the pain of the initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression
and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only
this meaning: to \emph{breed} man,\footnote{* “\emph{dresser} l’homme” in the French. See Friedrich Nietzsche. \emph{Will to Power}, Book IV, for his discussion of this notion. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} to mark him in his flesh, to render
him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-creditor
relation, which on both sides turns out to be a matter of memory—a
memory straining toward the future.


Far from being an appearance assumed by exchange, debt is the immediate
effect or the direct means of the territorial and corporal inscription
process. Debt is the direct result of inscription. Once again no
revenge, no \emph{ressentiment} will be invoked here—that is not the ground
they grow on, any more than does Oedipus. The fact that innocent men
suffer all the marks on their bodies derives from the respective
autonomy of the voice and the graphic action, and also from the
autonomous eye that extracts pleasure from the event. It is not because
everyone is suspected, in advance, of being a future bad debtor; the
contrary would be closer to the truth. It is the bad debtor who must be
understood as if the marks had not sufficiently “taken” on him, as if he
were or had been unmarked. He has merely widened, beyond the limits
allowed, the gap that separated the voice of alliance and the body of
filiation, to such a degree that it is necessary to re-establish the
equilibrium through an increase in pain. Nietzsche doesn’t say this, but
what does it matter? For it is indeed here that he encounters the
terrible equation of debt: injury done = pain to be
suffered. How does one explain, he asks, that the criminal’s pain can
serve as an “equivalent” of the harm he has done? How can one “pay back”
with suffering? An eye must be invoked that extracts pleasure from the
event (this has nothing to do with vengeance): something that Nietzsche
himself calls the evaluating eye, or the eye of the gods who enjoy cruel
spectacles, “and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”\footnote{\emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 6.}
So much is pain part of an active life and an obliging gaze. The
equation injury = pain has nothing exchangist about
it, and it shows in this extreme case that the debt itself had nothing
to do with exchange. Simply stated, the eye extracts from the pain it is
contemplating a surplus value of code that compensates the broken
relationship between the voice of alliance that the criminal has
wronged, and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated his body. The
crime, a rupture of the phonographic connection, re-established by the
spectacle of the punishment: as primitive justice, territorial
representation has \emph{foreseen} everything.


Coding pain and death, it has foreseen everything—except for the way
**its own* death would come to it from without. “They come like fate,
without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning
appears, too terrible, too convincing, too sudden, too \emph{different} even
to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of
forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there
are—wherever they appear something new arises, a ruling structure that
**lives*, in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in
which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a
‘meaning’ in relation to the whole. They do not know what guilt,
responsibility, or consideration are, these born organizers; they
exemplify that terrible artist’s egoism that has the look of bronze and
knows itself justified to all eternity in its ‘work,’ like a mother in
her child. It is not in \emph{them} that the ‘bad conscience’ developed, that
goes without saying—but it would not have developed if a tremendous
quantity of freedom had not been expelled from the world, or at least
from the visible world, and made as it were \emph{latent} under their hammer
blows and artist’s violence.”\footnote{Ibid., II, 17.} It is here that Nietzsche speaks of a
break, a rupture, a leap. Who are these beings, \emph{they} 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\dots{}.”\footnote{Ibid.}) Even the
most ancient African myths speak to us of these blond men. They are the
**founders of the State*. Nietzsche will come to establish the existence
of other breaks: those of the Greek city-state, Christianity, democratic
and bourgeois humanism, industrial society, capitalism, and socialism.
But it could be that all these—in various ways—presuppose this first
great hiatus, although they all claim to repel and to fill it. It could
be that, spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or
socialist, \emph{there has never been but a single State}, the State-as-dog
that “speaks with flaming roars.”\footnote{Ibid., II, 16.} And Nietzsche suggests how this
new socius proceeds: a terror without precedent, in comparison with
which the ancient system of cruelty, the forms of primitive
regimentation and punishment, are nothing. A concerted destruction of
all the primitive codings, or worse yet, their derisory preservation,
their reduction to the condition of secondary parts in the new machine,
and the new apparatus of repression (\emph{refoulement}). All that
constituted the essential element of the primitive inscription
machine—the blocks of mobile, open, finite debts, “the parcels of
destiny”—finds itself taken into an immense machinery \emph{that renders the
debt infinite} and no longer forms anything but one and the same
crushing fate: “the \emph{aim} now is to preclude pessimistically, once and
for all, the prospect of a final discharge; the \emph{aim} now is to make the
glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility.”\footnote{Ibid., II, 21.} The earth
becomes a madhouse.

\section{6. The Barbarian Despotic Machine}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-6}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-6}%


The founding of the despotic machine or the barbarian socius can be
summarized in the following way: a new alliance and direct filiation.
The despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations
of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places
himself in direct filiation with the deity: the people must follow. A
leap into a new alliance, a break with the ancient filiation—this is
expressed in a strange machine, or rather a machine of the strange whose
locus is the desert, imposing the harshest and the most barren of
ordeals, and attesting to the resistance of an old order as well as to
the validation of the new order. The machine of the strange is both a
great paranoiac machine, since it expresses the struggle with the old
system, and already a glorious celibate machine, insofar as it exalts
the triumph of the new alliance. The despot is the paranoiac: there is
no longer any reason to forego such a statement, once one has freed
oneself from the characteristic familialism of the concept of paranoia
in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and provided one sees in paranoia a
type of investment of a social formation. And new perverse groups spread
the despot’s invention (perhaps they even fabricated it for him),
broadcast his fame, and impose his power in the towns they found or
conquer. Wherever a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes,
and officials are part of the procession. It might be said that the
ancient complementarity has shifted to form a new socius: no longer the
bush paranoiac and the encampment or village perverts, but the desert
paranoiac and the town perverts.


In theory the despotic barbarian formation has to be conceived of in
terms of an opposition between it and the primitive territorial machine:
the birth of an empire. But in reality one can perceive the movement of
this formation just as well when one empire breaks away from a preceding
empire; or even when there arises the dream of a spiritual empire,
wherever temporal empires fall into decadence. It may be that the
enterprise is primarily military and motivated by conquest, or that it
is primarily religious, the military discipline being converted into
internal asceticism and cohesion. It may be that the paranoiac himself
is either a gentle creature or a raging beast. But we always rediscover
the figures of this paranoiac and his perverts, the conqueror and his
elite troops, the despot and his bureaucrats, the holy man and his
disciples, the anchorite and his monks, Christ and his Saint Paul. Moses
flees from the Egyptian machine into the wilderness and installs his new
machine there, a holy ark and a portable temple, and gives his people a
new religious-military organization. In order to summarize Saint John
the Baptist’s enterprise, one author declares: “John attacks at its
foundation the central doctrine of Judaeism, the doctrine of the
alliance with God through a filiation that goes back to Abraham.”\footnote{Jean Steinmann, \emph{Saint Jean-Baptiste et la spiritualité du désert} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959), p. 69.}
There is the essential: every time the categories of new alliance and
direct filiation are mobilized, we are talking about the imperial
barbarian formation or the despotic machine. And this holds true
whatever the context of this mobilization, whether in a relationship
with preceding empires or not, since throughout these vicissitudes the
imperial formation is always defined by a certain type of code and
inscription that is in direct opposition to the primitive territorial
codings. The number of elements in the alliance makes little difference:
new alliance and direct filiation are specific categories that testify
to the existence of a new socius, irreducible to the lateral alliances
and the extended filiations that declined the primitive machine. It is
this force of projection that defines paranoia, this strength to start
again from zero, to objectify a complete transformation: the subject
leaps outside the intersections of alliance-filiation, installs himself
at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, the subject of a
deterritorialized knowledge that links him directly to God and connects
him to the people. For the first time, something has been withdrawn from
life and from the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to
survey the earth from above: a first principle of paranoiac knowledge.
The whole relative play of alliances and filiations is carried to the
absolute in this new alliance and this direct filiation.


It remains to be said that, in order to understand the barbarian
formation, it is necessary to relate it not to other formations in
competition with it temporally and spiritually, according to
relationships that obscure the essential, but to the savage primitive
formation that it supplants by imposing its own rule of law, but that
continues to haunt it. It is exactly in this way that Marx defines
Asiatic production: a higher unity of the State establishes itself on
the foundations of the primitive rural communities, which keep their
ownership of the soil, while the State becomes the true owner in
conformity with the apparent objective movement that attributes the
surplus product to the State, assigns the productive forces to it in the
great projects undertaken, and makes it appear as the cause of the
collective conditions of appropriation.\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations} (1857), trans. Jack Cohen (New York: International Publishers, 1965), pp. 69–70.} The full body as socius has
ceased to be the earth, it has become the body of the despot, the despot
himself or his god. The prescriptions and prohibitions that often render
him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without organs. \emph{He}
is the sole quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the
apparent objective movement. In place of mobile detachments from the
signifying chain, a detached object has jumped outside the chain; in
place of flow selections, all the flows converge into a great river that
constitutes the sovereign’s consumption: a radical change of régimes in
the fetish or the symbol. What counts is not the person of the
sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited. It is the social
machine that has profoundly changed: in place of the territorial
machine, there is the “megamachine” of the State, a functional pyramid
that has the despot at its apex, an immobile motor, with the
bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear,
and the villagers at its base, serving as its working parts. The stocks
form the object of an accumulation, the blocks of debt become an
infinite relation in the form of the tribute. The entire surplus value
of code is an object of appropriation. This conversion crosses through
all the syntheses: the synthesis of production, with the hydraulic
machine and the mining machine; the synthesis of inscription, with the
accounting machine, the writing machine, and the monument machine; and
finally the synthesis of consumption, with the upkeep of the despot, his
court, and the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the
principle of a territorialization that would inscribe people according
to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the
effect of a movement of deterritorialization that divides the earth as
an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new
full body, to the new socius. “They come like fate,\dots{} they appear as
lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden.”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 17.}


The death of the primitive system always comes from without; history is
the history of contingencies and encounters. Like a cloud blown in from
the desert, the conquerors are there: “In some way that is
incomprehensible to me they have pushed right into the capital, although
it is a long way from the frontier. At any rate, here they are; it seems
that every morning there are more of them\dots{}. Speech with the nomads is
impossible. They do not know our own language.”\footnote{Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” \emph{The Great Wall of China}, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1948).} But this death that
comes from without is also that which was rising from within: the
general irreducibility of alliance to filiation, the independence of the
alliance groups, the way in which they serve as a conducting element for
the political and economic relations, the system of primitive rankings,
the mechanism of surplus value—all this already prefigured despotic
formations and caste hierarchies. And how does one distinguish the way
in which the primitive community remains on its guard with respect to
its own institutions of chieftainship, and exorcises or strait-jackets
the image of the possible despot whom it threatens to secrete from
within, from the way in which it binds up the symbol—a symbol that has
become derisory—of a former despot who thrust himself upon the community
from the outside long ago? It is not always easy to know if one is
considering a primitive community that is repressing an endogenous
tendency, or one that is regaining its cohesion as best it can after a
terrible exogenous adventure. The game of alliances is ambiguous: are we
still on this side of the new alliance, or already beyond it, having
fallen back, as it were, into a this-side-of that is residual and
transformed? (Related question: what is the feudal system?) We are only
able to fix the precise moment of the imperial formation as that of the
new exogenous alliance, not only in the place of former alliances, but
**in relation to them*.


This new alliance is something altogether different from a treaty or a
contract. What is suppressed is not the former régime of lateral
alliances and extended filiations, but merely their determining
character. They subsist, more or less modified, more or less harnessed
by the great paranoiac, since they furnish the material of surplus
value. In point of fact, that is what forms the specific character of
Asiatic production: the autochthonous rural communities subsist, and
continue to produce, inscribe, and consume; in effect, they are the
State’s sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine
subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the
State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups
retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows
of the former régime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity
that appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is
bricked over by and in the inscription of the State. The blocks subsist,
but have become encasted and embedded bricks, having only a controlled
mobility. The territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely
allied with the new alliance; the territorial filiations are not
replaced, but are merely affiliated with the direct filiation. It is
like an immense right of the first-born over all filiations, an immense
right of the wedding night over all alliances. The filiative stock
becomes the object of an accumulation in the other filiation, while the
alliance debt becomes an infinite relation in the other alliance. It is
the entire primitive system that finds itself mobilized, requisitioned
by a superior power, subjugated by new exterior forces, put in the
service of other ends; so true is it, said Nietzsche, that what is
called the evolution of a thing is “a succession of more or less
profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus
the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the
purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful
counteractions.”\footnote{\emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 12.}


It has often been remarked that the State commences (or recommences)
with two fundamental acts, one of which is said to be an act of
territoriality through the fixing of residence, and the other, an act of
liberation through the abolition of small debts. But the State operates
by means of euphemisms. The pseudo territoriality is the product of an
effective deterritorialization that substitutes abstract signs for the
signs of the earth, and that makes the earth itself into the object of a
State ownership of property, or an ownership held by the State’s richest
servants and officials. (There is no great change, \emph{from this point of
view}, when the State no longer does anything more than guarantee the
private property of a ruling class that becomes distinct from the
State.) The abolition of debts, when it takes place, is a means of
maintaining the distribution of land, and a means of preventing the
entry on stage of a new territorial machine, possibly revolutionary and
capable of raising and dealing with the agrarian problem in a
comprehensive way. In other cases where a redistribution occurs, the
cycle of credits is maintained, in the new form established by the
State—money. For without question, money does not begin by serving the
needs of commerce, or at least it has no autonomous mercantile model.
The despotic machine holds the following in common with the primitive
machine, it confirms the latter in this respect: the dread of decoded
flows—flows of production, but also mercantile flows (\emph{flux marchands})
of exchange and commerce that might escape the State monopoly, with its
tight restrictions and its plugging of flows. When Etienne Balazs asks
why capitalism wasn’t born in China in the thirteenth century, when all
the necessary scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed to
be present, the answer lies in the State, which closed the mines as soon
as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient, and which retained a
monopoly or a narrow control over commerce (the merchant as
functionary).\footnote{Etienne Balazs, \emph{La bureaucratie céleste} (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), Ch. 13: “La naissance du capitalisme en Chine” (especially the State and money, and the merchants’ impossibility of gaining an autonomy, pp. 229–300). Regarding imperial formations founded on the control of commerce rather than control over public works—in black Africa, for example—see the comments of Maurice Godelier and J. Suret-Canale, in Maurice Godelier, \emph{Sur le mode de production asiatique} (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1969), pp. 87–88, 120–22.}


The role of money in commerce hinges less on commerce itself than on its
control by the State. Commerce’s relationship with money is synthetic,
not analytical. And money is fundamentally inseparable, not from
commerce, but from taxes as the maintenance of the apparatus of the
State. Even where dominant classes set themselves apart from this
apparatus and make use of it for the benefit of private property, the
despotic tie between money and taxes remains visible. Basing himself on
the research of Edouard Will, Michel Foucault shows how, in certain
Greek tyrannies, the tax on aristocrats and the distribution of money to
the poor are a means of bringing the money back to the rich and a means
of remarkably widening the régime of debts, making it even stronger, by
anticipating and repressing any reterritorialization that might be
produced by the economic givens of the agrarian problem.\footnote{Michel Foucault, “La volonté de savoir”, a course given at the Collège de France in 1971.} (As if the
Greeks had discovered in their own way what the Americans rediscovered
after the New Deal: that heavy taxes are good for business.) In a word,
money—the circulation of money—\emph{is the means for rendering the debt
infinite}. And that is what is concealed in the two acts of the State:
the residence or territoriality of the State inaugurates the great
movement of deterritorialization that subordinates all the primitive
filiations to the despotic machine (the agrarian problem); the abolition
of debts or their accountable transformation initiates the duty of an
interminable service to the State that subordinates all the primitive
alliances to itself (the problem of debts). The infinite creditor and
infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts.
There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt
becomes a \emph{debt of existence}, a debt of the existence of the subjects
themselves. A time will come when the creditor has not yet lent while
the debtor never quits repaying, for repaying is a duty but lending is
an option—as in Lewis Carroll’s song, the long song about the infinite
debt:



\begin{quote}



\end{quote}



\begin{verse}
A man may surely claim his dues: \\{}
But, when there’s money to be lent, \\{}
A man must be allowed to choose \\{}
Such times as are convenient.\footnote{Lewis Carroll, “Peter and Paul,” in \emph{Sylvie and Bruno}.}
\end{verse}


The despotic State, such as it appears in the purest conditions of
“Asiatic” production, has two correlative aspects: on the one hand it
replaces the territorial machine, it forms a new deterritorialized full
body; on the other hand it maintains the old territorialities,
integrates them as parts or organs of production in the new machine. It
is perfected all at once because it functions on the basis of dispersed
rural communities, which are like pre-existing autonomous or
semiautonomous machines from the viewpoint of production; but from this
same viewpoint, it reacts on them in producing the conditions for major
work projects that exceed the capacities of the separate communities.
What is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of
the old alliances with the new, and a disjunctive synthesis that entails
an overflowing of the old filiations into the direct filiation,
gathering all the subjects into the new machine. The essential action of
the State, therefore, is the creation of a second inscription by which
the new full body—immobile, monumental, immutable—appropriates all the
forces and agents of production; but this inscription of the State
allows the old territorial inscriptions to subsist, as “bricks” on the
new surface. And finally, from this appropriation there results the way
in which the conjunction of the two parts is implemented and the
respective portions are distributed to the higher proprietary unity and
to the propertied communities, to the overcoding process and to the
intrinsic codes, to the appropriated surplus value and to the usufruct
put into use, to the State machine and to the territorial machines. As
in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” the State is the transcendent
higher unity that integrates relatively isolated subaggregates,
functioning separately, to which it assigns a development in bricks and
a labor of construction by fragments. Scattered partial objects hanging
on the body without organs. No one has equaled Kafka in demonstrating
that the law had nothing to do with a natural, harmonious, and immanent
totality, but that it acted as an eminent formal unity, and \emph{reigned
accordingly over pieces and fragments} (the wall and the tower). Hence
the State is not primeval, it is an origin or an abstraction, it is the
original abstract essence that is not to be confused with a beginning.
“We think only about the Emperor. But not about the present one; or
rather we would think about the present one if we knew who he was or
knew anything definite about him\dots{}. [The people] do not know what emperor
is reigning, and there exist doubts regarding even the name of the
dynasty\dots{}. Long-dead emperors are set on the throne in our villages, and
one that only lives in song recently had a proclamation of his read out
by the priest before the altar.”\footnote{Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” pp. 163–64, 167–68.}


As for the subaggregates themselves, the primitive territorial machines,
they are the concrete itself, the concrete base and beginning, but their
segments here enter into relationships corresponding to the essence,
they assume precisely this form of bricks that ensures their integration
into the higher unity, and their distributive operation, consonant with
the great collective designs of this same unity: major work projects,
extortion of surplus value, tributes, generalized servitude. Two
inscriptions coexist in the imperial formation, and mutually adjust
insofar as the one is imbricated into the other, but the new inscription
cements the whole and brings producers and products into relations with
itself (they do not need to speak the same language). The imperial
inscription countersects all the alliances and filiations, prolongs
them, makes them converge into the direct filiation of the despot with
the deity, and the new alliance of the despot with the people. All the
coded flows of the primitive machine are now forced into a bottleneck,
where the despotic machine overcodes them. \emph{Overcoding} is the operation
that constitutes the essence of the State, and that measures both its
continuity and its break with the previous formations: the dread of
flows of desire that would resist coding, but also the establishment of
a new inscription that overcodes, and that makes desire into the
property of the sovereign, even though he be the death instinct itself.
The castes are inseparable from this overcoding, and imply the existence
of dominant “classes” that do not yet manifest themselves as classes,
but are merged with a State apparatus. Who is able to touch the full
body of the sovereign? Here we have a problem of castes. It is
overcoding that impoverishes the earth for the benefit of the
deterritorialized full body, and that on this full body renders the
movement of debt infinite. It is a measure of Nietzsche’s force to have
stressed the importance of such a movement that begins with the founders
of States, these artists with a look of bronze, creating “an oppressive
and remorseless machine,”\footnote{\emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 17.} erecting before any perspective of
liberation an ironclad impossibility. This “infinitivation”
(\emph{infinitivation}) cannot be understood exactly as Nietzsche would have
it—that is, as a consequence of the interplay of ancestors, profound
genealogies, and extended filiations; rather, when these are
short-circuited, abducted by the new alliance and direct filiation,
**then* the ancestor—the master of the mobile and finite blocks—finds
himself dismissed by the deity, the immobile organizer of the bricks and
of their infinite circuit.

\section{7. Barbarian or Imperial Representation}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-7}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-7}%


Incest with the sister and incest with the mother are very different
things. The sister is not a substitute for the mother: the one belongs
to the connective category of alliance, the other to the disjunctive
category of filiation. Incest with the sister is prohibited insofar as
the conditions of territorial coding require that alliance not be
confounded with filiation; and incest with the mother, insofar as
descent within filiation must not be allowed to interfere with ascending
lines. That is why the despot’s incest is twofold, by virtue of the new
alliance and direct filiation. He begins by marrying \emph{the} sister. But
he enters into this forbidden endogamous marriage outside the tribe,
inasmuch as he is himself outside his tribe, on the outside or at the
outer limits of the territory. This is what Pierre Gordon showed in his
strange book: the same rule that proscribes incest must prescribe it for
certain persons. Exogamy must result in the position of men outside the
tribe who for their part are entitled to an endogamous marriage and are
able, by virtue of this formidable right, to serve as initiators to
exogamous subjects of both sexes: the “sacred deflowerer,” the “ritual
initiator” on the mountain or across the waters.\footnote{* Pierre Gordon, \emph{L’initiation sexuelle et l’évolutuion religieuse} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), p. 164: “The sacred personage \dots{} did not live in the little agricultural village, but in the woods, like the hero Enkidu of the Chaldean epic, or on the mountain, in the sacred enclosure. His occupations were those of a herdsman or a hunter, not those of a cultivator. The obligation to resort to him for sacred marriages, the only kind of marriage that enhanced the woman’s position, therefore entailed \emph{ipso facto an exogamy}. Under these conditions only the young women belonging to the same group as the ritual deflowerer could be \emph{endogamous}.”} The wilderness,
land of betrothal. All the flows converge on a man such as this, all the
alliances find themselves countersected by this new alliance that
overcodes them. Endogamous marriage outside the tribe places the hero in
a position to overcode all the endogamous marriages in the tribe.


It is clear that incest with \emph{the} mother has a completely different
meaning: this time it is a question of the mother of the tribe, as she
exists in the tribe, as the hero finds her in penetrating into the
tribe, or finds her again in returning to the tribe after his first
marriage. He countersects the extended filiations with a direct
filiation. The initiated or initiating hero becomes king. The second
marriage develops the consequences of the first, it draws out the
effects of the first. The hero begins by marrying the sister, than he
marries the mother. The fact that the two acts can, to varying degrees,
be bound together, assimilated, does not rule out the existence of two
sequences in the phenomenon: the union with the princess-sister and the
union with the mother-queen. Incest goes by twos. The hero is always
sitting astride two groups, the one where he leaves to find his sister,
the other where he returns to find his mother again. The purpose of this
double incest is not to produce a flow, not even a magic flow, but to
overcode all the existing flows, and to ensure that no intrinsic code,
no underlying flow escapes the overcoding of the despotic machine; hence
it is by virtue of his sterility that he guarantees the general
fecundity.\footnote{Luc de Heusch, \emph{Essais sur le symbolisme de Vinceste royal en Afrique} (Brussels, 1958), pp. 72–74.} The marriage with the sister is on the outside, it is
the wilderness ordeal, it expresses the spatial divergence from the
primitive machine; it provides the old alliances with an outcome; it
founds the new alliance by effecting a generalized appropriation of all
the alliance debts. The marriage with the mother is the return to the
tribe; it expresses the temporal divergence from the primitive machine
(the difference between the generations); it constitutes the direct
filiation that results from the new alliance, by effecting a generalized
accumulation of filiative stock. Both marriages are essential to the
overcoding, as the two ends of a tie for the despotic knot.


A pause seems in order here while we ask how such a thing is possible.
How is it that incest has become “possible,” and not only possible, but
the manifest property and seal of the despot? Who is this sister, this
mother? The sister and mother of the despot himself? Or should the
question be framed in a different way? For it concerns the whole system
of representation when it ceases to be territorial and becomes imperial.
First of all, we have the impression that the elements of the in-depth
system of representation have begun to move: the cellular migration has
begun that will carry the Oedipal cell from one locus of representation
to another. In the imperial formation, \emph{incest has ceased being the
displaced represented of desire to become the repressing representation
itself}. For there can be no doubt: this way the despot has of
committing incest, and of making it possible, in no way involves
removing the apparatus of social and psychic repression (\emph{l’appareil
répression-refoulement}). On the contrary, the despot’s intervention
forms part of the apparatus, it changes only the parts of the machine;
yet it is still as the displaced represented that incest now comes to
occupy the position of the repressing representation. Another gain in
the sum of repression, a new economy in the repressive, repressing
apparatus (\emph{l’appareil refoulant répressif}), a new mark, a new
severity. It would be easy, too easy, if it were enough to make incest
possible, and to implement this in sovereign fashion, so that the
exercise of psychic repression and the service of social repression
would be made to end. The royal barbarian incest is merely the means to
overcode the flows of desire, certainly not a means to liberate them. O
Caligula, O Heliogabalus, O mad memory of vanished emperors! Incest
never having been the desire, but merely its displaced represented as it
results from psychic repression, social repression has everything to
gain when incest comes to take the place of the representation itself,
and in this capacity take charge of the repressing function (\emph{la
fonction refoulante}). (That is what we have already seen in psychosis,
where the intrusion of the complex into consciousness, according to the
traditional criterion, did not, to be sure, alleviate the repression of
desire.) With incest’s new position in the imperial formation, we are
therefore speaking only of a migration in the in-depth elements of
**representation*, which will render the latter more foreign, more
ruthless, more definitive, or more “infinite” with respect to
**desiring-production*. But this migration would never be possible if
there did not occur correlatively a considerable change in the other
elements of representation, those elements that operate on the surface
of the inscribing socius.


What changes singularly in the surface organization of representation is
the relationship between the voice and graphism: it is the despot who
establishes the practice of writing (the most ancient authors saw this
clearly); it is the imperial formation that makes graphism into a system
of writing in the proper sense of the term. Legislation, bureaucracy,
accounting, the collection of taxes, the State monopoly, imperial
justice, the functionaries’ activity, historiography: everything is
written in the despot’s procession. Let us return to the paradox that
emerges from the analyses of Leroi-Gourhan: primitive societies are oral
not because they lack a graphic system but because, on the contrary, the
graphic system in these societies is independent of the voice; it marks
signs on the body that respond to the voice, react to the voice, but
that are autonomous and do not align themselves on it. In return,
barbarian civilizations are written, not because the voice has been
lost, \emph{but} because the graphic system has lost its independence and its
particular dimensions, has aligned itself on the voice and has become
subordinated to the voice, enabling it to extract from the voice a
deterritorialized abstract flux that it retains and makes reverberate in
the linear code of writing. In short, graphism in one and the same
movement begins to depend on the voice, and induces a mute voice from on
high or from the beyond, a voice that begins to depend on graphism. It
is by subordinating itself to the voice that writing supplants it.


Jacques Derrida is correct in saying that every language presupposes a
writing system from which it originates, if by that he means the
existence and the connection of some sort of graphism—writing in the
largest sense of the term. He is also right in saying that, within
writing in the narrow sense, hardly any breaks can be established
between pictographic, ideogrammic, and phonetic procedures: there is
always and already an alignment on the voice, at the same time as a
substitution for the voice (supplementarity), and “phonetism is never
all-powerful, but has also always-already begun to labor and elaborate
the mute signifier.” He is again correct in linking writing to incest in
a mysterious fashion. But we see nothing in this link that would lead us
to conclude in favor of the constancy of an apparatus of psychic
repression, operating in the manner of a graphic machine capable of
performing as well by means of hieroglyphs as by phonemes.\footnote{Jacques Derrida, \emph{De la grammatologie} (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), and “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in \emph{L’écriture et la différence} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967).} For
there is indeed a break that changes everything in the world of
representation, between this writing in the narrow sense and writing in
the broad sense—that is, between two completely different orders of
inscription: a graphism that leaves the voice dominant by being
independent of the voice while connecting with it, and a graphism that
dominates or supplants the voice by depending on it in various ways and
by subordinating itself to the voice. The primitive territorial sign is
self-validating; it is a position of desire in a state of multiple
connections. It is not a sign of a sign nor a desire of a desire. It
knows nothing of linear subordination and its reciprocity: neither
pictogram nor ideogram, it is rhythm and not form, zigzag and not line,
artifact and not idea, production and not expression. Let us try to
summarize the differences between these two forms of representation,
territorial and imperial.


In the first place, territorial representation is made up of two
heterogeneous elements, voice and graphism: the former is like the
representation of words constituted in lateral alliance, while the
latter is like the representation of things—of \emph{bodies}—established in
extended filiation. The former acts on the latter, while the latter
reacts on the former, each element having its own particular force that
is connoted along with that of the other, so as to perform the great
task of germinal intense repression. What is repressed, in fact, is the
full body as the foundation of the intense earth, which must yield its
place to the socius in extension, into which the intensities in question
pass or fail to pass. The full body of the earth must assume an
extension in the socius and as the socius. The primitive socius covers
itself in this manner with a network wherein one is continually jumping
from words to things, and from bodies to appellations, according to the
extensive requirements of the system in its length and its width. What
we call the order of connotation is an order in which the word (\emph{le
mot}) as a vocal sign designates something, but where the thing
designated is no less a sign, because it is furrowed by a graphism that
is connoted in conjunction with the voice. The heterogeneity, the
divergence, the disequilibrium of the two elements—vocal and graphic—is
resolved by a third element: the visual, the eye. It might be said of
this eye that it \emph{sees the word}—it sees it, it does not read it—insofar
as it evaluates the suffering caused by the graphism. Jean-François
Lyotard has attempted to describe such a system in another context,
where the word has only a designating function but does not of itself
constitute the sign; what becomes a sign is rather the thing or body
designated as such, insofar as it reveals an unknown facet described on
it, traced by the graphism that responds to the word. The gap between
the two elements is bridged by the eye, which “sees” the word without
reading it, inasmuch as it appraises the pain emanating from the
graphism applied to the flesh itself: the eye jumps.\footnote{* Lyotard re-establishes the overly neglected rights of a theory of pure designation. He shows the irreducible gap between the word and the thing in the relationship of designation that connotes them. By virtue of this gap, it is the thing designated that becomes the sign by revealing an unknown facet as a hidden content. (Words are not themselves signs, but they transform into signs the things or bodies they designate.) At the same time it is the designating word that becomes \emph{visible}, independently of any writing-reading, by revealing a strange ability to be seen, not read. See Lyotard, \emph{Discours, figure} (see reference note 85 [114 in this version]), pp. 41–82: “Words are not things, but as soon as there is a word, the object designated becomes a sign, which means precisely that it conceals a hidden content within its manifest identity, and that it reserves another face for another view focused on it,\dots{} which perhaps will never be seen”—but which in return will be viewed in the word itself.}


The magic triangle with its three sides—voice-audition, graphism-body,
eye-pain—thus seems to us to be an order of connotation, a system of
cruelty where the word has an essentially designating function, but
where the graphism itself constitutes a sign in conjunction with the
thing designated, and where the eye goes from one to the other,
extracting and measuring the visibility of the one against the pain of
the other. Everything in the system is active, en-acted (\emph{agi}), or
reacting; everything is a matter of use and function. So that when one
considers the whole of territorial representation, one is struck by the
complexity of the networks with which it covers the socius: the chain of
territorial signs is continually jumping from one element to another;
radiating in all directions; emitting detachments wherever there are
flows to be selected; including disjunctions; consuming remains;
extracting surplus values; connecting words, bodies, and sufferings, and
formulas, things, and affects; connoting voices, graphic traces, and
eyes, always in a polyvocal usage—\emph{a way of jumping} that cannot be
contained within an order of meaning, still less within a signifier. And
if incest seemed impossible to us from this point of view, it is because
incest is nothing other than a jump that necessarily fails, this jump
that goes from appellations to persons, from names to bodies: on the one
hand, the repressed this-side-of of appellations that do not yet
designate persons, but only intensive germinal states; on the other
hand, the repressing beyond that only applies appellations to persons by
prohibiting persons who answer to the names of sister, mother, father.
Between the two, the shallow stream \emph{where nothing passes}, where the
appellations do not adhere to the persons, where the persons elude the
graphic action, and where the eye no longer has anything to see or
evaluate: incest, the simple displaced limit, neither repressed nor
repressing, but merely the displaced represented of desire. From this
moment on it appears indeed that the two dimensions of
representation—its surface organization with the elements
voice-graphy-eye, and its in-depth organization with the representing
instances of desire-repressing representation\Slash{}displaced
represented—share the same fate, like a system of correspondences in the
heart of a given social machine.


All this finds itself overwhelmed in a new destiny, with the despotic
machine and imperial representation. In the first place, graphism aligns
itself on the voice, falls back on the voice, and becomes writing. At
the same time it induces the voice no longer as the voice of alliance,
but as that of the \emph{new alliance}, a fictitious voice from beyond that
expresses itself in the flow of writing as \emph{direct filiation}. These two
fundamental despotic categories are also the movement of graphism that,
at one and the same time, subordinates itself to the voice in order to
subordinate the voice and supplant it. Then there occurs a crushing of
the magic triangle: the voice no longer sings but dictates, decrees; the
graphy no longer dances, it ceases to animate bodies, but is set into
writing on tablets, stones, and books; the eye sets itself to reading.
(Writing does not entail but implies a kind of blindness, a loss of
vision \emph{and} of the ability to appraise; it is now the eye that suffers,
although it also acquires other functions.) Or rather, we are unable to
say that the magic triangle is completely crushed: it subsists as a base
and as a brick, insofar as the territorial machine continues to function
in the framework of the new machine. The triangle has become the base
for a pyramid, all of whose sides cause the vocal, the graphic, and the
visual to converge toward the eminent unity of the despot. If we call
the order of representation in a social system a plane of consistency
(\emph{plan de consistance}), it is evident that this plane has changed, that
it has become a plane of subordination and no longer one of connotation.
And here, in the second place, is the essential: the flattening of the
graphy onto the voice has made a transcendent object jump outside the
chain—a mute voice on which the whole chain now seems to depend, and in
relation to which it becomes linearized. The subordination of graphism
to the voice induces a fictitious voice from on high which, inversely,
no longer expresses itself except through the writing signs that it
emits (revelation). This is perhaps the first assembling of formal
operations that will lead to Oedipus (the paralogism of extrapolation):
a flattening out or a set of biunivocal relations that leads to the
breakaway and elevation of a detached object, and the linearization of
the chain that derives from this object.


It is perhaps at this juncture that the question “What does it mean?”
begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over problems
of use and efficacy. The emperor, the god—what did he mean? In place of
segments of the chain that are always detachable, a detached partial
object on which the whole chain depends; in place of a polyvocal
graphism flush with the real, a biunivocalization forming the
transcendent dimension that gives rise to a linearity; in place of
nonsignifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial chain, a
despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a
deterritorialized flow of writing. Men have even been seen drinking this
flow. Andras Zempléni shows how, in certain regions of Senegal, Islam
superimposes a plane of subordination on the old plane of connotation of
animist values: “The divine or prophetic word, written or recited, is
the foundation of this universe; the transparence of the animist prayer
yields to the opacity of the rigid Arab verse; speech (\emph{le verbe})
rigidities into formulas whose power is ensured by the truth of the
Revelation and not by a symbolic or incantatory efficacy\dots{}. The Moslem
holy man’s learning refers to a hierarchy of names, verses, numbers, and
corresponding beings—and if necessary, the verse will be placed in a
bottle filled with pure water, \emph{the verse water will be drunk}, one’s
body will be rubbed with it, and one’s hands will be washed with
it.”\footnote{Andras Zempléni, \emph{L’interpretation et la thérapie traditionelles du désordre mental chez les Wolof et les Lebou} (Paris: Universite de Paris, 1968), Vol. 2, pp. 380, 506.} Writing—the first deterritorialized flow, drinkable on this
account: it flows from the despotic signifier. For what is the signifier
in the first instance? What is it in relation to the nonsignifying
territorial signs, when it jumps outside their chains and
imposes—superimposes—a plane of subordination on their plane of immanent
connotation? The signifier is the sign that has become a sign of the
sign, the despotic sign having replaced the territorial sign, having
crossed the threshold of deterritorialization; \emph{the signifier is merely
the deterritorialized sign itself}. The sign made \emph{letter}. Desire no
longer dares to desire, having become a desire of desire, a desire of
the despot’s desire. The mouth no longer speaks, it drinks the letter.
The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer allows itself to be
engraved like the earth, but prostrates itself before the engravings of
the despot, the region beyond the earth, the new full body.


No water will ever cleanse the signifier of its imperial origin: the
signifying master or “the master signifier.” In vain will the signifier
be immersed in the immanent system of language (\emph{la langue}), or be used
to clear away problems of meaning and signification, or be resolved into
the coexistence of phonematic elements, where the signified is no more
than the summary of the respective differential values of these elements
in the relationships among themselves. In vain will the comparison of
language (\emph{langage}) to exchange and money be pushed to its furthest
point, subjecting language to the paradigms of an active capitalism, for
one will never prevent the signifier from reintroducing its
transcendence, and from bearing witness for a vanished despot who still
functions in modern imperialism. Even when it speaks Swiss or American,
linguistics manipulates the shadow of Oriental despotism. Ferdinand de
Saussure does not merely emphasize the following: that the arbitrariness
of language establishes its sovereignty, as a servitude or a generalized
slavery visited upon the “masses.” It has also been shown that two
dimensions exist side by side in Saussure: the one horizontal, where the
signified is reduced to the value of coexisting minimal terms into which
the signifier decomposes; but the other vertical, where the signifier is
elevated to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image—that is, to
the voice, taken in its maximum extension, which recomposes the
signifier (“value” as the opposite of the coexisting terms, but also the
“concept” as the opposite of the acoustic image). In short, the
signifier appears twice, once in the chain of elements in relation to
which the signified is always a signifier for another signifier, and a
second time in the detached object on which the whole of the chain
depends, and that spreads over the chain the effects of signification.
There is no phonological or even phonetic code operating on the
signifier in the first sense, without an overcoding effected by the
signifier itself in the second sense.


There is no linguistic field without biunivocal relations—whether
between ideographic and phonetic values, or between articulations of
different levels, monemes and phonemes—that finally ensure the
independence and the linearity of the deterritorialized signs. But such
a field remains defined by a transcendence, even when one considers this
transcendence as an absence or an empty locus, performing the necessary
foldings, levelings (\emph{rabattements}), and subordinations—a transcendence
whence issues throughout the system the inarticulate material flux in
which this transcendence operates, opposes, selects, and combines: \emph{the}
signifier. It is curious, therefore, that one can show so well the
servitude of the masses with respect to the minimal elements of the sign
within the immanence of language, without showing how the domination is
exercised through and in the transcendence of the signifier.\footnote{* Bernard Pautrat tries to establish a rapprochement between Nietzsche and Saussure, starting from problems of domination and servitude: \emph{Versions du soleil: figures et système de Nietzsche} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), pp. 207ff. He does well to remark that Nietzsche, in contrast to Hegel, causes the master-slave relationship to go by way of language and not by way of labor. But when he proceeds to the comparison with Saussure, he retains language as a system to which the masses are enslaved, and consigns to fiction the Nietzschean idea of a language of masters through which this enslavement is accomplished.} There,
however, as elsewhere, an irreducible exteriority of conquest asserts
itself. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the
leveling operations (\emph{les opérations de rabattement}) that constitute
written language indeed presuppose two inscriptions that do not speak
the same language: two languages (\emph{langages}), one of masters, the other
of slaves. Jean Nougayrol describes just such a situation: “For the
Sumerians, [a given sign] is water; the Sumerians read this sign \emph{a},
which signifies water in Sumerian. An Akkadian comes along and asks his
Sumerian master: what is this sign? The Sumerian replies: that’s \emph{a}.
The Akkadian takes this sign for \emph{a}, and on this point there is no
longer any relationship between the sign and water, which in Akkadian is
called \emph{mû}\dots{}. I believe that the presence of the Akkadians determined
the phoneticization of the writing system \dots{} and that the contact of two
peoples is almost necessary before the spark of a new writing can spring
forth.”\footnote{Jean Nougayrol, in \emph{L’écriture et la psychologie des peuples}, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), p. 90.}


One cannot better show how an operation of biunivocalization organizes
itself around a despotic signifier, so that a phonetic and alphabetical
chain flows from it. Alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by
illiterates. It goes by way of illiterates, those unconscious workers.
The signifier implies a language that overcodes another language, while
the other language is completely coded into phonetic elements. And if
the unconscious in fact includes the topical order of a double
inscription, it is not structured like one language, but like two. The
signifier does not appear to keep its promise, which is to give us
access to a modern and functional understanding of language. The
imperialism of the signifier does not take us beyond the question, “What
does it mean?”; it is content to bar the question in advance, to render
all the answers insufficient by relegating them to the status of a
simple signified. It challenges exegesis in the name of recitation, pure
textuality, and superior “scientificity” (\emph{scientificité}). Like the
young palace dogs too quick to drink the verse water, and who never tire
of crying: The signifier, you have not reached the signifier, you are
still at the level of the signifieds! The signifier is the only thing
that gladdens their hearts. But this master signifier remains what it
was in ages past, a transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the
elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence, the
authority that channels all the breaks-flows into one and the same locus
of one and the same cleavage: the detached object, the
phallus-and-castration, the bar that delivers over all the depressive
subjects to the great paranoiac king. O signifier, terrible archaism of
the despot where they still look for the empty tomb, the dead father,
and the mystery of the name! And perhaps that is what incites the anger
of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of his
followers: the vigor and the serenity with which Lacan accompanies the
signifier back to its source, to its veritable origin, the despotic age,
and erects an infernal machine that welds desire to the Law, because,
everything considered—so Lacan thinks—this is indeed the form in which
the signifier is in agreement with the unconscious, and the form in
which it produces effects of the signified in the unconscious.\footnote{* See Elisabeth Roudinesco’s excellent article on Lacan, where she analyzes the twofold aspect of the analytic signifying chain and the transcendent signifier on which the chain depends. She shows that, in this sense, Lacan’s theory should be interpreted less as a linguistic conception of the unconscious than as a critique of linguistics in the name of the unconscious. (Elisabeth Roudinesco, “L’action d’une métaphore,” \emph{La Pensée}, February 1972.)} The
signifier as the repressing representation, and the new displaced
represented that it induces, the famous metaphors and metonymy—all of
that constitutes the overcoding and deterritorialized despotic machine.


The despotic signifier has the effect of overcoding the territorial
chain. The signified is precisely the effect of the signifier, and not
what it represents or what it designates. The signified is the sister of
the borders and the mother of the interior. Sister and mother are the
concepts that correspond to the great acoustic image, to the voice of
the new alliance and direct filiation. Incest is the very operation of
overcoding at the two ends of the chain in all the territory ruled by
the despot, from the borders to the center: all the debts of alliance
are converted into the infinite debt of the new alliance, and all the
extended filiations are subsumed by direct filiation. Incest or the
royal trinity is therefore the whole of the repressing representation
insofar as it initiates the overcoding. The system of subordination or
signification has replaced the system of connotation. To the extent that
graphism is flattened onto the voice—the graphism that, not so long ago,
was inscribed flush with the body—body representation subordinates
itself to word representation: sister and mother are the voice’s
signifieds. But to the extent that this flattening induces a fictitious
voice from on high that no longer expresses itself except in the linear
flux, the despot himself is the signifier of the voice that, along with
the two signifieds, effects the overcoding of the whole chain. What made
incest impossible—namely, that at times we had the appellations (mother,
sister) but not the persons or the bodies, while at other times we had
the bodies, but the appellations disappeared from view as soon as we
broke through the prohibitions they bore—has ceased to exist. Incest has
become possible in the wedding of the kinship bodies and family
appellations, in the union of the signifier with its signifieds.


Hence it is by no means a question of knowing if the despot marries his
“true” sister and his true mother. For in any case his true sister is
the sister of the wilderness, just as his true mother is the mother of
the tribe. Once incest is \emph{possible}, it matters little whether it is
simulated or not, since in any case something else again is simulated
through incest. And in accordance with the complementarity of simulation
and identity that we encountered earlier, if the identification is that
of the object on high, the simulation is indeed the writing that
corresponds to it, the flux that flows from this object, the graphic
flux that flows from the voice. Simulation does not replace reality, it
is not an equivalent that stands for reality, but rather it appropriates
reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on
the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the
appropriation and production of the real by a quasi cause. In incest it
is the signifier that makes love with its signifieds. System of
simulation is the other name for signification and subordination. And
what is simulated and therefore produced, through the incest that is
itself simulated and therefore produced—all the more real for being
simulated, \emph{and vice versa}—is something very much like the extreme
states of a reconstituted, re-created intensity. With his sister the
despot simulates “a zero state from which the phallic force will arise,”
like a promise “whose hidden presence in the very interior of the body
must be situated at the extreme limit”; and with his mother the despot
simulates a superforce where the two sexes would be “at the maximum
[degree of externalization] of their specific natures”: the B-A Ba of
the phallus as voice.\footnote{Guy Rosalato, \emph{Essais sur le symbolique} (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 25–28.}


Hence something else is always at issue in royal incest: bisexuality,
homosexuality, castration, transvestism, as so many gradients and
passages in the cycle of intensities. This is because the despotic
signifier aims at the reconstitution of the full body of the intense
earth that the primitive machine had repressed, but on new foundations
or under new conditions present in the deterritorialized full body of
the despot himself. This is the reason that incest changes its meaning
or locus, and becomes the repressing representation. For what is at
stake in the overcoding effected by incest is the following: that all
the organs of all the subjects, all the eyes, all the mouths, all the
penises, all the vaginas, all the ears, and all the anuses become
attached to the full body of the despot, as though to the peacock’s tail
of a royal train, and that they have in this body their own intensive
representatives. Royal incest is inseparable from the intense
multiplication of organs and their inscription on the new full body.
(Sade saw clearly this always royal role of incest.) The apparatus of
social repression-psychic repression—i.e., the repressing
representation—now finds itself defined in terms of a supreme danger
that expresses the representative on which it bears: the danger that a
single organ might flow outside the despotic body, that it might break
away or escape. Suddenly the despot sees rising up before him, against
him, the enemy who brings death—an eye with too steady a look, a mouth
with too unfamiliar a smile; each organ is a possible protest. It is at
one and the same time that a half-deaf Caesar complains of an ear that
no longer hears, and sees weighing on him the look of Cassius, “lean and
hungry,” and the smile of Cassius, who “smiles in such a sort as if he
mock’d himself.” A long chronicle that will carry the assassinated,
dismembered, dis-organ-ized, tiled-down body of the despot into the
latrines of the city. Wasn’t it already the anus that detached the
object on high and produced the eminent voice? Didn’t the transcendence
of the phallus depend on the anus? But the latter is revealed only at
the end, as the last vestige of the vanished despot, the underside of
his voice: the despot is nothing more than this “dead rat’s ass
suspended from the ceiling of the sky.” The organs begin by detaching
themselves from the despotic body, the organs of the citizen risen up
against the tyrant. Then they will become those of private man, they
will become privatized after the model and memory of the disgraced anus,
ejected from the social field—the obsessive fear of smelling bad. The
entire history of primitive coding, of despotic overcoding, and of the
decoding of private man turns on these movements of flows: the intense
germinal influx, the surflux of royal incest, and the reflux of
excrement that conducts the dead despot to the latrines, and conducts us
all to today’s “private man”—the history sketched out by Artaud in his
masterpiece \emph{Héliogabale}. The entire history of the graphic flux goes
from the flood of sperm in the tyrant’s cradle, to the wave of shit in
his sewer tomb—“all writing is so much pig shit,” all writing is this
simulation, sperm and excrement.


One might think that the system of imperial representation was, in spite
of everything, milder than that of territorial representation. The signs
are no longer inscribed in the flesh itself but on stones, parchments,
pieces of currency, and lists. According to Wittfogel’s law of
“diminishing administrative returns,” wide sectors are left
semiautonomous insofar as they do not compromise the power of the State.
The eye no longer extracts a surplus value from the spectacle of
suffering, it has ceased to evaluate; it has begun rather to “forewarn”
and keep watch, to see that no surplus value escapes the overcoding of
the despotic machine. For all the organs and their functions experience
a detachment and elevation that relates them to, and makes them converge
on, the full body of the despot. In point of fact the régime is not
milder; the system of terror has replaced the system of cruelty. The old
cruelty persists. especially in the autonomous or quasi-autonomous
sectors; but it is now bricked into the State apparatus, which at times
organizes it and at other times tolerates or limits it, in order to make
it serve the ends of the State, and to subsume it under the higher
superimposed unity of a Law that is more terrible. As a matter of fact,
the law’s opposition or apparent opposition to despotism comes late—when
the State presents itself as an apparent peacemaker between classes that
become distinct from the State, making it necessary for the latter to
reshape its form of sovereignty.\footnote{* Regarding the transition from a royal system of justice based on magico-religious speech to a city-state system of justice based on a speech-as-dialogue, and regarding the change in “sovereignty” that corresponds to this transition, see L. Gernet, “Droit et prédroit en Grèce ancienne,” \emph{L’année sociologique 1948–49}; M. Détienne, \emph{Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque} (Paris: Maspero, 1967); and Michel Foucault, “La volonté de savoir” (see reference note 48 [63 in this version]).}


The law does not begin by being what it will become or seek to become
later: a guarantee against despotism, an immanent principle that unites
the parts into a whole, that makes of this whole the object of a general
knowledge and will whose sanctions are merely derivative of a judgment
and an application directed at the rebellious parts. The imperial
barbarian law possesses instead two features that are in opposition to
those just mentioned—the two features that Kafka so forcefully
developed: first, the paranoiac-schizoid trait of the law (metonymy)
according to which the law governs nontotalizable and nontotalized
parts, partitioning them off, organizing them as bricks, measuring their
distance and forbidding their communication, henceforth acting in the
name of a formidable but formal and empty Unity, eminent, distributive,
and not collective; and second, the maniacal depressive trait (metaphor)
according to which the law reveals nothing and has no knowable object,
the verdict having no existence prior to the penalty, and the statement
of the law having no existence prior to the verdict. The trial by ordeal
presents these two traits in a raw state. As in the machine of “In the
Penal Colony,” it is the penalty that writes both the verdict and the
rule that has been broken. In vain did the body liberate itself from its
characteristic graphism in the system of connotation, for it now becomes
the stone and the paper, the tablet and the currency on which the new
writing is able to mark its figures, its phonetism, and its alphabet.
Overcoding is the essence of the law, and the origin of the new
sufferings of the body. Punishment has ceased to be a festive occasion,
from which the eye extracts a surplus value in the magic triangle of
alliance and filiations. \emph{Punishment becomes a vengeance}, the vengeance
of the voice, the hand, and the eye now joined together on the
despot—the vengeance of the new alliance, whose public character does
not spoil the \emph{secret}: “I will bring down upon you the avenging sword
of the vengeance of alliance.” For once again, before it becomes a
feigned guarantee against despotism, the law is the invention of the
despot himself: \emph{it is the juridical form assumed by the infinite debt}.
The jurist will be seen in the despot’s procession up to the time of the
late Roman emperors, and the juridical form will accompany the imperial
formation, the legislator alongside the monster, Gaius and Commodus,
Papinian and Caracalla, Ulpian and Heliogabalus, “the delirium of the
twelve Caesars and the Golden Age of Roman Law”—taking the debtor’s side
against the creditor when necessary, so as to consolidate the infinite
debt.


As vengeance, and a vengeance exercised in advance, the imperial
barbarian law crushes the whole primitive interplay of action, the
en-acted (\emph{l’agi}), and reaction. Passivity must now become the virtue
of the subjects attached to the despotic body. As Nietzsche says when he
shows precisely how punishment becomes a vengeance in the imperial
formations, a “tremendous quantity of freedom” must have “been expelled
from the world, or at least from the \emph{visible} world, and made as it
were \emph{latent} under their hammer blows and artists’ violence.”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 17.}
There occurs a detachment and elevation of the death instinct, which
ceases to be coded in the interplay of savage actions and reactions
where fatalism was still something en-acted, in order to become the
somber agent of overcoding, the detached object that hovers over each
subject, as though the social machine had come unstuck from its
desiring-machines: death, the desire of desire, the desire of the
despot’s desire, a latency inscribed in the bowels of the State
apparatus. Better not a sole survivor than for a single organ to flow
outside this apparatus or slip away from the body of the despot. This is
because there is no other necessity (no other fatum) than that of the
signifier in its relationships with its signifieds: such is the régime
of terror. What the law is supposed to signify will only be revealed
later, when it has evolved and assumed the new figure that appears to
place it in opposition to despotism. But from the beginning it expresses
the imperialism of the signifier that produces its signifieds as effects
that are the more effective and necessary as they escape knowing, and as
they owe all to their eminent cause. Occasionally it still happens that
the young dogs will call for a return to the despotic signifier, without
exegesis or interpretation, while the law, however, wants to explain
what it signifies, to assert an independence of its signified—against
the despot, says the law. For the dogs, according to Kafka’s
observations, want desire to be firmly wedded to the law in the pure
detachment and elevation of the death instinct, rather than to hear, it
is true, hypocritical doctors explain what it all means. But all
that—the development of the democratic signified or the wrapping of the
despotic signifier—nevertheless forms part of the same question,
sometimes open and sometimes barred, the same extended abstraction, a
repressive machinery that always moves us away from the
desiring-machines. For there has never been but one State. The question
“What is the use of that?” fades more and more, and disappears in the
fog of pessimism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada!


The order of law as it appears in the imperial formation, and as it will
evolve later, indeed have something in common: the indifference to
designation. It is in the nature of the law to signify without
designating anything. The law does not designate anything or anybody
(the democratic conception of law will make this into a criterion). The
complex relationship of designation, as we have seen it elaborated in
the system of primitive connotation with its interplay of voice,
graphism, and eye, here disappears in the new relationship of barbarian
subordination. How could designation subsist when the sign has ceased to
be a position of desire, in order to become this imperial sign, a
universal castration that welds desire to the law? It is the crushing of
the old code, it is the new relationship of signification, it is the
**necessity* of this new relationship established in the overcoding
process, that refers designations to the \emph{arbitrary} (or that lets them
subsist in the form of bricks held over from the old system). Why is it
that linguists are constantly rediscovering the truths of the despotic
age? And finally, could it be that this arbitrariness of designations,
as the reverse side of a necessity of signification, does not bear only
on the despot’s subjects, nor even on his servants, but on the despot
himself, his dynasty, and his name (“[The people] do not know what
emperor is reigning, and there exist doubts regarding even the name of
the dynasty”\footnote{Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” p. 167.})? This would mean that the death instinct is even more
deeply rooted in the State than thought, and that latency not only
befalls the subjects of the State, but is also at work in the highest
machinery of the apparatus. The revenge becomes that of the subjects
against the despot. In the latency system of terror, what is no longer
active, en-acted, or reacted to, “this \emph{instinct for freedom} forcibly
made latent (\dots{}) pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and
finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself,”\footnote{Neitzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 17.}—that
very thing is now \emph{ressenti}:\footnote{* \emph{ressenti(e)} is the past participle of the French verb, ressentir, and \emph{ressentiment} is the noun form. Nietzsche makes use of \emph{ressentiment} constantly, in his own singular fashion, to describe the phenomenon whereby an active force is deprived of its normal conditions of existence, where it directs itself inward and turns against itself. “Pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself” is a perfect definition of what is meant for something to be \emph{ressenti} according to Nietzsche’s concept of \emph{ressentiment}. In his \emph{Nietzsche et la philosophie} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), Deleuze defines \emph{ressentiment} as the becoming-reactive of force in general: “separated from what it is capable of, the active force does not however cease to exist. Turning against itself, it produces suffering” (p. 147). Hence, Deleuze concludes, with \emph{ressentiment} a new meaning and depth is created for suffering, \emph{an intimate, internal meaning}. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} The eternal \emph{ressentiment} of the
subjects answers to the eternal vengeance of the despots. The
inscription is “\emph{ressentie}” when it is no longer en-acted or reacted
to. When the deterritorialized sign becomes a signifier, a formidable
quantity of reaction passes into a latent state; all the resonance and
all the retention change in volume and time (the “after-the-event”).
Vengeance and \emph{ressentiment}: not the beginning of justice, to be sure,
but its becoming and its destiny in the imperial formation as Nietzsche
analyzes it. And according to his prophecy, wouldn’t the State itself be
that dog which wants to die? But that is also reborn from its ashes. For
it is this whole constellation of the new alliance—the imperialism of
the signifier, the metaphoric or metonymic necessity of the signifieds,
**with* the arbitrary of the designations—that ensures the maintenance of
the system, and sees to it that the name is succeeded by another name,
one dynasty by another, without changing the signifieds, and without a
collapse of the wall of the signifier. This is why the order of latency
in the African, Chinese, Egyptian, and other empires was that of
rebellions and constant secessions, and not that of revolution. Here
again, death will have to be felt from within, but it will have to come
from without.


The founders of empires caused everything to pass into a latent state;
they invented vengeance and incited \emph{ressentiment}, that
countervengeance. And yet Nietzsche says about them what he has already
said about the primitive system: it was not in their midst that “bad
conscience,” this ugly growth—i.e., Oedipus—took root and began to grow.
It is simply that one more step has been taken in that direction:
Oedipus, bad conscience, interiority, they made it possible.\footnote{Ibid.} What
does Nietzsche mean, this man who dragged Caesar along with him as a
despotic signifier, along with its two signifieds, his sister and his
mother, and who felt their weight grow heavier as he drew nearer to
madness? It is true that Oedipus begins its cellular, ovular migration
in the system of imperial representation: from being at first the
displaced represented of desire, it becomes the repressing
representation itself. The impossible has become possible; the
unoccupied limit now finds itself occupied by the despot. Oedipus has
received its name, the clubfooted despot committing double incest
through overcoding, with his sister and his mother as body
representations subjected to verbal representation. Moreover, Oedipus is
in the process of establishing each of the formal operations that will
make it all possible: the extrapolation of a detached object; the double
bind of overcoding or royal incest; the biunivocalization, application,
and linearization of the chain between masters and slaves; the
introduction of the law into desire, and of desire into the law; the
terrible latency with its afterward or its after-the-event. All the
parts of the five paralogisms thus seem to be ready.


But we are still very far from the psychoanalytic Oedipus, and the
Hellenists are right to not grasp clearly the story that psychoanalysis
is trying at all costs to tell them. It is indeed the story of desire
and its sexual history (there is no other). But here all the parts
figure as cogs and wheels in the State machine. Desire is by no means an
interplay between a son, a mother, and a father. Desire institutes a
libidinal investment of a State machine that overcodes the territorial
machine and, with an additional turn of the screw, represses the
desiring-machines. Incest derives from this investment and not the
reverse. At first it brings into play only the despot, the sister, and
the mother: it is the overcoding and repressing representation. The
father intervenes only as the representative of the old territorial
machine, but the sister is the representative of the new alliance, and
the mother is the representative of direct filiation. Father and son are
not yet born. All sexuality functions in terms of the conjoined
operations of machines, their internecine struggle, their superposition,
their interlocking arrangements. Let us marvel once again at Freud’s
account of Oedipus. In \emph{Moses and Monotheism} he indeed surmises that
latency is a State affair. But then latency must not succeed the
“Oedipus complex,” marking the complex’s repression or even its
suppression. It must result from the repressing action of the incestuous
representation, which is not yet by any means a complex in the sense of
repressed desire, since on the contrary the representation exercises its
repressive action on desire itself. The Oedipus complex, as it is called
by psychoanalysis, will be born of latency, after latency, and it
signifies the return of the repressed under conditions that disfigure,
displace, and even decode desire. The Oedipus complex appears only after
latency; and when Freud recognizes two phases separated by latency, it
is only the second phase that merits the complex’s name, while the first
expresses only its parts and wheels functioning from a completely
different viewpoint, in a completely different organization. There we
see the mania of psychoanalysis with all its paralogisms: it presents as
a resolution, or an attempted resolution, of the complex what is rather
the latter’s definitive establishment or its interior installation, and
it presents as the complex what is still the complex’s opposite. What
will be necessary in order for Oedipus to become \emph{the} Oedipus, the
Oedipus complex? Many things, in fact—those things that Nietzsche
partially grasped in the evolution of the infinite debt.


The Oedipal cell will have to complete its migration; it must no longer
be content to pass from the state of the displaced represented to that
of repressing representation; rather, from being the repressing
representation, it will have to finally become the representative of
desire itself. And it must become the latter by virtue of being the
displaced represented. The debt must not only become an infinite debt,
it will have to be internalized and spiritualized as an infinite debt
(Christianity and what follows). The father and the son will have to
take form—that is, the royal triad must “masculinize” itself—and this
must occur as a direct consequence of the infinite debt that is now
internalized.\footnote{* Historians of religions and psychoanalysts are very familiar with this problem of the masculinization of the imperial triad, in terms of the father-son relationship that is brought into it. Nietzsche sees in this problem an essential moment in the development of the infinite debt: “that stroke of genius on the part of Christianity: God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of Mankind, God himself makes payment to himself, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself—the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love (can one credit that.), out of love for his debtor!” (\emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 21.)} Oedipus-the-despot will have to be replaced by
Oedipuses-as-subjects, Oedipuses-as-subjugated individuals,
Oedipuses-as-fathers, and Oedipuses-as-sons. All the formal operations
will have to be resumed within a decoded social field, and must
reverberate in the pure and private element of interiority, of interior
reproduction. The apparatus of social repression-psychic repression will
have to undergo a complete reorganization. Hence desire, having
completed its migration, will have to experience this extreme affliction
of being turned against itself: the turning back against itself, bad
conscience, the guilt that attaches it to the most decoded of social
fields as well as to the sickest interiority, the trap for desire, its
ugly growth. So long as the history of desire does not experience this
outcome, Oedipus haunts all societies, but as the nightmare of something
that has still not happened to them—its hour has not come. (And isn’t
this the strength of Lacan, to have saved psychoanalysis from the
frenzied oedipalization to which it was linking its fate—to have brought
about this salvation even at the price of a regression, and even though
it meant the unconscious would be kept under the weight of the despotic
apparatus, that it would be reinterpreted starting from this apparatus,
the Law, and the signifier—phallus and castration, yes! Oedipus, no!—the
despotic age of the unconscious.)

\section{8. The Urstaat}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-8}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-8}%


The city of Ur, the point of departure of Abraham or the new alliance.
The State was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully armed,
a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial \emph{Urstaat}, the
eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires. “Asiatic”
production, with the State that expresses or constitutes its objective
movement, is not a distinct formation; it is the basic formation, on the
horizon throughout history. There comes back to us from all quarters the
discovery of imperial machines that preceded the traditional historical
forms, machines characterized by State ownership of property, with
communal possession bricked into it, and collective dependence. Every
form that is more “evolved” is like a palimpsest: it covers a despotic
inscription, a Mycenaean manuscript. Under every Black and every Jew
there is an Egyptian, and a Mycenaean under the Greeks, an Etruscan
under the Romans. And yet their origin sinks into oblivion, a latency
that lays hold of the State itself, and where the writing system
sometimes disappears. It is beneath the blows of private property, then
of commodity production, that the State witnesses its decline. Land
enters into the sphere of private property and into that of commodities.
**Classes* appear, inasmuch as the dominant classes are no longer merged
with the State apparatus, but are distinct determinations that make use
of this transformed apparatus. At first situated adjacent to communal
property, then entering into the latter’s composition or conditioning
it, then becoming more and more a determining force, private property
brings about an internalization of the creditor-debtor relation in the
relations of opposed classes.\footnote{Concerning the régime of private property already present in the despotic State itself, see Karl Wittfogel, \emph{Oriental Despotism} (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 78–85, 228–300. On private property in the Chinese state, see Balazs, \emph{La bureaucratie céleste}, Ch. 7–9. Regarding the two paths of transition from the despotic State to feudalism, according to whether or not commodity production is joined with private property, see Godelier, \emph{Sur le mode de production asiatique}, pp. 90–92.}


But how does one explain both this latency into which the despotic State
enters, and this power with which it re-forms itself on modified
foundations, in order to spring back more “mendacious,” “colder,” and
more “hypocritical” than ever? This oblivion and this return. On the one
hand, the ancient city-state, the Germanic commune, and feudalism
presuppose the great empires, and cannot be understood except in terms
of the Urstaat that serves as their horizon. On the other hand, the
problem confronting these forms is to reconstitute the Urstaat insofar
as possible, given the requirements of their new distinct
determinations. For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and
classes signify? \emph{The breakdown of codes}. The appearance, the surging
forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from
one end to the other. The State can no longer be content to overcode
territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific
codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialized, which means:
putting despotism in the service of the new class relations; integrating
the relations of wealth and poverty, of commodity and labor; reconciling
market money and money from revenues; everywhere stamping the mark of
the Urstaat on the new state of things. And everywhere, the presence of
the latent model that can no longer be equaled, but that one cannot help
but imitate. The Egyptian’s melancholy warning to the Greeks echoes
through history: “You Greeks will never be anything but children!”


This special situation of the State as a category—oblivion and
return—has to be explained. To begin with, it should be said that the
primordial despotic state is not a historical break like any other. Of
all the institutions, it is perhaps the only one to appear fully armed
in the brain of those who institute it, “the artists with a look of
bronze.” That is why Marxism didn’t quite know what to make of it: it
has no place in the famous five stages: primitive communism, ancient
city-states, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism.\footnote{* Regarding whether it is possible to bring “Asiatic” production into agreement with the five stages and regarding the reasons behind Engel’s renunciation of this category in \emph{Origins of the Family}, and the Russian and Chinese Marxists’ resistance to this category, see Godeher, \emph{Sur le mode de production asiatique} (reference note 47). One may recall the insults addressed to Wittfogel for having raised this simple question: wasn’t the category of the Oriental despotic State challenged for reasons having to do with its special paradigmatic status as a horizon for modern socialist States.} \emph{It is not one
formation among others, nor is it the transition from one formation to
another}. It appears to be set back at a remove from what it transects
and from what it resects, as though it were giving evidence of another
dimension, a cerebral ideality that is added to, superimposed on the
material evolution of societies, a regulating idea or principle of
reflection (terror) that organizes the parts and the flows into a whole.
What is transected, superseded, or overcoded by the despotic State is
what comes before—the territorial machine, which it reduces to the state
of bricks, of working parts henceforth subjected to the cerebral idea.
In this sense the despotic State is indeed the origin, but the origin as
an abstraction that must include its differences with respect to the
concrete beginning. We know that myth always expresses a passage and a
divergence (\emph{un écart}). The primitive territorial myth of the beginning
expressed the divergence of a characteristically intense energy—what
Marcel Griaule called “the metaphysical part of mythology,” the
vibratory spiral—in relation to the social system in extension that it
conditioned, passing back and forth between alliance and filiation. But
the imperial myth of the origin expresses something else: the divergence
of this beginning from the origin itself, the divergence of the
extension from the idea, of the genesis from the order and the power
(the new alliance), and also what repasses from filiation to alliance,
what is taken up again by filiation. Jean-Pierre Vernant shows in this
way that the imperial myths are not able to conceive a law of
organization that is immanent in the universe: they need to posit and
internalize this difference between the origin and the beginnings,
between the sovereign power and the genesis of the world; “the myth
constitutes itself within this distance, it makes it into the very
object of its narrative, retracing the avatars of sovereignty down
through the succession of generations to the moment when a supremacy,
this time definitive, puts an end to the dramatic elaboration of the
**dunesteia*.”\footnote{Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{Les origines de la pensée grecque} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 112–13.} So that in the end one no longer really knows what
comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact
presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that
it segments in its turn.


In a certain sense it is necessary to say as much in regard to what
comes after the primal State, in regard to what is resected by this
State. It supersects what comes before, but resects the formations that
follow. There too it is like an abstraction that belongs to another
dimension, always at a remove and struck by latency, but that springs
back and returns stronger than before in the later forms that lend it a
concrete existence. A protean State, yet there has never been but one
State. Whence the variations, all the variants of the new alliance,
falling nevertheless under the same category. For example, feudalism not
only presupposes an abstract despotic State that it divides into
segments according to the régime of its private property and the rise of
its commodity production, but the latter induce in return the concrete
existence of a \emph{feudal state in the proper sense of the term}, where the
despot returns as the absolute monarch. For it is a double error to
think that the development of commodity production is enough to bring
about feudalism’s collapse—on the contrary, this development reinforces
feudalism in many respects, offering the latter new conditions of
existence and survival—and that feudalism of itself is in opposition to
the State, which on the contrary, as the feudal State, is capable of
preventing commodities from introducing the decoding of flows that
**alone* would be ruinous to the system under consideration.\footnote{* Maurice Dobb has shown how the development of commerce, of the market, and of money had very diverse effects on feudalism, at times reinforcing serfdom and the whole array of feudal structures: \emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism} (reference note 70), pp. 33–83. François Hincker has elaborated the concept of “State feudalism” to show how the French absolute monarchy, in particular, maintained the productive forces and commodity production in the framework of a feudalism that did not end until the eighteenth century (\emph{Sur le féodalisme} [Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971], pp. 61–66).} And in
more recent examples, we have to go along with Wittfogel when he shows
the degree to which modern capitalist and socialist States take on the
characteristic features of the primordial despotic State. As for
democracies, how could one fail to recognize in them the despot who has
become colder and more hypocritical, more calculating, since he must
himself count and code instead of overcoding the accounts? It is useless
to compose the list of differences after the manner of conscientious
historians: village communes here, industrial societies there, and so
on. The differences could be determining only if the despotic State were
one concrete formation among others, to be treated comparatively. But
the despotic State is the abstraction that is realized—in imperial
formations, to be sure—only as an abstraction (the overcoding eminent
unity). It assumes its immanent concrete existence only in the
subsequent forms that cause it to return under other guises and
conditions. Being the common horizon for what comes before and what
comes after, it conditions universal history only provided it is not on
the outside, but always off to the side, the cold monster that
represents the way in which history is in the “head,” in the “brain”—the
Urstaat.


Marx recognized that there was indeed a way in which history proceeded
from the abstract to the concrete: “the simple categories are the
expression of relations within which the less developed concrete may
have already realized itself before having posited the more many-sided
connection or relation which is mentally expressed in the more concrete
category; while the more developed concrete preserves the same category
as a subordinate relation.”\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Grundrisse}, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 102.} The State was first this abstract unity
that integrated subaggregates functioning separately; it is now
subordinated to a field of forces whose flows it co-ordinates and whose
autonomous relations of domination and subordination it expresses. It is
no longer content to overcode maintained and imbricated
territorialities; it must constitute, invent codes for the decoded flows
of money, commodities, and private property. It no longer of itself
forms a ruling class or classes; it is itself formed by these classes,
which have become independent and delegate it to serve their power and
their contradictions, their struggles and their compromises with the
dominated classes. It is no longer the transcendent law that governs
fragments; it must fashion as best it can a whole to which it will
render its law immanent. It is no longer the pure signifier that
regulates its signifieds; it now appears behind them, depending on the
things it signifies. It no longer produces an overcoding unity; it is
itself produced inside the field of decoded flows. As a machine it no
longer determines a social system; it is itself determined by the social
system into which it is incorporated in the exercise of its functions.
In brief, it does not cease being artificial, but it becomes concrete,
it “tends to concretization” while subordinating itself to the dominant
forces. The existence of an analogous evolution has been demonstrated
for the technical machine, when it ceases to be an abstract unity or
intellectual system reigning over separate subaggregates to become a
relation that is subordinated to a field of forces operating as a
concrete physical system.\footnote{Gilbert Simondon, \emph{Du mode d’existence des objets techniques} (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 25–49.}


But isn’t this tendency to concretization in the social or technical
machine precisely the movement of desire? Again and again we come upon
the monstrous paradox: the State is desire that passes from the head of
the despot to the hearts of his subjects, and from the intellectual law
to the entire physical system that disengages or liberates itself from
the law. A State desire, the most fantastic machine for repression, is
still desire—the subject that desires and the object of desire.
Desire—such is the operation that consists in always stamping the mark
of the primordial Urstaat on the new state of things, rendering it
immanent to the new system insofar as possible, making it interior to
this system. As for the rest, it will be a question of starting again
from zero: the founding of a spiritual empire there where forms exist
under which the State can no longer function as such in the physical
system. When the Christians took possession of the Empire, this
complementary duality reappeared between those who wanted to do
everything possible to reconstruct the Urstaat from the elements they
found in the immanence of the objective Roman world, and the purists,
who wanted a fresh start in the wilderness, a new beginning for a new
alliance, a rediscovery of the Egyptian and Syriac inspiration that
would provide the impetus for a transcendent Urstaat. What strange
machines those were that cropped up on columns and in tree trunks! In
this sense, Christianity was able to develop a whole set of paranoiac
and celibate machines, a whole string of paranoiacs and perverts who
also form part of our history’s horizon and people our calendar.\footnote{* In this regard Jacques Lacarrière has called attention to the figures and the moments of Christian asceticism Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, starting with the third century: \emph{Les hommes ivres de Dieu} (Grenoble: Arthaud, 1961). First come gentle paranoiacs who install themselves close to a village, then withdraw into the desert where they invent astonishing ascetic machines expressing their struggle against the old alliances and filiations (the Saint Anthony stage); next, communities of disciples are formed, monasteries where one of the main activities is to \emph{write} the life of the founding saint: celibate machines with a military discipline where the monk “reconstructs around him, in the form of ascetic and collective constraints, the aggressive universe of the old persecutions” (the Saint Pachomius stage); and finally, the return to the city or the village; armed groups of perverts who assign themselves the task of struggling against the dying paganism (the Schnoudi stage). More generally, concerning the monastery’s relationship with the city, see Lewis Mumford, who talks about an “elaboration of a new form of urban structuration” in terms of monasteries (\emph{The City in History} [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961], pp. 246ff., 258–59).}
These are the two aspects of a becoming of the State: its
internalization in a field of increasingly decoded social forces forming
a physical system; its spiritualization in a supraterrestrial field that
increasingly overcodes, forming a metaphysical system. The infinite debt
must become internalized at the same time as it becomes spiritualized.
The hour of bad conscience draws nigh; it will also be the hour of the
greatest cynicism, “that repressed cruelty of the animal-man made inward
and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the ‘state’ so
as to be tamed\dots{}.”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 22.}

\section{9. The Civilized Capitalist Machine}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-9}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-9}%


The first great movement of deterritorialization appears with the
overcoding performed by the despotic State. But it is nothing compared
to the other great movement, the one that will be brought about by the
decoding of flows. The action of decoded flows is not enough, however,
to cause the new break to traverse and transform the socius—not enough,
that is, to induce the birth of capitalism. Decoded flows strike the
despotic State with latency; they submerge the tyrant, but they also
cause him to return in unexpected forms; they democratize him,
oligarchize him, segmentalize him, monarchize him, and always
internalize and spiritualize him, while on the horizon there is the
latent Urstaat, for the loss of which there is no consolation. It is now
up to the State to recode as best it can, by means of regular or
exceptional operations, the product of the decoded flows. Let us take
the example of Rome: the decoding of the landed flows (\emph{des flux
fonciers}) through the privatization of property, the decoding of the
monetary flows through the formation of great fortunes, the decoding of
the commercial flows through the development of commodity production,
the decoding of the producers through expropriation and
proletarization—all the preconditions are present, everything is given,
without producing a capitalism properly speaking, but rather a régime
based on slavery.\footnote{Karl Marx, “Reply to Milkhailovski” (Nov., 1877), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, \emph{Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy} (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 441.} Or the example of feudalism: there again private
property, commodity production, the monetary afflux, the extension of
the market, the development of towns, and the appearance of manorial
ground rent in money form, or of the contractual hiring of labor, do not
by any means produce a capitalist economy, but rather a reinforcing of
feudal offices and relations, at times a return to more primitive stages
of feudalism, and occasionally even the re-establishment of a kind of
slavery (\emph{esclavagisme}). And it is well known that the monopolistic
action favoring the guilds and the companies promotes, not the rise of
capitalist production, but the insertion of the bourgeoisie into a town
and State feudalism that consists in devising codes for flows that are
decoded as such, and in keeping the merchants, according to Marx’s
formula, “in the very pores” of the old full body of the social machine.
Hence capitalism does not lead to the dissolution of feudalism, but
rather the contrary, and that is why so much time was required between
the two. There is a great difference in this respect between the
despotic age and the capitalist age. For the founders of the State come
like lightning; the despotic machine is synchronic while the capitalist
machine’s time is diachronic. The capitalists appear in succession in a
series that institutes a kind of creativity of history, a strange
menagerie: the schizoid time of the new creative break.


The dissolutions are defined by a simple decoding of flows, and they are
always compensated by residual forces or transformations of the State.
Death is felt rising from within and desire itself becomes the death
instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry
the seeds of a new life. Decoded flows—but who will give a name to this
new desire? Flows of property that is sold, flows of money that
circulates, flows of production and means of production making ready in
the shadows, flows of workers becoming deterritorialized: the encounter
of all these flows will be necessary, their conjunction, and their
reaction on one another—and the contingent nature of this encounter,
this conjunction, and this reaction, which occur one time—in order for
capitalism to be born, and for the old system to die this time from
without, at the same time as the new life begins and desire receives its
name. The only universal history is the history of contingency. Let us
return to this eminently contingent question that modern historians know
how to ask: why Europe, why not China? Apropos of ocean navigation,
Fernand Braudel asks: why not Chinese, Japanese, or even Moslem ships?
Why not Sinbad the Sailor? It is not the technique, the technical
machine, that is lacking. Isn’t it rather that desire remains caught in
the nets of the despotic State, entirely invested in the despot’s
machine? “Perhaps then the merit of the West, confined as it was on its
narrow ‘Cape of Asia,’ was to have needed the world, to have needed to
venture outside its own front door.”\footnote{Fernand Braudel, \emph{Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800}, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 308.} The schizophrenic voyage is
the only kind there is. (Later this will be the American meaning of
frontiers: something to go beyond, limits to cross over, flows to set in
motion, noncoded spaces to enter.)


Decoded desires and desires for decoding have always existed; history is
full of them. But we have just seen that only through their encounter in
a place, and their conjunction in a space that takes time, do decoded
flows constitute a desire—a desire that, instead of just dreaming or
lacking it, actually produces a desiring-machine that is at the same
time social and technical. That is why capitalism and its break are
defined not solely by decoded flows, but by the generalized decoding of
flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of
deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature of this conjunction
that ensured the universality of capitalism. By simplifying a lot, we
can say that the savage territorial machine operated on the basis of
connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic machine was
based on disjunctions of inscription derived from the eminent unity. But
the capitalist machine, the civilized machine, will first establish
itself on the conjunction. When this occurs, the conjunction no longer
merely designates remnants that have escaped coding, or
consummations-consumptions as in the primitive feasts, or even the
“maximum consumption” in the extravagance of the despot and his agents.
When the conjunction moves to the fore in the social machine, it seems
on the contrary that it ceases to be tied to enjoyment or to the excess
consumption of a class, that it makes luxury itself into a means of
investment, and reduces all the decoded flows to production, in a
“production for production’s sake” that rediscovers the primitive
connections of labor, on condition—on the sole condition—that they be
linked to capital and to the new deterritorialized full body, the true
consumer from whence they seem to emanate (as in the pact with the devil
that Marx describes—the “industrial eunuch”: so it’s \emph{your} fault
if\dots{})\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844}, (trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 148.}


At the heart of \emph{Capital}, Marx points to the encounter of two
“principal” elements: on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has
become free and naked, having to sell his labor capacity; and on the
other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying
it. The fact that these two elements result from the segmentation of the
despotic State in feudalism, and from the decomposition of the feudal
system itself and that of its State, still does not give us the
extrinsic conjunction of these two flows: flows of producers and flows
of money. The encounter might not have taken place, with the free
workers and the money-capital existing “virtually” side by side. One of
the elements depends on a transformation of the agrarian structures that
constitute the old social body, while the other depends on a completely
different series going by way of the merchant and the usurer, as they
exist marginally in the pores of this old social body.\footnote{See Balibar’s commentary, in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, \emph{Reading Capital}, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 281: “The unity possessed by the capitalist structure once it has been constituted is not found in its rear. [It requires] that the \emph{meeting} should have been produced and rigorously thought, between those elements, which are identified on the basis of the result of their \emph{conjunction}, and the historical field within which their peculiar histories are to be thought. In their concepts, the latter have nothing to do with that result, since they are defined by the structure of a different mode of production. In this historical field (constituted by the previous mode of production), the elements whose genealogy is being traced have precisely only a marginal situation, i.e., a non-determinate one.”} What is
more, each of these elements brings into play several processes of
decoding and deterritorialization having very different origins. For the
free worker: the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization;
the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation; the
loss of the means of consumption through the dissolution of the family
and the corporation; and finally, the decoding of the worker in favor of
the work itself or of the machine. And for capital: the
deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the
decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the
decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the
decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial
capital; and so on.


Let us consider more in detail how the elements come together, with the
conjunction of all their processes. It is no longer the age of cruelty
or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange
piety. (The two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the
physical immanence of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of
a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as the means of extorting
surplus labor, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence all
the forces of labor seem to emanate.) This age of cynicism is that of
the accumulation of capital—an age that implies a period of time,
precisely for the conjunction of all the decoded and deterritorialized
flows. As Maurice Dobb has shown, an accumulation of property title
deeds—in land, for example—will be necessary in a first period of time,
in a favorable conjuncture, at a time when this property costs little
(the disintegration of the feudal system); and a second period is
required when the property is sold during a rise in prices and under
conditions that make industrial investment especially advantageous (the
“price-revolution,” an abundant reserve supply of labor, the formation
of a proletariat, an easy access to sources of raw materials, favorable
conditions for the production of tools and machinery).\footnote{Maurice Dobb, \emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism} (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 177–86.} All sorts of
contingent factors favor these conjunctions. So many encounters for the
formation of the thing, the unnamable! But the effect of the conjunction
is indeed capital’s tighter and tighter control over production:
capitalism or its break, the conjunction of all the decoded and
deterritorialized flows, cannot be defined by commercial capital or by
financial capital—these being merely flows among other flows and
elements among other elements—but rather by industrial capital.
Doubtless the merchant was very early an active factor in production,
either by turning into an industrialist himself in occupations based on
commerce, or by making artisans into his own intermediaries or employees
(the struggles against the guilds and the monopolies). But capitalism
doesn’t begin, the capitalist machine is not assembled, until capital
directly appropriates production, and until financial capital and
merchant capital are no longer anything but specific functions
corresponding to a division of labor in the capitalist mode of
production in general. One then re-encounters the production of
productions, the production of recordings, and the production of
consumptions—but precisely in this conjunction of decoded flows that
makes of capital the new social full body, whereas commercial and
financial capitalism in its primitive forms merely installed itself in
the pores of the old socius without changing the old mode of production.


Even before the capitalist production-machine is assembled, commodities
and money effect a decoding of flows through abstraction. But this does
not occur in the same way for both instances. First, simple exchange
inscribes commercial products as particular \emph{quanta} of a unit of
abstract labor. It is abstract labor, posited in the exchange relation,
that forms the disjunctive synthesis of the apparent movement of
commodities, since the abstract labor is divided into qualified pieces
of labor to which a given determinate quantum corresponds. But it is
only when a “general equivalent” appears as money that one enters into
the reign of the \emph{quantitas}, which can have all sorts of particular
values or be worth all sorts of quanta. This abstract quantity
nonetheless must have some particular value, so that it still appears
only as a relation of magnitude between quanta. It is in this sense that
the exchange relation formally unites partial objects that are produced
and even inscribed independently of it. The commercial and monetary
inscription remains overcoded and even repressed by the previous
characteristics and modes of inscription of a socius considered in its
specific mode of production, which knows nothing of and does not
recognize abstract labor. As Marx says, the latter is indeed the
simplest and most ancient relation of productive activity, but it does
not appear as such and only becomes a true practical relation in the
modern capitalist machine.\footnote{Marx, \emph{Grundrisse}, pp. 104–106.} That is why, before, the monetary and
commercial inscription does not have a body of its own at its disposal,
and why it is inserted into the interstices of the pre-existing social
body. The merchant is continually speculating with the maintained
territorialities, so as to buy where prices are low and sell where they
are high. Before the capitalist machine, merchant or financial capital
is merely in a relationship of alliance with noncapitalist production;
it enters into the new alliance that characterizes precapitalist
States—whence the alliance of the merchant and banking bourgeoisie with
feudalism. In brief, the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases
to be a capital of alliance to become a filiative capital. Capital
becomes filiative when money begets money, or value a surplus
value—“value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital\dots{}. Value
\dots{} suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a
motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which
it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay more: instead of simply
representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say,
into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value
from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself qua
the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value
of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital.”\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Capital}, trans. Ernest Untermann (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 154.}


It is solely under these conditions that capital becomes the full body,
the new socius or the quasi cause that appropriates all the productive
forces. We are no longer in the domain of the quantum or of the
quantitas, but in that of the differential relation as a conjunction
that defines the immanent social field particular to capitalism, and
confers on the abstraction as such its effectively concrete value, its
tendency to concretization. The abstraction has not ceased to be what it
is, but it no longer appears in the simple quantity as a variable
relation between independent terms; it has taken upon itself the
independence, the quality of the terms and the quantity of the
relations. The abstract itself posits the more complex relation within
which it will develop like something concrete. This is the differential
relation \emph{Dy}\Slash{}\emph{Dx}, where \emph{Dy} derives from labor power and
constitutes the fluctuation of variable capital, and where \emph{Dx} derives
from capital itself and constitutes the fluctuation of constant capital
(“the definition of constant capital by no means excludes the
possibility of a change in the value of its constituent parts”). It is
from the fluxion of decoded flows, from their conjunction, that the
filiative form of capital, \emph{x+dx}, results. The differential relation
expresses the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of \emph{the transformation
of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux}. The fact
that a mathematical appearance here replaces the old code simply
signifies that one is witnessing a breakdown of the subsisting codes and
territorialities for the benefit of a machine of another species,
functioning in an entirely different way. This is no longer the cruelty
of life, the terror of one life brought to bear against another life,
but a \emph{post-mortem} despotism, the despot become anus and vampire:
“Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living
labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Industrial
capital thus offers a new new filiation that is a constituent part of
the capitalist machine, in relation to which commercial capital and
financial capital will now take the form of a new alliance by assuming
specific functions.


The celebrated problem of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, that
is, of surplus value in relation to total capital, can be understood
only from the viewpoint of capitalism’s entire field of immanence, and
by taking into account the conditions under which a surplus value of
code is transformed into a surplus value of flux. First of all, it
appears that—in keeping with Balibar’s remarks—this tendency to a
falling rate of profit has no end, but reproduces itself while
reproducing the factors that counteract it. But why does it have no end?
Doubtless for the same reasons that provoke the laughter of the
capitalists and their economists when they ascertain that surplus value
cannot be determined mathematically. Yet they have little cause to
rejoice. They would be better off concluding in favor of the very thing
they are bent on hiding: that it is not the same money that goes into
the pocket of the wage earner and is entered on the balance sheet of a
commercial enterprise. In the one case, there are impotent money signs
of exchange value, a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods
and use values, and a one-to-one relation between money and an imposed
range of products (“which I have a right to, which are my due, so
they’re mine”); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, flows
of financing, a system of differential quotients of production that bear
witness to a prospective force or to a long-term evaluation, not
realizable \emph{hic et nunc}, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract
quantities. In the one case, money represents a potential
break-deduction in a flow of consumption; in the other case, it
represents a break-detachment and a rearticulation of economic chains
directed toward the adaptation of flows of production to the
disjunctions of capital. The extreme importance in the capitalist system
of the dualism that exists in banking has been demonstrated, the dualism
between the formation of means of payment and the structure of
financing, between the management of money and the financing of
capitalist accumulation, between exchange money and credit money.\footnote{Suzanne de Brunhoff, \emph{L’offre de monnaie, critique d’un concept} (Paris: Maspero, 1971); and \emph{La monnaie chez Marx} (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1967) (see the critique of Hilferding’s arguments, pp. 16ff.).}
The fact that banks participate in both, that they are situated at the
pivotal point between financing and payment, merely shows the multiple
interactions of these two operations. Thus in credit money, which
comprises all the commercial and bank credits, purely commercial credit
has its roots in simple circulation where money develops as means of
payment (bills of exchange falling due on a fixed date, which constitute
a monetary form of finite debt). Inversely, bank credit effects a
demonetization or dematerialization of money, and is based on the
circulation of drafts instead of the circulation of money. This credit
money traverses a particular circuit where it assumes, then loses, its
value as an instrument of exchange, and where the conditions of flux
imply conditions of reflux, giving to the infinite debt its capitalist
form; but the State as a regulator ensures a principle of convertibility
of this credit money, either directly by tying it to gold, or indirectly
through a mode of centralization that comprises a guarantor of the
credit, a uniform interest rate, a unity of capital markets, etc.


Hence one is correct in speaking of a profound \emph{dissimulation} of the
dualism of these two forms of money, payment and financing—the two
aspects of banking practice. But this dissimulation does not depend on a
faulty understanding so much as it expresses the capitalist field of
immanence, the apparent objective movement where the lower or
subordinate form is no less necessary than the other (it is necessary
for money to play on both boards), and where no integration of the
dominated classes could occur without the shadow of this unapplied
principle of convertibility—which is enough, however, to ensure that the
Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its
strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the
capitalist social field as a whole. Flows, who doesn’t desire flows, and
relationships between flows, and breaks in flows?—all of which
capitalism was able to mobilize and break under these hitherto unknown
conditions of money. While it is true that capitalism is industrial in
its essence or mode of production, it functions only as merchant
capitalism. While it is true that it is filiative industrial capital in
its essence, it functions only through its alliance with commercial and
financial capital. In a sense, it is the bank that controls the whole
system and the investment of desire.\footnote{* Brunhoff, \emph{L’offre de monnaie} (reference note 73). p. 124: “The very notion of a monetary mass can have a meaning only relative to the workings of a system of credit where the different kinds of money combine. Without such a system, one would have only a sum of means of payment that would have no access to the social nature of the general equivalent and that could serve only in local private circuits. There would be no general monetary circulation. Only in the centralized system can the different kinds of money become homogeneous and appear as the components of an articulated whole.” And with regard to the objective \emph{dissimulation} in the system, see pp. 110, 114.} One of Keynes’s contributions
was the reintroduction of desire into the problem of money; it is this
that must be subjected to the requirements of Marxist analysis. That is
why it is unfortunate that Marxist economists too often dwell on
considerations concerning the mode of production, and on the theory of
money as the general equivalent as found in the first section of
**Capital*, without attaching enough importance to banking practice, to
financial operations, and to the specific circulation of credit
money—which would be the meaning of a return to Marx, to the Marxist
theory of money.


Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two
inscriptions, the one going into the account of the wage earner, the
other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders
of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is a pure fiction, a
cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalactic or intra-atomic
distances in meters and centimeters. There is no common measure between
the value of the enterprises and that of the labor capacity of wage
earners. That is why the falling tendency has no conclusion. A quotient
of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of
variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output,
but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and
the labor flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is
not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in
nature; the “tendency” has no end, it has no exterior limit that it
could reach or even approximate. The tendency’s only limit is internal,
and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit—that
is, by reconstituting it, by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be
surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus the continuity of the
capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is
always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this
respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the
withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually
expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the
manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the
general principle according to which things work well only providing
they break down, crises being “the means immanent to the capitalist mode
of production.” If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies,
this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only
an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter,
but reproduces by always displacing it.\footnote{* Marx, \emph{Capital} (see reference note 72 [97 in this version]), Vol. 3, p. 250: “Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”} Jean-Joseph Goux rigorously
analyzes the mathematical phenomenon of the curve without a tangent, and
the direction it is apt to take in economy as well as linguistics: “If
the movement does not tend toward any limit, if the quotient of
differentials is not calculable, the present no longer has any meaning\dots{}.
The quotient of differentials is not resolved, the differences no longer
cancel one another in their relationship. No limit opposes the break
(\emph{la brisure}), or the breaking of this break. The tendency finds no
end, the thing in motion never quite reaches what the immediate future
has in store for it; it is endlessly delayed by accidents and
deviations\dots{}. Such is the complex notion of a continuity within the
absolute break.”\footnote{Jean-Joseph Goux, “Dérivable et indérivable,” \emph{Critique}, January 1970, pp. 48–49.} In the expanded immanence of the system, the limit
tends to reconstitute in its displacement the thing it tended to
diminish in its primitive emplacement.


Now this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the
deterritorialization of capitalism. As Samir Amin has shown, the process
of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that
is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which
do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of
the world-wide capitalist machine. It must be added, however, that the
center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its
reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries. (Pierre Moussa has
defined the United States as a fragment of the Third World that has
succeeded and has preserved its immense zones of underdevelopment.) And
if it is true that the tendency to a falling rate of profit or to its
equalization asserts itself at least partially at the center, carrying
the economy toward the most progressive and the most automated sectors,
a veritable “development of underdevelopment” on the periphery ensures a
rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing
exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the
center. For it would be a great error to think that exports from the
periphery originate primarily in traditional sectors or archaic
territorialities: on the contrary, they come from modern industries and
plantations that generate an immense surplus value, to a point where it
is no longer the developed countries that supply the underdeveloped
countries with capital, but quite the opposite. So true is it that
primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of
capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself. Capitalism exports
filiative capital. At the same time as capitalist deterritorialization
is developing from the center to the periphery, the decoding of flows on
the periphery develops by means of a “disarticulation” that ensures the
ruin of traditional sectors, the development of extraverted economic
circuits, a specific hypertrophy of the tertiary sector, and an extreme
inequality in the different areas of productivity and in incomes.\footnote{Samir Amin, \emph{L’accumulation á l’échelle mondiale} (Paris: Anthropos, 1970), pp. 373ff.}
Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced
limit, a decoding. Capitalism schizophrenizes more and more on the
periphery. It will be said that, even so, at the center the falling
tendency retains its restricted sense, i.e., the relative diminution of
surplus value in relation to total capital—a diminution that is ensured
by the development of productivity, automation, and constant capital.


This problem was raised again recently by Maurice Clavel in a series of
decisive and willfully incompetent questions—that is, questions
addressed to Marxist economists by someone who doesn’t quite understand
how one can maintain human surplus value as the basis for capitalist
production, while recognizing that machines too “work” or produce value,
that they have always worked, and that they work more and more in
proportion to man, who thus ceases to be a constituent part of the
production process, in order to become adjacent to this process.\footnote{Maurice Clavel, \emph{Qui est aliéné?} (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 110–24, 320–27. See Marx’s great chapter on automation (1857–58) in the \emph{Grundrisse}, pp. 692ff.}
Hence there is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital,
which develops along with automation and productivity, and which cannot
be explained by factors that counteract the falling tendency—the
increasing intensity of the exploitation of human labor, the diminution
of the price of the elements of constant capital, etc.—since, on the
contrary, these factors depend on it. It seems to us, with the same
indispensable incompetence, that these problems can only be viewed under
the conditions of the transformation of the surplus value of code into a
surplus value of flux. In defining precapitalist régimes by a surplus
value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted
this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were
presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though
the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism
that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one
hand, codes continue to exist—even as an archaism—but they assume a
function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation
within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant,
the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical
machine presupposes flows of a particular type: \emph{flows of code} that are
both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a
technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find
themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies
in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith,
the astronomer). But the decoding of flows in capitalism has freed,
deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the
others—to such a degree that the automatic machine has always
increasingly internalized them in its body or its structure as a field
of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called
intellectual labor distinct from the manual labor of the worker (the
evolution of the technical object). In this sense, it is not machines
that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and
that is constantly introducing breaks and cleavages through which it
revolutionizes its technical modes of production.


But several correctives must be introduced in this regard. These breaks
and cleavages take time, and their extension is very wide-ranging. By no
means does the diachronic capitalist machine allow itself to be
revolutionized by one or more of its synchronous technical machines, and
by no means does it confer on its scientists and its technicians an
independence that was unknown in the previous régimes. Doubtless it can
let a certain number of scientists—mathematicians, for
example—“schizophrenize” in their corner, and it can allow the passage
of socially decoded flows of code that these scientists organize into
axiomatics of research that is said to be basic. But \emph{the true
axiomatic} is elsewhere. (Leave the scientists alone to a certain point,
let them create their own axiomatic, but when the time comes for serious
things \dots{} For example, nondeterminist physics, with its corpuscular
flows, will have to be brought into line with “determinism.”) The true
axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of
the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows
of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist
system and in the service of its ends. That is why it has often been
remarked that the Industrial Revolution combined an elevated rate of
technical progress with the maintenance of a great quantity of
“obsolescent” equipment, along with a great suspicion concerning
machines and science. An innovation is adopted only from the perspective
of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of
production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the
existing equipment, and stand ready to make a parallel investment in
equipment in another area.\footnote{Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, \emph{Monopoly Capital} (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), pp. 93–97.}


Thus the importance of human surplus value remains decisive, even at the
center and in highly industrialized sectors. What determines the
lowering of costs and the elevation of the rate of profit through
machinic surplus value is not innovation itself, whose value is no more
measurable than that of human surplus value. It is not even the
profitability of the new technique considered in isolation, but its
effect on the over-all profitability of the firm in its relationships
with the market and with commercial and financial capital. This implies
diachronic encounters and countersectings such as one already sees for
example in the early part of the nineteenth century, between the steam
engine and textile machines or techniques for the production of iron. In
general, the introduction of innovations always tends to be delayed
beyond the time scientifically necessary, until the moment when the
market forecasts justify their exploitation on a large scale. Here
again, alliance capital exerts a strong selective pressure on machinic
innovations within industrial capital. In brief, there where the flows
are decoded, the specific flows of code that have taken a technical and
scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is
much severer than all the scientific axiomatics, much severer too than
all the old codes and overcodes that have disappeared: the axiomatic of
the world capitalist market. In brief, the flows of code that are
“liberated” in science and technics by the capitalist régime engender a
machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on science and
technics themselves, but on capital—a surplus value that is added to
human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative diminution of
the latter, \emph{both of them constituting the whole of the surplus value of
flux that characterizes the system}. Knowledge, information, and
specialized education are just as much parts of capital (“knowledge
capital”) as is the most elementary labor of the worker. And just as we
found, on the side of human surplus value insofar as it resulted from
decoded flows, an incommensurability or a fundamental asymmetry (no
assignable exterior limit) between manual labor and capital, or between
two forms of money, here too, on the side of the machinic surplus value
resulting from scientific and technical flows of code, we find no
commensurability or exterior limit between scientific or technical
labor—even when highly remunerated—and the profit of capital that
inscribes itself with another sort of writing. In this respect the
knowledge flow and the labor flow find themselves in the same situation,
determined by capitalist decoding or deterritorialization.


But if it is true that innovations are adopted only insofar as they
entail a rise in profits through a lowering of costs of production, and
if there exists a sufficiently high volume of production to justify
them, the corollary that derives from this proposition is that
investment in innovations is never sufficient to realize or absorb the
surplus value of flux that is produced on the one side as on the
other.\footnote{Regarding the concept of depreciation implied by this proposition, ibid., pp. 99–102.} Marx has clearly demonstrated the importance of the problem:
the ever widening circle of capitalism is completed, while reproducing
its immanent limits on an ever larger scale, only if the surplus value
is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized.\footnote{\emph{Capital}, Vol. 3, p. 244.} If
the capitalist is not defined in terms of enjoyment, the reason is not
merely that his aim is the “production for production’s sake” that
generates surplus value, it also includes the realization of this
surplus value: an unrealized surplus value of flux is as if not
produced, and becomes embodied in unemployment and stagnation. It is
easy to list the principal modes of absorption of surplus value outside
the spheres of consumption and investment: advertising, civil
government, militarism, and imperialism. The role of the State in this
regard, within the capitalist axiomatic, is the more manifest in that
what it absorbs is not sliced from the surplus value of the firms, but
added to their surplus value by bringing the capitalist economy closer
to full output within the given limits, and by widening these limits in
turn—especially within an order of military expenditures that are in no
way competitive with private enterprise, quite the contrary (it took a
war to accomplish what the New Deal had failed to accomplish). The role
of a politico-military-economic complex is the more manifest in that it
guarantees the extraction of human surplus value on the periphery and in
the appropriated zones of the center, but also because it engenders for
its own part an enormous machinic surplus value by mobilizing the
resources of knowledge and information capital, and finally because it
absorbs the greater part of the surplus value produced.


The State, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of
antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning
this production. Here we discover a new determination of the properly
capitalist field of immanence: not only the interplay of the relations
and differential coefficients of decoded flows, not only the nature of
the limits that capitalism reproduces on an ever wider scale as interior
limits, but the presence of antiproduction within production itself. The
apparatus of antiproduction is no longer a transcendent instance that
opposes production, limits it, or checks it: on the contrary, it
insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine and becomes
firmly wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize
surplus value—which explains, for example, the difference between the
despotic bureaucracy and the capitalist bureaucracy. This effusion from
the apparatus of antiproduction is characteristic of the entire
capitalist system; the capitalist effusion is that of antiproduction
within production at all levels of the process. On the one hand, it
alone is capable of realizing capitalism’s supreme goal, which is to
produce lack in the large aggregates, to introduce lack where there is
always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources.
On the other hand, it alone doubles the capital and the flow of
knowledge with a capital and an equivalent flow of \emph{stupidity} that also
effects an absorption and a realization, and that ensures the
integration of groups and individuals into the system. Not only lack
amid overabundance, but stupidity in the midst of knowledge and science;
it will be seen in particular how it is at the level of the State and
the military that the most progressive sectors of scientific or
technical knowledge combine with those feeble archaisms bearing the
greatest burden of current functions.


Here André Gorz’s double portrait of the “scientific and technical
worker” takes on its full meaning. Although he has mastered a flow of
knowledge, information, and training, he is so absorbed in capital that
the reflux of organized, axiomatized stupidity coincides with him, so
that, when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little
desiring-machines by tinkering with a television set—O despair.\footnote{André Gorz, \emph{Strategy for Labor} trans. Martin Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 106.} Of
course the scientist as such has no revolutionary potential; he is the
first integrated agent of integration, a refuge for bad conscience, and
the \emph{forced} destroyer of his own creativity. Let us consider the more
striking example of a career \emph{à l’américaine}, with abrupt mutations,
just as we imagine such a career to be: Gregory Bateson begins by
fleeing the civilized world, by becoming an ethnologist and following
the primitive codes and the savage flows; then he turns in the direction
of flows that are more and more decoded, those of schizophrenia, from
which he extracts an interesting psychoanalytic theory; then, still in
search of a beyond, of another wall to break through, he turns to
dolphins, to the language of dolphins, to flows that are even stranger
and more deterritorialized. But where does the dolphin flux end, if not
with the basic research projects of the American army, which brings us
back to preparations for war and to the absorption of surplus value.


In comparison to the capitalist State, the socialist States are
children—but children who learned something from their father concerning
the axiomatizing role of the State. But the socialist States have more
trouble stopping unexpected flow leakage except by direct violence. What
on the contrary is called the co-opting power of capitalism can be
explained by the fact that its axiomatic is not more flexible, but wider
and more englobing. In such a system no one escapes participation in the
activity of antiproduction that drives the entire productive system.
“But it is not only those who man and supply the military machine who
are engaged in an anti-human enterprise. The same can be said in varying
degrees of many millions of other workers who produce, and create wants
for, goods and services which no one needs. And so interdependent are
the various sectors and branches of the economy that nearly everyone is
involved in one way or another in these anti-human activities: the
farmer supplying food to troops fighting in Vietnam, the tool and die
makers turning out the intricate machinery needed for a new automobile
model, the manufacturers of paper and ink and TV sets whose products are
used to control the minds of the people, and so on and so on.”\footnote{Baran and Sweezy, \emph{Monopoly Capital}, p. 344.} Thus
the three segments of the ever widening capitalist reproduction process
are joined, three segments that also define the three aspects of its
immanence: (1) the one that extracts human surplus value on the basis of
the differential relation between decoded flows of labor and production,
and that moves from the center to the periphery while nevertheless
maintaining vast residual zones at the center; (2) the one that extracts
machinic surplus value, on the basis of an axiomatic of the flows of
scientific and technical code, in the “core” areas of the center; (3)
and the one that absorbs or realizes these two forms of surplus value of
flux by guaranteeing the emission of both, and by constantly injecting
antiproduction into the producing apparatus. Schizophrenization occurs
on the periphery, but it occurs at the center and at the core as well.


The definition of surplus value must be modified in terms of the
machinic surplus value of constant capital, which distinguishes itself
from the human surplus value of variable capital and from the
nonmeasurable nature of this aggregate of surplus value of flux. It
cannot be defined by the difference between the value of labor capacity
and the value created by labor capacity, but by the incommensurability
between two flows that are nonetheless immanent to each other, by the
disparity between the two aspects of money that express them, and by the
absence of a limit exterior to their relationship—the one measuring the
true economic force, the other measuring a purchasing power determined
as “income.” The first is the immense deterritorialized flow that
constitutes the full body of capital. An economist of the caliber of
Bernard Schmitt finds strange lyrical words to characterize this flow of
infinite debt: an instantaneous creative flow that the banks create
spontaneously as a debt owing to themselves, a creation \emph{ex nihilo}
that, instead of transferring a pre-existing currency as means of
payment, hollows out at one extreme of the full body a negative money (a
debt entered as a liability of the banks), and projects at the other
extreme a positive money (a credit granted the productive economy by the
banks)—“a flow possessing a power of mutation” \emph{that does not enter into
income and is not assigned to purchases}, a pure availability,
nonpossession and nonwealth.\footnote{Bernard Schmitt, \emph{Monnaie, salaires et profits} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), pp. 234–36.} The other aspect of money represents
the reflux, that is, the relationship that it assumes with goods as soon
as it acquires a purchasing power through its distribution to workers or
production factors, through its allotment in the form of incomes—a
relationship that it loses as soon as the latter are converted into real
goods (at which point everything recommences by means of a new
production that will first come under the sway of the first aspect). The
incommensurability of the two aspects—the flux and the reflux—shows that
nominal wages fail to embrace the totality of the national income, since
the wage earners allow a great quantity of revenues to escape. These
revenues are tapped by the firms and in turn form an afflux by means of
a conjunction; a flow—this time uninterrupted—of raw \emph{profit},
constituting “at one go” an undivided quantity flowing over the full
body, however diverse the uses for which it is allocated (interest,
dividends, management salaries, purchase of production goods,
etc.).\footnote{Ibid., p. 292.}


The incompetent observer has the impression that this whole economic
schema, this whole story is profoundly schizo. The aim of the theory is
clear—a theory that refrains, however, from employing any moral
reference. “Who is robbed?” is the serious implied question that echoes
Clavel’s ironic question, “Who is alienated?” Yet no one is or can be
robbed—just as, according to Clavel, one no longer knows who is
alienated or who does the alienating. Who steals? Certainly not the
finance capitalist as the representative of the great instantaneous
creative flow, which is not even a possession and has no purchasing
power. Who is robbed? Certainly not the worker who is not even bought,
since the reflux or salary distribution creates the purchasing power,
instead of presupposing it. Who would be capable of stealing? Certainly
not the industrial capitalist as the representative of the afflux of
profit, since “profits do not flow in the reflux, but side by side with,
deviating from rather than penalizing the flow that creates incomes.”
How much flexibility there is in the axiomatic of capitalism, always
ready to widen its own limits so as to add a new axiom to a previously
saturated system! You say you want an axiom for wage earners, for the
working class and the unions? Well then, let’s see what we can do—and
thereafter profit will flow alongside wages, side by side, reflux and
afflux. An axiom will be found even for the language of dolphins. Marx
often alluded to the Golden Age of the capitalist, when the latter
didn’t hide his own cynicism: in the beginning, at least, he could not
be unaware of what he was doing, extorting surplus value. But how this
cynicism has grown—to the point where he is able to declare: no, nobody
is being robbed! For everything is then based on the disparity between
two kinds of flows, as in the fathomless abyss where profit and surplus
value are engendered: the flow of merchant capital’s economic force and
the flow that is derisively named “purchasing power”—a flow made truly
**impotent* that represents the absolute impotence of the wage earner as
well as the relative dependence of the industrial capitalist. This is
money and the market, capitalism’s true police.


In a certain sense, capitalist economists are not mistaken when they
present the economy as being perpetually “in need of monetarization,” as
if it were always necessary to inject money into the economy from the
outside according to a supply and a demand. In this manner the system
indeed holds together and functions, and perpetually fulfills its own
immanence. In this manner it is indeed the global object of an
investment of desire. The wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire,
everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded \emph{on
the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit,
and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening
and more comprehensive scale}. Hence it is at the level of a generalized
theory of flows that one is able to reply to the question: how does one
come to desire strength while also desiring one’s own impotence? How was
such a social field able to be invested by desire? And how far does
desire go beyond so-called objective interests, when it is a question of
flows to set in motion and to break? Doubtless Marxists will remind us
that the formation of money as a specific relation within capitalism
depends on the mode of production that makes the economy a monetary
economy. The fact remains that the apparent objective movement of
capital—which is by no means a failure to recognize or an illusion of
consciousness—shows that the productive essence of capitalism can itself
function only in this necessarily monetary or commodity form that
controls it, and whose flows and relations between flows contain the
secret of the investment of desire. It is at the level of flows, the
monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the
integration of desire is achieved.


So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis
is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of
relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it—an
entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the
**desire* of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its
part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is
the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market,
as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival
of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite
direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market,
of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet
deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a
theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to
withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the
process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we
haven’t seen anything yet.

\section{10. Capitalist Representation}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-10}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-10}%


Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly
illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the death
of the father: the thing was settled a long time ago, although the news
of the event is slow to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of
extinct signs with which we still write. The reason for this is simple:
writing implies a use of language in general according to which graphism
becomes aligned on the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a
fictitious voice from on high that functions as a signifier. The
arbitrary nature of the thing designated, the subordination of the
signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally, its
consecutive decomposition into minimal elements within a field of
immanence uncovered by the withdrawal of the despot—all this is evidence
that writing belongs to imperial despotic representation. Once this is
said, what exactly is meant when someone announces the collapse of the
“Gutenberg galaxy”? Of course capitalism has made and continues to make
use of writing; not only is writing adapted to money as the general
equivalent, but the specific functions of money in capitalism went by
way of writing and printing, and in some measure continue to do so. The
fact nonetheless remains that writing typically plays the role of an
archaism in capitalism, the Gutenberg press being the element that
confers on the archaism a \emph{current function}. But the capitalist use of
language is different in nature; it is realized or becomes concrete
within the field of immanence peculiar to capitalism itself, with the
appearance of the technical means of expression that correspond to the
generalized decoding of flows, instead of still referring, in a direct
or indirect form, to despotic overcoding.


This seems to us to be the significance of McLuhan’s analyses: to have
shown what a language of decoded flows is, as opposed to a signifier
that strangles and overcodes the flows. In the first place, for
nonsignifying language anything will do: whether it be phonic, graphic,
gestural, etc., no flow is privileged in this language, which remains
indifferent to its substance or its support, inasmuch as the latter is
an amorphous continuum. The electric flow can be considered as the
realization of such a flow that is indeterminate as such. But a
substance is said to be formed when a flow enters into a relationship
with another flow, such that the first defines a content and the second,
an expression.\footnote{* Marshall McLuhan, \emph{Understanding Media} (New York: McGraw-Hill, Signet, 1964), p. 23: “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.”} The deterritorialized flows of content and
expression are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal precondition that
constitutes figures as the ultimate units of both content and
expression. These figures do not derive from a signifier nor are they
even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or
rather nonsignifying signs, points-signs having several dimensions,
flows-breaks or schizzes that form images through their coming together
in a whole, but that do not maintain any identity when they pass from
one whole to another. Hence the figures, that is, the schizzes or
breaks-flows are in no way “figurative”; they become figurative only in
a particular constellation that dissolves in order to be replaced by
another one. Three million points per second transmitted by television,
only a few of which are retained. Electric language does not go by way
of the voice or writing; data processing does without them both, as does
that discipline appropriately named fluidics, which operates by means of
streams of gas; the computer is a machine for instantaneous and
generalized decoding. Michel Serres defines in this sense the
correlation of the break and the flow in the signs of the new technical
language machines, where production is narrowly determined by
information: “Take for example a cloverleaf highway interchange\dots{}. It is
a quasi point that analyses, through multiple overlappings, along a
dimension that is normal to the network space, the lines of flow for
which it serves as a receiver. On it one can go from any afferent
direction to any efferent direction, and in whatever order, without ever
encountering any of the other directions\dots{}. If I like, \emph{I will never come
back to the same point}, although it will be the same\dots{}. A topological
knot where everything is connected without confusion, where everything
flows together and is distributed\dots{}. Thus a knot may be seen as a point
having several dimensions”—which, far from cancelling the flows,
contains them and sets them in motion.\footnote{Michel Serres, “Le messager,” \emph{Bulletin de la Sociétfrançaise de philosophie}, November 1967.} This cordoning off of
production through information shows once again that the productive
essence of capitalism functions or “speaks” only in the language of
signs imposed on it by merchant capital or the axiomatic of the market.


There are great differences between such a linguistics of flows and
linguistics of the signifier. Saussurian linguistics, for example, in
effect discovers a field of immanence constituted by “value”—i.e., by
the system of relations among ultimate elements of the signifier; but
apart from the fact that this field of immanence still presupposes the
transcendence of the signifier, which uncovers the field if only through
the signifier’s own withdrawal, the elements populating this field have
for a criterion a minimal identity that they owe to their relations of
opposition, and that they keep throughout all the types of variations
affecting them. The elements of the signifier as distinguishing units
are regulated by “coded gaps” that the signifier overcodes in its turn.
There result diverse but always convergent consequences: the comparison
of language to a game; the signified-signifier relationship, where the
signified finds itself by nature subordinated to the signifier; figures
defined as effects of the signifier itself; the formal elements of the
signifier determined in relation to a phonic substance on which writing
even confers a secret privilege. We believe that, from all points of
view and despite certain appearances, Louis Hjelmslev’s linguistics
stands in profound opposition to the Saussurian and post-Saussurian
undertaking. Because it abandons all privileged reference. Because it
describes a pure field of algebraic immanence that no longer allows any
surveillance on the part of a transcendent instance, even one that has
withdrawn. Because within this field it sets in motion its flows of form
and substance, content and expression. Because it substitutes the
relationship of reciprocal precondition between expression and content
for the relationship of subordination between signifier and signified.
Because there no longer occurs a double articulation between two
hierarchized levels of language, but between two convertible
deterritorialized planes, constituted by the relation between the form
of content and the form of expression. Because in this relation one
reaches figures that are no longer effects of a signifier, but schizzes,
points-signs, or flows-breaks that collapse the wall of the signifier,
pass through, and continue on beyond. Because these signs have crossed a
new threshold of deterritorialization. Because these figures have
definitively lost the minimum conditions of identity that defined the
elements of the signifier itself. Because in Hjelmslev’s linguistics the
order of the elements is secondary in relation to the axiomatic of flows
and figures. Because the money model in the point-sign, or in the
figure-break stripped of its identity, having now only a floating
identity, tends to replace the model of the game. In short, Hjelmslev’s
very special position in linguistics, and the reactions he provokes,
seem to be explained by the following: that he tends to fashion a purely
immanent theory of language that shatters the double game of the
voice-graphism domination; that causes form and substance, content and
expression to flow according to the flows of desire; and that breaks
these flows according to points-signs and figures-schizzes.\footnote{* Nicolas Ruwet, for example, takes Hjelmslev to task for having elaborated a theory whose applications are on the order of \emph{Jabberwocky} or \emph{Finnegans Wake: Introduction à la grammaire générative} (Paris: Plon, 1967), p. 54. (Regarding Hjelmslev’s indifference to the “order of the elements,” see p. 345.) André Martinet stresses the loss of the conditions of identity in Hjelmslev’s theory. \emph{Au sujet des fondements de la théorie linguistique de Louis Hjelmslev}, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed. (Paris: Paulet, 1946).} Far
from being an overdetermination of structuralism and of its fondness for
the signifier, Hjelmslev’s linguistics implies the concerted destruction
of the signifier, and constitutes a decoded theory of language about
which one can also say—an ambiguous tribute—that it is the only
linguistics adapted to the nature of \emph{both} the capitalist \emph{and} the
schizophrenic flows: until now, the only modern—and not archaic—theory
of language.


The extreme importance of J.-F. Lyotard’s recent book is due to its
position as the first generalized critique of the signifier. In his most
general proposition, in fact, he shows that the signifier is overtaken
toward the outside by figurative images, just as it is overtaken toward
the inside by the pure figures that compose it—or, more decisively, by
“the figural” that comes to short-circuit the signifier’s coded gaps,
inserting itself between them, and working under the conditions of
identity of their elements. In language and in writing itself, sometimes
the letters as breaks, as shattered partial objects—and sometimes the
words as undivided flows, as nondecomposable blocks, or full bodies
having a tonic value—constitute assignifying signs that deliver
themselves over to the order of desire: rushes of breath and cries. (In
particular, formal investigations concerning manual or printed writing
change their meaning according to whether the characteristics of the
letters and the qualities of the words are in the service of a
signifier, whose effects they express following exegetical rules; or
whether, on the contrary, they break through this wall so as to set
flows in motion, and establish breaks that overflow or rupture the
sign’s conditions of identity, and that cause books within “the book” to
flow and to disintegrate, entering into multiple configurations whose
possibilities were already the object of the typographical exercises of
Mallarmé—always passing underneath the signifier, filing through the
wall: which again shows that the death of writing is infinite, so long
as it arises and arrives from within.)


Similarly, in the plastic arts there is the pure figural dimension
formed by the active line and the multidimensional point, and on the
other hand, the multiple configurations formed by the passive line and
the surface it engenders, so as to reveal—as in Paul Klee—those
“intermundia that perhaps are visible only to children, madmen, and
primitives.”\footnote{Jean-Francois Lyotard, \emph{Discours, figure} (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).} Or in dreams: in some very beautiful pages, Lyotard
shows that what is \emph{at work} in dreams is not the signifier but a
figural dimension underneath, which gives rise to configurations of
images that make use of words, making them flow and cutting them
according to flows and points that are not linguistic and do not depend
on the signifier or its regulated elements. Thus Lyotard everywhere
reverses the order of the signifier and the figure. It is not the
figures that depend on the signifier and its effects, but the signifying
chain that depends on the figural effects—this chain itself being
composed of asignifying signs—crushing the signifiers as well as the
signifieds, treating words as things, fabricating new unities, creating
from nonfigurative figures configurations of images that form and then
disintegrate. And these constellations are like flows that imply the
breaks effected by points, just as the points imply the fluxion of the
material they cause to flow or leak: the sole unity without identity is
that of the flux-schiz or the break-flow. The pure figural element—the
“figure-matrix”—Lyotard correctly names desire, which carries us to the
gates of schizophrenia as a process.\footnote{Ibid.}


But what explains the reader’s impression that Lyotard is continually
arresting the process, and steering the schizzes toward shores he has so
recently left behind: toward coded or overcoded territories, spaces, and
structures, to which they bring only “transgressions,” disorders, and
deformations that are secondary in spite of everything, instead of
forming and transporting further the desiring-machines that are in
opposition to the structures, and the intensities that are in opposition
to the spaces? The explanation is that, despite his attempt at linking
desire to a fundamental \emph{yes}, Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence
into desire; maintains desire under the law of castration, at the risk
of restoring the entire signifier along with the law; and discovers the
matrix of the figure in fantasy, the simple fantasy that comes to veil
desiring-production, the whole of desire as effective production. But at
least for an instant the mortgage of the signifier was raised: that
enormous archaism that causes so many of us to groan and bow under its
weight, and that others use to establish a new terrorism, diverting
Lacan’s imperial discourse into a university discourse characterized by
a pure scientificity, that “scientificity” perfectly suited for
resupplying our neuroses, for strangling the process once again, and for
overcoding Oedipus with castration, while chaining us to the current
structural functions of a vanished archaic despot. For it is certain
that, even and especially in their manifestations of extreme force,
neither capitalism nor revolution nor schizophrenia follows the paths of
the signifier.


Civilization is defined by the decoding and the deterritorialization of
flows in capitalist production. Any method will do for ensuring this
universal decoding: the privatization brought to bear on property,
goods, and the means of production, but also on the organs of “private
man” himself; the abstraction of monetary quantities, but also the
abstraction of the quantity of labor; the limitless nature of the
relationship between capital and labor capacity, and between the flows
of financing and the flows of incomes or means of payment; the
scientific and technical form assumed by flows of code themselves; the
formation of floating configurations starting from lines and points
without a discernible identity. The route taken by the decoded flows is
traced by recent monetary history: the role of the dollar, short-term
migrating capital, the floating of currencies, the new means of
financing and credit, the special drawing rights, and the new form of
crises and speculations. Our societies exhibit a marked taste for all
codes—codes foreign or exotic—but this taste is destructive and morbid.
While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it
also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic,
folkloric, or residual function, which makes of psychoanalysis and
ethnology two disciplines highly regarded in our modern societies. Yet
it would be a serious error to consider \emph{the capitalist flows and the
schizophrenic flows} as identical, under the general theme of a decoding
of the flows of desire. Their affinity is great, to be sure: everywhere
capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that animate “our” arts and “our”
sciences, just as they congeal into the production of “our own” sick,
the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relationship of schizophrenia
to capitalism went far beyond problems of modes of living, environment,
ideology, etc., and that it should be examined at the deepest level of
one and the same economy, one and the same production process. Our
society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford
cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable. How
then does one explain the fact that capitalist production is constantly
arresting the schizophrenic process and transforming the subject of the
process into a confined clinical entity, as though it saw in this
process the image of its own death coming from within? Why does it make
the schizophrenic into a sick person—not only nominally but in reality?
Why does it confine its madmen and madwomen instead of seeing in them
its own heros and heroines, its own fulfillment? And where it can no
longer recognize the figure of a simple illness, why does it keep its
artists and even its scientists under such close surveillance—as though
they risked unleashing flows that would be dangerous for capitalist
production and charged with a revolutionary potential, so long as these
flows are not co-opted or absorbed by the laws of the market? Why does
it form in turn a gigantic machine for social repression-psychic
repression, aimed at what nevertheless constitutes its own reality—the
decoded flows?


The answer—as we have seen—is that capitalism is indeed the limit of all
societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the
other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the \emph{relative}
limit of every society; it effects \emph{relative} breaks, because it
substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains
the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a
socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more
pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the
**absolute* limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a
desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia
is the \emph{exterior} limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its
deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that
it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit,
by substituting for it its own \emph{immanent} relative limits, which it
continually reproduces on a widened scale. It axiomatizes with one hand
what it decodes with the other. Such is the way one must reinterpret the
Marxist law of the counteracting tendency. With the result that
schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist field from one end to the
other. But for capitalism it is a question of binding the schizophrenic
charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always opposes the
revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits. And
it is impossible in such a régime to distinguish, even in two phases,
between decoding and the axiomatization that comes to replace the
vanished codes. The flows are decoded \emph{and} axiomatized by capitalism at
the same time. Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism,
but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death.
Monetary flows are perfectly schizophrenic realities, but they exist and
function only within the immanent axiomatic that exorcises and repels
this reality. The language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a
middle or high-level manager, or a government minister is a perfectly
schizophrenic language, but that functions only statistically within the
flattening axiomatic of connections that puts it in the service of the
capitalist order.\footnote{See Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the functional language of “total administration”—especially in abbreviations (e.g., S.E.A.T.O.), the floating configurations formed by letters-figures): \emph{One Dimensional Man} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), Ch. 4.} (At the highest level of linguistics as a
science, Hjelmslev is able to effect a vast decoding of language only by
setting in motion from the start an axiomatic machine based on the
supposed finite number of the figures considered.) Then what becomes of
the “truly” schizophrenic language and the “truly” decoded and unbound
flows that manage to break through the wall or absolute limit? The
capitalist axiomatic is so rich that one more axiom is added—for the
books of a great writer whose lexical and stylistic characteristics can
always be computed by means of an electronic machine, or for the
discourse of madmen that can always be heard within the framework of a
hospital, administrative, and psychiatric axiomatic. In brief, the
notion of break-flow has seemed to us to define both capitalism and
schizophrenia. But not in the same way; they are not at all the same
thing, depending on whether the decodings are caught up in an axiomatic
or not; on whether one remains at the level of the large aggregates
functioning statistically, or crosses the barrier that separates them
from the unbound molecular positions; on whether the flows of desire
reach this absolute limit or are content to displace a relative immanent
limit that will reconstitute itself further along; on whether
controlling reterritorializations are added to the processes of
deterritorialization; and on whether money burns or bursts into flames.


Why not merely say that capitalism replaces one code with another, that
it carries into effect a new type of coding? For two reasons, one of
which represents a kind of moral impossibility, the other a logical
impossibility. All the cruelties and terrors meet in the precapitalist
formations; some fragments of the signifying chain are struck by
secrecy—secret societies or initiation groups—but there is never
anything in these societies that is, strictly speaking, unavowable. It
is with the thing, capitalism, that the unavowable begins: there is not
a single economic or financial operation that, assuming it is translated
in terms of a code, would not lay bare its own unavowable nature, that
is, its intrinsic perversion or essential cynicism (the age of bad
conscience is also the age of pure cynicism). But in point of fact it is
impossible to code such operations: in the first place, a code
determines the respective qualities of the flows passing through the
socius (for example, the three circuits of consumer goods, prestige
goods, and women and children); the characteristic object of codes is
therefore to establish necessarily indirect relations among these
qualified and therefore incommensurable codes. Such relations indeed
imply a quantitative siphoning off of portions of the different sorts of
flows, but these quantities do not enter into equivalences that would
presuppose an unlimited “something”; they simply form composites that
are themselves qualitative, essentially mobile and limited, where
differences between the elements compensate the disequilibrium (whence
the relationship of prestige and consumption in the block of finite
debt).


All these code characteristics—indirect, qualitative, and limited—are
sufficient to show that a code is not, and can never be, economic: on
the contrary, it expresses the apparent objective movement according to
which the economic forces or productive connections are attributed to an
extraeconomic instance as though they emanated from it, an instance that
serves as a support and an agent of inscription. That is what Althusser
and Balibar show so well: how juridical and political relations are
**determined as dominant*—in the case of feudalism, for example because
surplus labor as a form of surplus value constitutes a flux that is
qualitatively and temporally distinct from that of labor, and
consequently must enter into a composite that is itself qualitative and
implies noneconomic factors.\footnote{* See Marx, \emph{Capital}, Vol. 3, p. 791: “Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.”} Or the way the autochthonous relations
of alliance and filiation are determined as dominant in the so-called
primitive societies, where the economic forces and flows are inscribed
on the full body of the earth and are attributed to it. In short, there
is a code where a full body as an instance of antiproduction falls back
on the economy that it appropriates. That is why the sign of desire, as
an economic sign that consists in producing and breaking flows, is
accompanied by a sign of necessarily extraeconomic power, although its
causes and effects lie within the economy (for example, the sign of
alliance in relation to the power of the creditor). Or—what amounts to
the same thing—surplus value here is determined as a surplus value of
code. Hence the code relation is not only indirect, qualitative, and
limited; because of these very characteristics, it is also
extraeconomic, and by virtue of this fact engineers the couplings
between qualified flows. Consequently it implies a system of collective
appraisal and evaluation, and a set of organs of perception, or more
precisely of belief, as a condition of existence and survival of the
society in question—thus the collective investment of organs that causes
men to be directly coded, and the appraising eye as we have analyzed it
in the primitive system. It should be noted that these general traits
characterizing a code are rediscovered precisely in what today is called
a genetic code; not because it depends on an effect of a signifier, but
on the contrary because the chain it constitutes is only signifying in a
secondary way, insofar as it calls into play couplings between qualified
flows, interactions that are exclusively indirect, qualitative
composites that are essentially limited, and organs of perception and
**extrachemical* factors that select and appropriate the cellular
connections.


So many reasons for defining capitalism by a social axiomatic that
stands opposed to codes in every respect. First of all, money as a
general equivalent represents an abstract quantity that is indifferent
to the qualified nature of the flows. But the equivalence itself points
to the position of a relation without limitation: in the formula M-C-M,
“the circulation of money as capital has therefore no limits.”\footnote{Marx, \emph{Capital}, Vol. 1, p. 150.} The
studies of Bohannan concerning the Tiv of the Niger River, or those of
Salisbury concerning the Siane of New Guinea, have shown how the
introduction of money as an equivalent—which makes it possible to begin
and end with money, therefore never to end at all—is enough to disturb
the circuits of qualified flows, to decompose the finite blocks of debt,
and to destroy the very basis of codes. Secondly, the fact remains that
money as an unlimited abstract quantity cannot be divorced from a
becoming-concrete without which it would not become capital and would
not appropriate production. We have seen that this becoming-concrete
appeared in the differential relation; but it must be borne in mind that
the differential relation is not an indirect relation between qualified
or coded flows, it is a direct relation between decoded flows whose
respective qualities have no existence prior to the differential
relation itself. The quality of the flows results solely from their
conjunction as decoded flows; outside this conjunction they would remain
purely virtual; this conjunction is also the disjunction of the abstract
quantity through which it becomes something concrete. \emph{Dx} and \emph{dy} are
nothing independent of their relation, which determines the one as a
pure quality of the flow of labor and the other as a pure quality of the
flow of capital. The progression is therefore the opposite of that of a
code; it expresses the capitalist transformation of the surplus value of
code into a surplus value of flux. Whence the fundamental change in the
order of powers. For if one of the flows finds itself subordinated and
enslaved to the other, the reason is precisely that they are not to the
same power (\emph{x} and \emph{y}\textsuperscript{2} for example), and that the relation
is established between a power and a given magnitude. This is something
that became evident as we pursued the analysis of capital and labor at
the level of the differential relation between flows of financing, and
flows of means of payment or income. Such an extension merely signifies
that capital has no industrial essence functioning other than as
merchant, financial, and commercial capital, where money would take on
functions other than those deriving from its form as the equivalent. But
in this way the signs of power completely cease being what they were
from the viewpoint of a code: they become coefficients that are directly
economic, instead of being doubles to the economic signs of desire and
expressing for their part noneconomic factors determined as dominant.
That the flow of financing is raised to an entirely different power from
the flow of means of payment signifies that the power has become
directly economic. And yet, as regards paid labor, it is evident that
there is no longer any need for a code in order to ensure surplus labor,
when the latter is merged qualitatively and temporally with labor itself
into one and the same simple magnitude (the condition characterized by
surplus value of flux).


Hence capital differentiates itself from any other socius or full body,
inasmuch as capital itself figures as a directly economic instance, and
falls back on production without interposing extraeconomic factors that
would be inscribed in the form of a code. With the advent of capitalism
the full body becomes truly naked, as does the worker himself who is
attached to this full body. In this sense the antiproduction apparatus
ceases to be transcendent, and pervades all production and becomes
coextensive with it. Thirdly, as a result of these developed conditions
involving the destruction of all codes within a becoming-concrete, the
absence of limits takes on a new meaning. This absence no longer simply
designates the unlimited abstract quantity, but the effective absence of
any limit or end for the differential relation where the abstract
becomes something concrete. Concerning capitalism, we maintain that it
both does and does not have an exterior limit: it has an exterior limit
that is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of flows, but it
functions only by pushing back and exorcising this limit. And it also
has, yet does not have, interior limits: it has interior limits under
the specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that
is, in capital itself, but it functions only by reproducing and widening
these limits on an always vaster scale. The strength of capitalism
indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that
it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.
Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to fully occupy
this field. But this deterritorialized field finds itself determined by
an axiomatic, in contrast to the territorial field determined by
primitive codes. Differential relations of such a nature as to be filled
by surplus value; an absence of exterior limits that it is “filled” by
the widening of internal limits; and the effusion of antiproduction
within production so as to be filled by the absorption of surplus
value—these constitute the three aspects of capitalism’s immanent
axiomatic. And monetarization everywhere comes to fill the abyss of
capitalist immanence, introducing there, as Schmitt says, “a
deformation, a convulsion, an explosion—in a word, a movement of extreme
violence.”\footnote{Schmitt, \emph{Monnaie, salaires et profits}.}


There results, finally, a fourth characteristic that places the
axiomatic in opposition to codes. The axiomatic does not need to write
in bare flesh, to mark bodies and organs, nor does it need to fashion a
memory for man. In contrast to codes, the axiomatic finds in its
different aspects its own organs of execution, perception, and
memorization. Memory has become a bad thing. Above all, there is no
longer any need of belief, and the capitalist is merely striking a pose
when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no one believes in anything any
more. Language no longer signifies something that must be believed, it
indicates rather what is going to be done, something that the shrewd or
the competent are able to decode, to half understand. Moreover, despite
the abundance of identity cards, files, and other means of control,
capitalism does not even need to write in books to make up for the
vanished body markings. Those are only relics, archaisms with a current
function. The person has become “private” in reality, insofar as he
derives from abstract quantities and becomes concrete in the
becoming-concrete of these same quantities. It is these quantities that
are marked, no longer the persons themselves: \emph{your capital or your
labor capacity}, the rest is not important, we’ll always find a place
for you within the expanded limits of the system, even if an axiom has
to be created just for you. There is no longer any need of a collective
investment of organs, as they are sufficiently filled with the floating
images constantly produced by capitalism. To pursue a remark of Henri
Lefebvre’s, these images do not initiate a making public of the private
so much as a privatization of the public: the whole world unfolds right
at home, without one’s having to leave the TV screen. This gives private
persons a very special role in the system: a role of \emph{application}, and
no longer of implication, in a code. The hour of Oedipus draws nigh.


While capitalism thus proceeds by means of an axiomatic and not by means
of a code, one must not think that it replaces the socius, the social
machine, with an aggregate of technical machines. The difference in
nature between the two types of machines persists, although they are
both machines in the strict sense, without metaphor. Capitalism’s
originality resides rather in the fact that the social machine has for
its parts technical machines as constant capital attached to the full
body of the socius, and no longer men, the latter having become adjacent
to the technical machines—whence the fact that inscription no longer
bears directly, or at least in theory has no need of bearing directly,
on men. But an axiomatic of itself is by no means a simple technical
machine, not even an automatic or cybernetic machine. Bourbaki\footnote{* Nicolas Bourbaki is the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who are known for their work in the theory of sets and for their advocacy of an “axiomatic method” which “allows us, when we are concerned with complex mathematical objects, to separate their properties and regroup them around a small number of concepts: that is to say, using a word which will receive a precise definition later, to classify them according to the \emph{structures} to which they belong” (Nicolas Bourbaki, \emph{Elements of Mathematics} Vol. 3: \emph{Theory of Sets} [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968], p. 9). In this way they propose to elaborate a language of mathematical formalization capable of integrating the different branches of mathematics. (\emph{Translators’ note.})} says
as much concerning scientific axiomatics: they do not form a Taylor
system, nor a mechanical game of isolated formulas, but rather imply
“intuitions” that are linked to resonances and conjunctions of
structures, and that are merely aided by the “powerful levers” of
technique. This holds even truer of the social axiomatic: the way in
which this axiomatic fulfills its own immanence; pushes back or enlarges
its limits; adds still more axioms while preventing the system from
becoming saturated; and functions well only by grinding, sputtering, and
starting up again—all this implies social organs of decision,
administration, reaction, inscription; a technocracy and a bureaucracy
that cannot be reduced to the operation of technical machines. In short,
the conjunction of the decoded flows, their differential relations, and
their multiple schizzes or breaks require a whole apparatus of
regulation whose principal organ is the State. The capitalist State is
the regulator of decoded flows as such, insofar as they are caught up in
the axiomatic of capital. In this sense it indeed completes the
becoming-concrete that seemed to us to preside over the evolution of the
abstract despotic Urstaat: from being at first the transcendent unity,
it becomes immanent to the field of social forces, enters into their
service, and serves as a regulator of the decoded and axiomatized flows.
The capitalist State completes the becoming-concrete so fully that, in
another sense, it alone represents a veritable rupture with this
becoming, a break with it, in contrast to the other forms that were
established on the ruins of the Urstaat. For the Urstaat was defined by
overcoding, and its derivatives, from the ancient City-State to the
monarchic State, already found themselves in the presence of flows that
were decoded or in the process of being decoded. These flows doubtless
had the effect of making the State more and more immanent and
subordinate to the actual field of forces; but precisely because the
circumstances were not right for these flows to enter into a
conjunction, the State could be content to save fragments of overcoding
and of codes, to invent others, and by marshaling all its forces, was
even able to prevent the conjunction from taking place (as for the rest,
its project was to resuscitate the Urstaat insofar as possible).


The capitalist State is in a different situation: it is produced by the
conjunction of the decoded or deterritorialized flows, and is able to
carry the becoming-immanent to its highest point only to the extent that
it is party to the generalized breakdown of codes and overcodings, and
evolves entirely within this new axiomatic that results from a hitherto
unknown conjunction. Once again, this axiomatic is not the invention of
capitalism, since it is identical with capital itself. On the contrary,
capitalism is its offspring, its result. Capitalism merely ensures the
regulation of the axiomatic; it regulates or even organizes the failures
of the axiomatic as conditions of the latter’s operation; it watches
over or directs progress toward a saturation of the axiomatic and the
corresponding widenings of the limits. Never before has a State lost so
much of its power in order to enter with so much force into the service
of the signs of economic power. And capitalism, despite what is said to
the contrary, assumed this role very early, in fact from the start, from
its gestation in forms still semifeudal or monarchic—from the standpoint
of the flow of “free” workers: the control of manual labor and of wages;
from the standpoint of the flow of industrial and commercial production:
the granting of monopolies, favorable conditions for accumulation, and
the struggle against overproduction. There has never been a liberal
capitalism: action against monopolies goes back first of all to a time
when commercial and financial capital is still allied with the old
system of production, and when nascent industrial capitalism can secure
its production and its market only by obtaining the abolition of such
privileges. That the struggle against monopolistic privileges does not
imply any struggle against the very principle of State control—providing
the State sees fit—can be seen clearly in mercantilism, inasmuch as it
expresses the new commercial functions of a capital that has secured for
itself direct interests in production. As a general rule, State controls
and regulations tend to disappear or diminish only in situations where
there is an abundant labor supply and an unusual expansion of
markets.\footnote{For a discussion of all these points, see Dobb, \emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism}, pp. 23–25, 161–67, 193–210.} That is, \emph{when capitalism functions with a very small
number of axioms within relative limits that are sufficiently wide}.
This situation ceased to exist long ago, and one must regard as a
decisive factor in this evolution the organization of a powerful working
class that required a high and stable level of employment, and forced
capitalism to multiply its axioms while having at the same time to
reproduce its limits on an ever expanding scale (the axiom of
displacement from the center to the periphery). Capitalism was able to
digest the Russian Revolution only by continually adding new axioms to
the old ones: an axiom for the working class, for the unions, and so on.
But it is always prepared to add more axioms, it adds axioms for many
other things besides, things that are much smaller, tiny even, absurdly
insignificant; it has a peculiar passion for such things that leaves the
essential unchanged. The State is thus induced to play an increasingly
important role in the regulation of the axiomatized flows, with regard
to production and its planning, the economy and its “monetarization,”
and surplus value and its absorption (by the State apparatus itself).


The regulative functions of the State do not imply any sort of
arbitration between social classes. That the State is entirely in the
service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but
a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation. The latter is
simple to explain: from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there
is only one class, a class with a universalist vocation, the bourgeosie.
Plekhanov notes that the French School of the nineteenth century, under
the influence of Saint-Simon, should be credited with the discovery of
class struggle and its role in history—precisely the same men who praise
the struggle of the bourgeois class against the nobility and feudalism,
and who come to a halt before the proletariat and deny that there can be
any difference in class between the industrialist or banker and the
worker, but only a fusion into one and the same flow as with profits and
wages.\footnote{G. Plekhanov, “Augustin Thierry et la conception matérialiste de l’histoire” (1895), in \emph{Les questions fondamentales du marxisme} (Paris: Editions sociales.).} This proposition contains something other than an
ideological blindness or denial. Classes are \emph{the} negative of castes
and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been
decoded. To reread history through the class struggle is to read it in
terms of the bourgeoisie as the decoding and decoded class. It is the
**only* class as such, inasmuch as it leads the struggle against codes,
and merges with the generalized decoding of flows. In this capacity it
is sufficient to fill the capitalist field of immanence. And in point of
fact, something new occurs with the rise of the bourgeoisie: the
disappearance of enjoyment as an end, the new conception of the
conjunction according to which the sole end is abstract wealth and its
realization in forms other than consumption. The generalized slavery of
the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters, and an
apparatus of antiproduction distinct from the sphere of production. But
the bourgeois field of immanence—as delimited by the conjunction of the
decoded flows, the negation of any transcendence or exterior limit, and
the effusion of antiproduction inside production itself—institutes an
unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer
even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves; there is no
longer any need to burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its
own burden. Not that man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is
rather the slave of the social machine. The bourgeois sets the example,
he absorbs surplus value for ends that, taken as a whole, have nothing
to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of
slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of
the reproduction of capital, internalization of the infinite debt. “I
too am a slave”—these are the new words spoken by the master. “Only as
personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares
with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the
miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the
social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels.”\footnote{Marx, \emph{Capital}, Vol. 1, p. 592.}


It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class
that is ruled, both defined by surplus value, the distinction between
the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only
partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two
in the differential relations, and integrates them both in the
continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeois
is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very
organization of his axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the
great mutant decoded flow—cut off from goods—and one class of servants,
the decoding bourgeosie, the class that decodes the castes and the
statuses, and that draws from the machine an undivided flow of income
convertible into consumer and production goods, a flow on which profits
and wages are based. In short, the theoretical opposition is not between
two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it
designates the “negative” of codes, that implies there is only one
class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between, on the
one hand, the decoded flows that enter into a class axiomatic on the
full body of capital, and on the other hand, the decoded flows that free
themselves from this axiomatic just as they free themselves from the
despotic signifier, that break through this wall, and this wall of a
wall, and begin flowing on the full body without organs. The opposition
is between the class and those who are outside the class.\footnote{* \emph{les hors-classe}: This term shares an affinity with \emph{hors-caste} (outcaste) and \emph{hors-la-loi} (outlaw). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} Between
the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage it or its cogs and
wheels. Between the social machine’s régime and that of the
desiring-machines. Between the relative interior limits and the absolute
exterior limit. If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos in
their basic intimacy at the level of decoding, in their basic antagonism
at the level of the axiomatic—whence the resemblance, in the
nineteenth-century socialists’ portrait of the proletariat, between the
latter and a perfect schizo.


That is why the problem of a proletarian class belongs first of all to
praxis. The task of the revolutionary socialist movement was to organize
a bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes. Of course it
is possible to conceive a theoretical determination of the proletarian
class at the level of production (those from whom surplus value is
extorted), or at the level of money (income in wages). But not only are
these determinations sometimes too narrow and sometimes too wide, but
the objective being they define as \emph{class interest} remains purely
virtual so long as it is not embodied in a consciousness that, to be
sure, does not create it, but actualizes it in an organized party suited
to the task of conquering the State apparatus. If the movement of
capitalism, in the interplay of its differential relations, is to dodge
any assignable fixed limit, to exceed and displace its interior limits,
and to always effect breaks of breaks, then the socialist movement seems
necessarily led to fix or assign a limit that differentiates the
proletariat from the bourgeoisie—a great cleavage that will animate a
struggle not only economic and financial, but political as well. Now the
meaning of just such a conquest of the State apparatus has always been
and remains problematical. A supposedly socialist State implies a
transformation of production, of the units of production and the
economic rationale. But this transformation can only take place starting
from an already conquered State that finds itself confronted by the same
axiomatic problems of extraction of a surplus or surplus value, of
accumulation and absorption, of the market and monetary reckoning.
Consequently, either the proletariat prevails and transforms the
apparatus in conformity with its objective interest—but these operations
are carried out under the domination of its consciousness or party
vanguard, that is, for the benefit of a bureaucracy or technocracy that
stands in for the bourgeoisie as the “great-absent” class—or the
bourgeoisie keeps its control of the State and is free to secrete its
own technobureaucracy, and above all to add a few more axioms for the
recognition of the proletariat as a second class. It is correct to say
that the alternative is not between the market and economic planning,
since planning is necessarily introduced in the capitalist State, and
the market subsists in the socialist State, if only as a monopolistic
market of the State itself. And in effect, how does one define the true
alternative without assuming all these problems resolved beforehand?


The immense accomplishment of Lenin and the Russian Revolution was to
have forged a class consciousness consonant with the objective being or
interest of the class, and as a consequence, to have imposed on the
capitalist countries a recognition of class bipolarity. But this great
Leninist break did not prevent the resurrection of a State capitalism
inside socialism itself, any more than it prevented classical capitalism
from getting round the break by continuing its veritable mole work,
always effecting breaks of breaks that allowed it to integrate into its
axiomatic sections of the newly recognized class, while throwing the
uncontrolled revolutionary elements—no more controlled by official
socialism than by capitalism itself—further into the distance, to the
periphery or into enclaves. Thus the only choice left was between the
new terroristic and rigid axiomatic—quickly saturated—of the socialist
State, and the old cynical axiomatic—all the more dangerous for being
flexible and never saturated—of the capitalist State. But in reality,
the most direct question is not that of knowing whether an industrial
society can do without a surplus, without the absorption of a surplus,
without a commodity-exchanging and planner State, and even without an
equivalent of the bourgeoisie: it is evident both that the answer is no,
and that in these terms the question is poorly put. Nor is it a question
of knowing whether or not class consciousness, embodied in a party or a
State, betrays the objective class interest, to which a kind of
potential spontaneity would be ascribed, suffocated by the agents
claiming to represent that interest. Sartre’s analysis in \emph{Critique de
la raison dialectique} appears to us profoundly correct where he
concludes that there does not exist any class spontaneity, but only a
“group” spontaneity: whence the necessity for distinguishing
“groups-in-fusion” from the class, which remains “serial,” represented
by the party or the State.\footnote{Jacques Lacan, \emph{Lettres de l’école freudienne}, March 7, 1970, p. 42.} And the two do not exist on the same
scale. This is because class interest remains a function of the large
molar aggregates; it merely defines a collective preconscious that is
necessarily represented in a distinct consciousness that, at this level,
does not even present any grounds for asking whether it betrays or not,
alienates or not, deforms or not. The problem is situated there, between
unconscious group desires and preconscious class interests. It is only
starting from this point, as we shall see, that one is able to pose the
questions issuing indirectly therefrom, concerning the class
preconscious and the representative forms of class consciousness, and
the nature of the interests and the process of their realization. Reich
always comes back to us with his innocent standards, claiming the rights
of a prior distinction between desire and interest: “The leadership has
no task more urgent, besides that of acquiring a precise understanding
of the objective historical process, than to understand: (a) what are
the progressive desires, ideas and thoughts which are latent in people
of different social strata, occupations, age groups and sexes, and (b)
what are the desires, fears, thoughts and ideas (‘traditional bonds’)
which prevent the progressive desires, ideas, etc., from
developing.”\footnote{Jean-Paul Sartre, \emph{Critique de la raison dialectique} (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).} (The leadership has a tendency rather to reply: when I
hear the word “desire,” I pull out my gun.)


Desire can never be deceived. Interests can be deceived, unrecognized,
or betrayed, but not desire. Whence Reich’s cry: no, the masses were not
deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what has to be explained. It
happens that one desires against one’s own interests: capitalism profits
from this, but so does socialism, the party, and the party leadership.
How does one explain that desire devotes itself to operations that are
not failures of recognition, but rather perfectly reactionary
unconscious investments? And what does Reich mean when he speaks of
“traditional bonds”?\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, “What Is Class Consciousness?” (1934), trans. Anna Bostock, \emph{Liberation}, Vol. 16, no. 5 (October 1971), p. 22.} The latter also belong to the historical
process and bring us back to the modern functions of the State.
Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and
deterritorialization. But \emph{what they deterritorialize with one hand,
they reterritorialize with the other}. These neoterritorialities are
often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a
perfectly current function, our modern way of “imbricating,” of
sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old
codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons. Neoarchaisms, as Edgar Morin
puts it. These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some
are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and
potentially political forces (from domino players to home brewers via
the Veterans of Foreign Wars). Others are enclaves whose archaism is
just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a
revolutionary charge (the ethnic minorities, the Basque problem, the
Irish Catholics, the Indian reservations). Some of these archaisms take
form as if spontaneously, in the very current of the movement of
deterritorialization (neighborhood territorialities, territorialities of
the large aggregates, “gangs”). Others are organized or promoted by the
State, even though they might turn against the State and cause it
serious problems (regionalism, nationalism). The fascist State has been
without doubt capitalism’s most fantastic attempt at economic and
political reterritorialization. But the socialist State also has its own
minorities, its own territorialities, which re-form themselves against
the State, or which the State instigates and organizes. (Russian
nationalism, the territoriality of the party: the proletariat was only
able to constitute itself as a class on the basis of artificial
neoterritorialities; in parallel fashion, the bourgeoisie
reterritorializes itself in forms that are at times the most archaic.)


The famous personalization of power is like a territoriality that
accompanies the deterritorialization of the machine, as its other side.
If it is true that the function of the modern State is the regulation of
the decoded, deterritorialized flows, one of the principal aspects of
this function consists in reterritorializing, so as to prevent the
decoded flows from breaking loose at all the edges of the social
axiomatic. One sometimes has the impression that the flows of capital
would willingly dispatch themselves to the moon if the capitalist State
were not there to bring them back to earth. For example:
deterritorialization of the flows of financing, but reterritorialization
of purchasing power and the means of payment (the role of the central
banks). Or the movement of deterritorialization that goes from the
center to the periphery is accompanied by a peripheral
reterritorialization, a kind of economic and political self-centering of
the periphery, either in the modernistic forms of a State socialism or
capitalism, or in the archaic form of local despots. It may be all but
impossible to distinguish deterritorialization from
reterritorialization, since they are mutually enmeshed, or like opposite
faces of one and the same process.


This essential aspect of the regulation performed by the State is even
more readily understood if one sees that it is directly based on the
social and economic axiomatic of capitalism as such. It is the very
conjunction of the deterritorialized flows that delineates archaic or
artificial neoterritorialities. Marx has shown what was the foundation
of political economy properly speaking: the discovery of an abstract
subjective essence of wealth, in labor or production—and in desire as
well, it would seem. (“It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to
throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity—not
only manufacturing, or commercial, or agricultural labour; but one as
well as others, labour in general \dots{} the abstract universality of
wealth-creating activity.”\footnote{Marx, \emph{Grundrisse}, p. 104, and \emph{Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844}, pp. 128–31.} Here we have the great movement of
decoding or deterritorialization: the nature of wealth is no longer to
be sought on the side of the object, under exterior conditions, in the
territorial or despotic machine. But Marx is quick to add that this
essentially “cynical” discovery finds itself rectified by a new
territorialization, in the form of a new fetishism or a new “hypocrisy.”
Production as the abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the
forms of property that objectifies it all over again, that alienates it
by reterritorializing it. Although they had a presentiment of the
subjective nature of wealth, the mercantilists had determined it as a
special activity still tied to a “money-creating” despotic machine; the
physiocrats, pushing this presentiment still further, had tied
subjective activity to a territorial or reterritorialized machine, in
the form of agriculture and landed property. And even Adam Smith
discovers the great essence of wealth, abstract and subjective,
industrial and deterritorialized, only by immediately reterritorializing
it in the private ownership of the means of production. (Nor can one say
in this regard that so-called common ownership changes the direction of
this movement.) Moreover, if it is not a question of writing the history
of political economy, but the real history of the corresponding society,
one is better able to understand why capitalism is continually
reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the
other.


In \emph{Capital} Marx analyzes the true reason for the double movement: on
the one hand, capitalism can proceed only by continually developing the
subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of
production, that is, “production as an end in itself, the absolute
development of the social productivity of labor”; but on the other hand
and at the same time, it can do so only in the framework of its own
limited purpose, as a determinate mode of production, “production of
capital,” “the self-expansion of existing capital.”\footnote{Marx, \emph{Capital}, Vol. 3, pp. 249–50.} Under the first
aspect capitalism is continually surpassing its own limits, always
deterritorializing further, “displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy
which overthrows every restriction and bond”; but under the second,
strictly complementary, aspect, capitalism is continually confronting
limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself, and that,
precisely because they are immanent, let themselves be overcome only
provided they are reproduced on a wider scale (always more
reterritorialization—local, world-wide, planetary). That is why the law
of the falling tendency—that is, limits never reached because they are
always surpassed and always reproduced—has seemed to us to have as a
corollary and even as a direct manifestation, the simultaneity of the
two movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.


An important consequence emerges from the above considerations. The
social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is
constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and
deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these
societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to
resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the
unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They
recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local
dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding—or allowing the
decoding of—the fluent quantities of their capital and their
populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism,
neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate
between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of
the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the
sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a
point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour
or flow out through the other. They are continually behind or ahead of
themselves.\footnote{* Suzanne de Brunhoff, \emph{La monnaie chez Marx} (reference note 73), p. 147: “That is why in capitalism even credit, formed into a system, brings together composite elements that are both \emph{ante-capitalist} (money, money commerce) and \emph{post-capitalist} (the credit circuit being a higher circulation\dots{}). Adapted to the needs of capitalism, credit is never really contemporary with capital. The system of financing born of the capitalist mode of production remains a bastard.”}


How can the nostalgia for, and the necessity of, the Urstaat be
reconciled with the insistence and the inevitability of the fluxion of
the flows? What can be done so that the decoding and the
deterritorialization constitutive of the system do not make it flee
through one end or another that would escape the axiomatic and throw the
machine into a panic (a Chinese on the horizon, a Cuban
missile-launcher, an Arab highjacker, a consul kidnapper, a Black
Panther, a May ’68, or even stoned hippies, angry gays, etc.)? There is
an oscillation between the reactionary paranoiac overcharges and the
subterranean, schizophrenic, and revolutionary charges. Moreover, one no
longer quite knows how it goes on one side or the other: the two
ambiguous poles of delirium, their transformations, the way in which an
archaism or folklore in a given set of circumstances can suddenly become
charged with a dangerous progressive value. How things turn fascist or
revolutionary is the problem of the universal delirium about which
everyone is silent, first of all and especially the psychiatrists (they
have no ideas on the subject—why would they?). Capitalism, and socialism
as well, are as though torn between the despotic signifier that they
adore, and the schizophrenic figure that sweeps them along. We are thus
entitled to maintain two conclusions that we have already put forward
and that seemed to stand mutually opposed. On the one hand, the modern
State forms a break that represents a genuine advance in comparison with
the despotic State, in terms of its fulfillment of a becoming-immanent,
its generalized decoding of flows, and its axiomatic that comes to
replace the codes and overcodings. But on the other hand there has never
been but one State, the Urstaat, the Asiatic despotic formation, which
constitutes in its shadow existence history’s only break, since even the
modern social axiomatic can function only by resuscitating it as one of
the poles between which it produces its own break. Democracy, fascism,
or socialism, which of these is not haunted by the Urstaat as a model
without equal? The name of the local dictator Duvalier’s chief of police
was Desyr.


But the events that restore a thing to life are not the same as those
that gave rise to it in the first place. We have distinguished among
three social machines corresponding to the savage, the barbarian, and
the civilized societies. The first is the underlying territorial
machine, which consists in coding the flows on the full body of the
earth. The second is the transcendent imperial machine, which consists
in overcoding the flows on the full body of the despot or his apparatus,
the Urstaat: it effects the first great movement of
deterritorialization, but does so by adding its eminent unity to the
territorial communes that it conserves by bringing them together,
overcoding them and appropriating their surplus labor. The third is the
modern immanent machine, which consists in decoding the flows on the
full body of capital-money: it has realized the immanence, it has
rendered concrete the abstract as such and has naturalized the
artificial, replacing the territorial codes and the despotic overcoding
with an axiomatic of decoded flows, and a regulation of these flows; it
effects the second great movement of deterritorialization, but this time
because it doesn’t allow any part of the codes and overcodes to subsist.
However, what it doesn’t allow to subsist it rediscovers through its own
original means; it reterritorializes where it has lost the
territorialities, it creates new archaisms where it has destroyed the
old ones—and the two become as one. The historian says no, the Modern
State, its bureaucracy and its technocracy, do not resemble the ancient
despotic State. Of course not, since it is a matter in the one case of
reterritorializing decoded flows, but in the other case of overcoding
the territorial flows. The paradox is that capitalism makes use of the
Urstaat for effecting its reterritorializations. But the imperturbable
modern axiomatic, from the depths of its immanence, reproduces the
transcendence of the Urstaat as its internalized limit, or one of the
poles between which it is determined to oscillate. And in its
imperturbable and cynical existence, it is prey to great forces that
form the other pole of the axiomatic, its accidents, its breakdowns, its
chances of being blown to pieces, of causing what it decodes to pass
beyond the wall of its immanent regulations and beyond its
transcendental resurrections.


Each type of social machine produces a particular kind of
**representation* whose elements are organized at the surface of the
socius: the system of connotation-connection in the savage territorial
machine, corresponding to the coding of the flows; the system of
subordination-disjunction in the barbarian despotic machine,
corresponding to overcoding; the system of co-ordination-conjunction in
the civilized capitalist machine, corresponding to the decoding of the
flows. Deterritorialization, the axiomatic, and reterritorialization are
the three surface elements of the representation of desire in the modern
socius. So we come back to the question: in each case what is the
relationship between social production and desiring-production, once it
is said that they have identical natures and differing régimes? Could it
be that the identity in nature is at its highest point in the order of
modern capitalist representation, because this identity is “universally”
realized in the immanence of this order and in the fluxion of the
decoded flows? But also that the difference in régime is greatest in the
capitalist order of representation, and that this representation
subjects desire to an operation of social repression-psychic repression
that is stronger than any other, because, by means of the immanence and
the decoding, antiproduction has spread throughout all of production,
instead of remaining localized in the system, and has freed a fantastic
death instinct that now permeates and crushes desire? And what is this
death that always rises from within, but that must arrive from
without—and that, in the case of capitalism, rises with all the more
power as one still fails to see exactly what this outside is that will
cause it to arrive? In short, the general theory of society is a
generalized theory of flows; it is in terms of the latter that one must
consider the relationship of social production to desiring-production,
the variations of this relationship in each case, and the limits of this
relationship in the capitalist system.

\section{11. Oedipus at Last}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-3-section-11}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-3-section-11}%


In the territorial or even the despotic machine, social economic
reproduction is never independent of human reproduction, of the social
form of this reproduction. The family is therefore an open praxis, a
strategy that is coextensive with the social field; the relations of
filiation and alliance are determinant, or rather “determined as
dominant.” As a matter of fact, what is marked or inscribed on the
socius—directly—is the producers (or nonproducers) according to the
standing of their family or their standing inside the family. The
reproduction process is not directly economic, but passes by way of the
noneconomic factors of kinship. This is true not only with respect to
the territorial machine, and to local groups that determine the place of
each member in social economic reproduction, according to one’s status
from the standpoint of the alliances and the filiations, but also with
respect to the despotic machine, which adds the relations of the new
alliance and direct filiation to the old alliance and filiations (whence
the role of the sovereign’s family in despotic overcoding, and that of
the “dynasty”—whatever its mutations, its indecisions—which are
inscribed under the same category of new alliance). The process by no
means remains the same in the capitalist system.\footnote{See Emmanuel Terray’s differential analysis of production modes, \emph{Le Marxisme devant les societes primitives}, pp. 140–55 (why, in precapitalist societies, “the reproduction of the economic and social structure depends in large measure on the conditions under which the physical reproduction of the group is maintained”).} Representation no
longer relates to a distinct object, but to productive activity itself.
The socius as full body has become directly economic as capital-money;
it does not tolerate any other preconditions. What is inscribed or
marked is no longer the producers or nonproducers, but the forces and
means of production as abstract quantities that become effectively
concrete in their becoming related or their conjunction: labor capacity
or capital, constant capital or variable capital, capital of filiation
or capital of alliance. Capital has taken upon itself the relations of
alliance and filiation. There ensues a privatization of the family
according to which the family ceases to give its social form to economic
reproduction: it is as though disinvested, placed outside the field; in
the language of Aristotle, the family is now simply the form of human
matter or material that finds itself subordinated to the autonomous
social form of economic reproduction, and that comes to take the place
assigned it by the latter. That is to say that the elements of
production and antiproduction are not reproduced in the same way as
humans themselves, but find in them a simple material that the form of
economic reproduction preorganizes in a mode that is entirely distinct
from the form this material has as human reproduction. Precisely because
it is privatized, placed outside the field, the form of the material or
the form of human reproduction begets people whom one can readily assume
to be all equal in relation to one another; but inside the field itself,
the form of social economic reproduction has already preformed the form
of the material so as to engender, there where they are needed, \emph{the}
capitalist as a function derived from capital, and \emph{the} worker as a
function derived from labor capacity, etc., in such a way that the
family finds itself countersected by the order of classes. (In this
sense, indeed, segregation is the only origin of equality.\footnote{Regarding the production of \emph{the} capitalist, etc., see Marx, \emph{Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations}, pp. 118–19, and \emph{Capital}, Vol. 1, pp. 591–92.})


This placing of the family outside the social field is also its greatest
social fortune. For it is the condition under which the entire social
field can be \emph{applied} to the family. Individual persons are social
persons first of all, i.e., functions derived from the abstract
quantities; they become concrete in the becoming-related or the
axiomatic of these quantities, in their conjunction. They are nothing
more nor less than configurations or images produced by the
points-signs, the breaks-flows, the pure “figures” of capitalism; the
capitalist as personified capital—i.e., as a function derived from the
flow of capital; and the worker as personified labor capacity—i.e., a
function derived from the flow of labor. In this way capitalism fills
its field of immanence with images: even destitution, despair,
revolt—and on the other side, the violence and the oppression of
capital—become images of destitution, despair, revolt, violence, or
oppression. But starting from nonfigurative figures or from the
breaks-flows that produce them, these images will themselves be capable
of figuring and reproducing only by shaping a human material whose
specific form of reproduction falls outside the social field that
nonetheless determines this form. Private persons are therefore images
of the second order, images of images—that is, \emph{simulacra} that are thus
endowed with an aptitude for representing the first-order images of
social persons. These private persons are formally delimited in the
locus of the restricted family as father, mother, child. But instead of
being a strategy that, through the action of alliances and filiations,
opens onto the entire social field, is coextensive with it, and
countersects its co-ordinates, it would appear that the family is now
merely a simple tactic around which the social field recloses, to which
it applies its autonomous requirements of reproduction, and that it
counteracts with all its dimensions. The alliances and filiations no
longer pass through people but through money; so the family becomes a
microcosm, suited to expressing what it no longer dominates. In a
certain sense the situation has not changed; for what is invested
through the family is still the economic, political, and cultural social
field, its breaks and flows. Private persons are an illusion, images of
images or derivatives of derivatives. But in another sense everything
has changed, because the family, instead of constituting and developing
the dominant factors of social reproduction, is content to apply and
envelop these factors in its own mode of reproduction. Father, mother,
and child thus become the simulacrum of the images of capital (“Mister
Capital, Madame Earth,” and their child the Worker), with the result
that these images are no longer recognized at all in the desire that is
determined to invest only their simulacrum. The familial determinations
become the application of the social axiomatic.


The family becomes the subaggregate to which the whole of the social
field is applied. Since \emph{each person} has his own private father and
mother, it is a distributive subaggregate that simulates for each person
the collective whole of social persons and that closes off his domain
and scrambles his images. Everything is reduced to the
father-mother-child triangle, which reverberates the answer
“daddy-mommy” every time it is stimulated by the images of capital. In
short, Oedipus arrives: it is born in the capitalist system of the
application of first-order social images to the private familial images
of the second order. It is the aggregate of destination that corresponds
to an aggregate of departure that is socially determined. It is our
intimate colonial formation that corresponds to the form of social
sovereignty. We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes
us. When the family ceases to be a unit of production and of
reproduction, when the conjunction again finds in the family the meaning
of a simple unit of consumption, it is father-mother that we consume. In
the aggregate of departure there is the boss, the foreman, the priest,
the tax collector, the cop, the soldier, the worker, all the machines
and territorialities, all the social images of our society; but in the
aggregate of destination, in the end, there is no longer anyone but
daddy, mommy, and me, the despotic sign inherited by daddy, the residual
territoriality assumed by mommy, and the divided, split, castrated ego.
Isn’t this operation of flattening, folding, or application what leads
Lacan to say, willingly betraying the secret of psychoanalysis as an
applied axiomatic: what appears to “come most freely into play in what
is called the analytic dialogue, in fact depends on a subfoundation that
is perfectly reducible to a few essential and formalizable
articulations.”\footnote{Jacques Lacan, \emph{Lettres de l’école freudienne}, March 7, 1970, p. 42.} Everything is pre-formed, arranged in advance. The
social field, where everyone acts and is acted upon (\emph{patit}) as a
collective agent of enunciation, an agent of production and
antiproduction, is reduced to Oedipus, where everyone now finds himself
cornered and cut along the line that divides him into an individual
subject of the statement and an individual subject of enunciation. The
subject of the statement is the social person, and the subject of
enunciation, the private person. “So” it’s your father, so it’s your
mother, so it’s you: the familial conjunction results from the
capitalist conjunctions, insofar as they are applied to private persons.
Daddy-mommy-me—one is sure to re-encounter them everywhere, since
everything has been applied to them. The reign of images is the new way
in which capitalism utilizes the schizzes and diverts the flows:
composite images, images flattened onto other images, so that when this
operation reaches its outcome the little ego of each person, related to
its father-mother, is truly the center of the world. Much more
underhanded than the subterranean reign of the fetishes of the earth, or
the celestial reign of the despot’s idols, is the advent of the
Oedipal-narcissistic machine: “No more glyphs and hieroglyphs, we’ll
have the real objective reality \dots{} our Kodak-vision\dots{}. To every man, to
every woman, the universe is just a setting to the absolute little
picture of himself, herself\dots{}. A picture! A Kodak snap, in a universal
film of snaps.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, “Art and Morality,” in \emph{Phoenix} (New York: Viking Press, 1936), pp. 522–26. On the “reality” of modern man as a composite and motley image, see Nietzsche, \emph{Thus Spake Zarathustra}, II, “Of the Land of Culture.”} Each person as a little triangulated microcosm—the
narcissistic ego is identical with the Oedipal subject.


Oedipus at last: in the end it is a very simple operation, one that
indeed readily lends itself to formalization, although it involves
universal history. We have seen in what sense schizophrenia was the
**absolute limit* of every society, inasmuch as it sets in motion decoded
and deterritorialized flows that it restores to desiring-production, “at
the bounds” of all social production. And capitalism, the \emph{relative
limit} of every society, inasmuch as it axiomatizes the decoded flows
and reterritorializes the deterritorialized flows. We have also seen
that capitalism finds in schizophrenia its own \emph{exterior limit}, which
it is continually repelling and exorcising, while capitalism itself
produces its \emph{immanent limits}, which it never ceases to displace and
enlarge. But capitalism still needs a displaced \emph{interior limit} in
another way: precisely in order to neutralize or repel the absolute
exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit; it needs to internalize this
limit, this time by restricting it, by causing it to pass no longer
between social production and the desiring-production that breaks away
from social reproduction, but inside social production, between the form
of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction to which
social production is reduced, between the social aggregate and the
private subaggregate to which the social aggregate is applied.


Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself
be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private
territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social
reterritorialization. Oedipus was always the displaced limit for every
social formation, since it is the displaced represented of desire. But
in the primitive formations this limit remains vacant, precisely insofar
as the flows are coded and as the interplay of alliances and filiations
keeps families extended according to the scale of the determinations of
the social field, preventing any secondary reduction of the latter to
the former. In the despotic formations the Oedipal limit is occupied,
symbolically occupied but not lived or inhabited, inasmuch as the
imperial incest effects an overcoding that in turn surveys the entire
social field from above (the repressing representation): the formal
operations of flattening, extrapolation, and so on, that later belong to
Oedipus, are already sketched out, but within a symbolic space where the
object from on high is formed. It is only in the capitalist formation
that the Oedipal limit finds itself not only occupied, but inhabited and
lived, in the sense in which the social images produced by the decoded
flows actually fall back on restricted familial images invested by
desire. It is at this point in the Imaginary that Oedipus is
constituted, at the same time as it \emph{completes its migration} in the
in-depth elements of representation: \emph{the displaced represented has
become, as such, the representation of desire}. Hence it goes without
saying that this becoming or this constitution does not develop under
the categories imagined in the earlier social formation, since the
imaginary Oedipus results from such a becoming and not the inverse. It
is not via a flow of shit or a wave of incest that Oedipus arrives, but
via the decoded flows of capital-money. The waves of incest and shit are
only secondary derivates of the latter, insofar as they transport the
private persons to which the flows of capital are reduced or applied.
(Which explains the complex origin of the relation that is completely
distorted in the psychoanalytic equation,
shit=money; in reality, it is a question of
encounters or conjunctions, of derivatives and resultants between
decoded flows.)


In Oedipus there is a recapitulation of the three states, or the three
machines. For Oedipus makes ready in the territorial machine, as an
empty unoccupied limit. It takes form in the despotic machine as a
symbolically occupied limit. But it is filled and carried to completion
only by becoming the imaginary Oedipus of the capitalist machine. The
despotic machine preserved the primitive territorialities, and the
capitalist machine resuscitates the Urstaat as one of the poles of its
axiomatic, it makes the despot into one of its images. That is why
Oedipus gathers up everything, everything is found again in Oedipus,
which is indeed the result of universal history, but in the singular
sense in which capital is already this result. \emph{Fetishes, idols, images,
and simulacra}—here we have the whole series: territorial fetishes,
despotic idols or symbols, then everything is recapitulated in the
images of capitalism, which shapes and reduces them to the Oedipal
simulacrum. The representative of the local group with Laius, the
territoriality with Jocasta, the despot with Oedipus himself: “a motley
painting of everything that has ever been believed.” It comes as no
surprise that Freud looks to Sophocles for the central image of
Oedipus-the-despot, the myth become tragedy, in order to make the image
radiate in two contrary directions: the ritual primitive direction of
**Totem and Taboo*, and the private direction of modern man the dreamer.
(Oedipus can be a myth, a tragedy, or a dream: it always expresses the
displacement of the limit.)


Oedipus would be nothing if the symbolic position of an object from on
high, in the despotic machine, did not first make possible the folding
and flattening operations that will constitute Oedipus in the modern
social field: the triangulation’s \emph{cause}. Whence the extreme
importance—but also the indeterminate nature, the nondecidability—of the
argument advanced by psychoanalysis’s most profound innovator, which
makes the displaced limit pass between the Symbolic and the Imaginary,
between symbolic castration and imaginary Oedipus. For castration in the
order of the despotic signifier, as the law of the despot or the effect
of the object from on high, is in reality the formal condition of the
Oedipal images that will be deployed in the field of immanence left
uncovered by the withdrawal of the signifier. I reach desire when I
arrive at castration! What does the desire-castration equation signify,
if not in fact a prodigious operation that consists in replacing desire
under the law of the despot, in introducing lack there at the deepest
levels, and in rescuing us from Oedipus by means of a fantastic
regression. A fantastic and brilliant regression: someone had to do it,
“no one helped me,” as Lacan says, to shake loose the yoke of Oedipus
and carry it to the point of its autocritique. But it is like the story
of the Resistance fighters who, wanting to destroy a pylon, balanced the
plastic charges so well that the pylon blew up and fell back into its
hole. From the Symbolic to the Imaginary, from castration to Oedipus,
and from the despotic age to capitalism, inversely there is the progress
leading to the withdrawal of the overseeing and overcoding object from
on high, which gives way to a social field of immanence where the
decoded flows produce images and level them down. Whence the two aspects
of the signifier: a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum
that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between
minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat
similar, in traditional terms, to the way one goes from the Parmenidean
Being to the atoms of Democritus).


A transcendent object that is more and more spiritualized, for a field
of forces that is more and more immanent, more and more internalized:
this describes the evolution of the infinite debt—through Catholicism,
then the Reformation. The extreme spiritualization of the despotic
State, and the extreme internalization of the capitalist field, define
bad conscience. The latter is not cynicism’s contrary; it is, in private
persons, the correlate of the cynicism of social persons. All the
cynical tactics of bad conscience, just as Nietzsche and then Lawrence
and Miller analyzed them to arrive at a definition of civilized European
man: the hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the
hatred of life and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows;
the universal effusion of the death instinct; depression and guilt used
as a means of contagion, the kiss of the Vampire: aren’t you ashamed to
be happy? follow my example, I won’t let go before you say, “It’s my
fault,” O ignoble contagion of the depressives, neurosis as the only
illness consisting in making others ill; the permissive structure: let
me deceive, rob, slaughter, kill! but in the name of the social order,
and so daddy-mommy will be proud of me; the double direction given to
**ressentiment*, the turning back against oneself, and the projection
against the Other: the father is dead, it’s my fault, who killed him?
it’s your fault, it’s the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese, all the
resources of racism and segregation; the abject desire to be loved, the
whimpering at not being loved enough, at not being “understood,”
concurrent with the reduction of sexuality to the “dirty little secret,”
this whole \emph{priest’s psychology}—there is not a single one of these
tactics that does not find in Oedipus its land of milk and honey, its
good provider. Nor is there a single one of these tactics that does not
serve and develop in psychoanalysis, with the latter as the new avatar
of the “ascetic ideal.”


Once again, psychoanalysis does not invent Oedipus; it merely provides
the latter a last territoriality, the couch, and a last Law, the analyst
as despot and money collector. But the mother as the simulacrum of
territoriality, and the father as the simulacrum of the despotic Law,
with the slashed, split, castrated ego, are the products of capitalism
insofar as it engineers an operation that has no equivalent in the other
social formations. Everywhere else the familial position is merely a
stimulus to the investment of the social field by desire: the familial
images function only by opening onto social images to which they become
coupled or which they confront in the course of struggles and
compromises; so that what is invested through the breaks and segments of
families is the economic, political, and cultural breaks of the field
into which they are plunged (cf. Ndembu schizophrenia). This is the case
even in the peripheral zones of capitalism, where the colonizer’s
efforts at oedipalizing the indigenous population—African Oedipus—find
themselves contradicted by the breakup of the family along the lines of
social exploitation and oppression. But it is at the soft center of
capitalism, in the temperate zones of the bourgeoisie, that the colony
becomes intimate and private, interior to each person: it is there that
the flow of the investment of desire, which travels from the familial
stimulus to the social organization (or disorganization), is as it were
**covered over by a reflux* that flattens the social investment onto the
familial investment serving as a pseudo organizer. The family has become
the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations.
It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply
all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the
result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but
father-mother—this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin. Yes, I desired
my mother and wanted to kill my father; a single subject of
enunciation—Oedipus—for all the capitalist statements, and between the
two, the leveling cleavage of castration.


Marx said that Luther’s merit was to have determined the essence of
religion, no longer on the side of the object, but as an interior
religiosity; that the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have
determined the essence or nature of wealth no longer as an objective
nature, but as an abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence,
**the activity of production in general*. But as this determination
develops under the condition of capitalism, they objectify the essence
all over again, they alienate and reterritorialize it, this time in the
form of the private ownership of the means of production. So that
capitalism is without doubt the universal of every society, but only
insofar as it is capable of carrying to a certain point its own
critique—that is, the critique of the processes by which it re-enslaves
what within it tends to free itself or to appear freely.\footnote{Marx, \emph{Grundrisse}, pp. 104–108.} The same
thing must be said of Freud: his greatness lies in having determined the
essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to objects, aims, or
even sources (territories), but as an abstract subjective essence—libido
or sexuality. But he still relates this essence to the family as the
last territoriality of private man—whence the position of Oedipus,
marginal at first in the \emph{Three Essays}, then centering more and more
around desire. It is as though Freud were asking to be forgiven his
profound discovery of sexuality by saying to us: at least it won’t go
any further than the family! The dirty little secret, in place of the
wide open spaces glimpsed for a moment. The familialist reduction, in
place of the drift of desire. In place of the great decoded flows,
little streams recoded in mommy’s bed. Interiority in place of a new
relationship with the outside. Throughout psychoanalysis, the discourse
of bad conscience and guilt always rises up and finds its
nourishment—what is called being cured.


On two points at least, Freud exonerates the real exterior family of any
wrongs, the better to internalize the family and the wrongs in the
person of the family’s smallest member, the child. The way in which he
posits an autonomous repression independent of social repression; the
way in which he abandons the theme of the seduction of the child by the
adult, in order to substitute the individual fantasy that makes the real
parents into so many innocents or even victims.\footnote{* Erich Fromm, apropos of the analysis of Little Hans in particular, has pointed to the increasingly clear evolution of Freud, who comes to posit the child’s guilt and exonerate parental authority: \emph{The Crisis of Psychoanalysis} (New York: Fawcett, 1970), pp. 55–59, 90–100.} For the family must
appear in two forms: one where doubtless it is guilty, but only in the
manner in which the child lives it intensely, internally, and where it
is confounded with the child’s own guilt; the other where it is a
tribunal of responsibility, before which one stands as a guilty child,
and in relation to which one becomes a responsible adult (Oedipus as
sickness \emph{and} sanity, the family as an alienating factor \emph{and} as an
agent of dealienation, if only through the way in which it is
reconstituted in the transference). This is what Foucault has shown in
his very fine analysis: the familialism inherent in psychoanalysis
doesn’t so much destroy classical psychiatry as shine forth as the
latter’s crowning achievement. After the madman of the earth and the
madman of the despot comes the madman of the family; what
nineteenth-century psychiatry had wanted to organize in the asylum—“the
imperative fiction of the family,” Reason-the-father and
madness-the-child or minor, the parents who are ill only from their own
childhood—all this finds its fulfillment outside the asylum, in
psychoanalysis and in the consulting room of the analyst. Freud is the
Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry. He mobilizes all the resources
of myth, of tragedy, of dreams, in order to re-enslave desire, this time
from within: an intimate theater. Yes, Oedipus is nevertheless the
universal of desire, the product of universal history—but on one
condition, which is not met by Freud: that Oedipus be capable, at least
to a certain point, of conducting its autocritique. Universal history is
nothing more than a theology if it does not seize control of the
conditions of its contingent, singular existence, its irony, and its own
critique. And what are these conditions, this point where the
autocritique is possible and necessary? To discover beneath the familial
reduction the nature of the social investments of the unconscious. To
discover beneath the individual fantasy the nature of group fantasies.
Or, what amounts to the same thing, to push the simulacrum to the point
where it ceases to be the image of an image, so as to discover the
abstract figures, the schizzes-flows that it harbors and conceals. To
substitute, for the private subject of castration, split into a subject
of enunciation and a subject of the statement relating only to the two
orders of personal images, the collective agents of enunciation that for
their part refer to machinic arrangements. To overturn the theater of
representation into the order of desiring-production: this is the whole
task of schizoanalysis.

\chapter{4. Introduction to Schizoanalysis}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4}%

\section{1. The Social Field}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4-section-1}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4-section-1}%


Which comes first, the chicken or the egg—but also the father and the
mother, or the child? Psychoanalysis acts as if it were the child (the
father is sick only from his own childhood), but at the same time is
forced to postulate a parental pre-existence (the child is sick only in
relation to a father and a mother). This is clearly evident in the
primal position of the father of the horde. Oedipus itself would be
nothing without the identifications of the parents with the children;
and the fact cannot be hidden that everything begins in the mind of the
father: isn’t that what you want, to kill me, to sleep with your mother?
It is first of all a father’s idea: thus Laius. It is the father who
raises hell, and who brandishes the law (the mother tends to be
obliging: we mustn’t make this into a scene, it’s only a dream, a
territoriality). Lévi-Strauss puts it very well: “The initial theme of
the key myth is the incest committed by the hero with the mother. Yet
the idea that he is ‘guilty’ seems to exist mainly in the mind of the
father, who desires his son’s death and schemes to bring it about\dots{}. In
the long run it is the father who appears guilty, through having tried
to avenge himself, and it is he who is killed\dots{}. This curious
indifference toward incest appears in other myths”.\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{The Raw and the Cooked}, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 48.} \emph{Oedipus is
first the idea of an adult paranoiac, before it is the childhood feeling
of a neurotic}. So it is that psychoanalysis has much difficulty
extracting itself from an infinite regression: the father must have been
a child, but was able to be a child only in relation to a father, who
was himself a child, in relation to another father.


How does a delirium begin? Perhaps the cinema is able to capture the
movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and
regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence. Witness a film
by Nicolas Ray, supposedly representing the formation of a cortisone
delirium: an overworked father, a high-school teacher who works overtime
for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart trouble. He
begins to rave about the educational system in \emph{general}, the need to
restore a pure \emph{race}, the salvation of the social and moral \emph{order},
then he passes to \emph{religion}, the timeliness of a return to the Bible,
Abraham. But what in fact did Abraham do? Well now, he killed or wanted
to kill his son, and perhaps God’s only error lies in having stayed his
hand. But doesn’t this man, the film’s protagonist, have a son of his
own? Hmm \dots{} What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists,
is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is
social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical,
and religious: the delirious person applies a delirium to his family and
his son that overreaches them on all sides.


Joseph Gabel, presenting a case of paranoiac delirium with a strong
politico-erotic content replete with suggestions for social reform,
believes it possible to say that such a case is rare, and that,
moreover, its origins are not reconstructible.\footnote{Joseph Gabel, “Délire politique chez un paranoïde,” \emph{L’Evolution psychiatrique}, no. 2 (1952).} Yet it is evident
that there is never a delirium that does not possess this characteristic
to a high degree, and that is not originally economic, political, and so
forth, before being crushed in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic
treadmill. Judge Schreber would not deny this (nor his father, who
invented the Pangymnastikon and a general pedagogical system).
Everything changes, then: the infinite regression forced us to postulate
a primacy of the father, but an always relative and hypothetical primacy
that carried us to infinity, barring a shift into the position of an
absolutely primary father; but it is clear that the viewpoint of
regression is the result of abstraction. When we say the father is first
in relation to the child, this proposition, devoid of meaning in itself,
concretely means the following: the social investments are first in
relation to the familial investments, which result solely from the
application or the reduction (\emph{rabattement}) of the social investments.
To say that the father is first in relation to the child really amounts
to saying that the investment of desire is in the first instance the
investment of a social field into which the father and the child are
plunged, simultaneously immersed.


Let us again consider the example of the Marquesans, as analyzed by
Kardiner: he distinguishes between an adult alimentary anxiety linked to
an endemic famine, and an infantile alimentary anxiety linked to a
deficiency of maternal care.\footnote{Abram Kardiner, \emph{The Individual and His Society} (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 223ff. And concerning the two possible paths, from the child to the adult or from the adult to the child, see Mikel Dufrenne’s commentaries in \emph{La personnalité de base}, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), pp. 287–320.} Not only is it impossible to derive
the first anxiety from the second, but one cannot even consider, as
Kardiner does, that the social investment corresponding to the first
anxiety comes \emph{after} the infantile familial investment of the second.
For a determination of the social field is already invested in the
second type of anxiety, namely, the rarity of women that explains how it
is that the adults no less than the children “are wary of them.” In
brief, what the child invests through the infantile experience, the
mother’s breast, and the familial structure is already a state of the
breaks and the flows of the social field in its entirety, flows of women
and of food, recordings and distributions. Never is the adult an
afterward of the child, but in the family both relate to the
determinations of the field in which both the family and they are
simultaneously immersed.


Hence we are confronted by three unavoidable conclusions. (1) From the
point of view of regression, whose meaning is only \emph{hypothetical}, it is
the father who is first in relation to the child. The paranoiac father
Oedipalizes the son. Guilt is an idea projected by the father before it
is an inner feeling experienced by the son. The first error of
psychoanalysis is in acting as if things began with the child. This
leads psychoanalysis to develop an absurd theory of fantasy, in terms of
which the father, the mother, and their real actions and passions must
first be understood as “fantasies” of the child (the Freudian
abandonment of the theme of seduction). (2) If regression taken in an
absolute sense reveals itself to be inadequate, it is because this
regression encloses us in simple reproduction or generation.
Furthermore, taking organic bodies and organized persons as its object,
the theory of regression merely attains the object of reproduction. The
point of view of the cycle alone is \emph{categorical and absolute}, because
it attains production as the subject of reproduction, which is to say it
attains the process of autoproduction of the unconscious (a unity of
history and of nature, from \emph{Homo natura} to \emph{Homo historia}). It is
certainly not sexuality that is in the service of generation, but
progressive or regressive generation that is in the service of sexuality
as a cyclical movement by which the unconscious, always remaining
“subject,” reproduces itself. There is, then, no longer any call for
wondering which is first, the father or the child, because such a
question can be raised only within the framework of familialism. The
father is first in relation to the child, but only because what is first
is the social investment in relation to the familial investment, the
investment of the social field in which the father, the child, and the
family as a subaggregate are at one and the same time immersed. The
primacy of the social field as the terminus of the investment of desire
defines the cycle, and the states through which a subject passes. The
second error of psychoanalysis, made just as it was completing the
separation of sexuality from reproduction, lies in having remained
captive to an unrepentant familialism that condemned it to evolve solely
within the movement of regression or progression. (Even the
psychoanalytic conception of repetition remains captive to such a
movement.\footnote{For a rigorous philosophical discussion of the notion of \emph{repetition}, both the radical repetition of the Same and of Difference (the Eternal Return), and the normative repetition of Habit and Representation, see Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Différence et répétition} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 128–67. (\emph{Translators’ note.})})


(3) Finally, the point of view of the community, which is \emph{disjunctive}
or takes account of the disjunctions in the cycle. Not only is
generation second in relation to the cycle, but transmission is second
in relation to an information or a communication. The genetic revolution
occurred when it was discovered that, strictly speaking, there is no
transmission of flows, but a communication of a code or an axiomatic, of
a combinative apparatus (\emph{combinatoire}) informing the flows. Such is
also the case for the social field: its coding or its axiomatic first
determine within it a communication of unconsciouses. This phenomenon of
communication, which Freud touched on only marginally in his remarks on
occultism, constitutes in fact the norm, and pushes into the background
the problems of hereditary transmission that animated the Freud-Jung
controversy.\footnote{* It is also within the perspective of marginal phenomena that the problem, nevertheless fundamental, of the communication of unconsciouses was posed, first by Spinoza in letter 17 to Balling, then by Myers, James, Bergson, etc.} It appears that, in the common social field, the first
thing that the son represses, or has to repress, or tries to repress, is
**the unconscious of the father and the mother*. The failure of that
repression is the basis of neuroses. But this communication of
unconsciouses does not by any means take the family as its principle; it
takes as its principle the commonalty of the social field insofar as it
is the object of the investment of desire. In all respects the family is
never determining, but is always determined, first as a stimulus of
departure, then as an aggregate of destination, and finally as an
intermediary or an interception of communication.


If the familial investment is only a dependence or an application of the
unconscious investments of the social field—and if this is just as true
of the child as of the adult; if it is true that the child, through the
mommy-territoriality and the daddy-law, already aims for the schizzes
and the encoded or axiomated flows of the social field—then we must
transport the essential difference to the heart of this domain. Delirium
is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment. Every
unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of
disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments. But we have
seen in this context that there were two major types of social
investment, segregative and nomadic, just as there were two poles of
delirium: first, a paranoiac fascisizing (\emph{fascisant}) type or pole that
invests the formation of central sovereignty; overinvests it by making
it the final eternal cause for all the other social forms of history;
counterinvests the enclaves or the periphery; and disinvests every free
“figure” of desire—yes, I am your kind, and I belong to the superior
race and class. And second, a schizorevolutionary type or pole that
follows the \emph{lines of escape} of desire; breaches the wall and causes
flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the
enclaves or at the periphery—proceeding in an inverse fashion from that
of the other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the
inferior race, I am a beast, a black. Good people say that we must not
flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t effective, and that one
must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is
revolutionary—\emph{withdrawal}, \emph{freaks}—provided one sweeps away the social
cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the
shuffle. What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to
become black like John Brown. George Jackson. ‘I may take flight, but
all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!’\footnote{[empty]}


Doubtless there are astonishing oscillations of the unconscious, from
one pole of delirium to the other: the way in which an expected
revolutionary force (\emph{puissance}) breaks free, sometimes even in the
midst of the worst archaisms; inversely, the way in which everything
turns fascist or envelops itself in fascism, the way in which it falls
back into archaisms. Or, staying on the level of literary examples: the
case of Céline, the great victim of delirium who evolves while
communicating more and more with the paranoia of his father. The case of
Jack Kerouac, the artist possessing the soberest of means who took
revolutionary “flight,” but who later finds himself immersed in dreams
of a Great America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the
superior race. Isn’t the destiny of American literature that of crossing
limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to
circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing,
moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities?


These oscillations of the unconscious, these underground passages from
one type of libidinal investment to the other—often the coexistence of
the two—form one of the major objects of schizoanalysis. The two poles
united by Artaud in the formula: Heliogabalus-the-anarchist, “the image
of all human contradictions, and of the contradiction \emph{in principle}.”
But no passage impairs or suppresses the difference in nature between
the two, nomadism and segregation. If we are able to define this
difference as that which separates paranoia and schizophrenia, it is
because on the one hand we have distinguished the schizophrenic process
(“the breakthrough”) from the accidents and relapses that hinder or
interrupt it (“the breakdown”), and because on the other hand we have
posited paranoia no less than schizophrenia as independent of all
familial pseudo etiologies, so as to make them bear directly upon the
social field: every name in history, and not the name of the father. On
the contrary, the nature of the familial investments depends on the
breaks and the flows of the social field as they are invested in one
type or another, at one pole or the other. And the child does not wait
until he is an adult before grasping—underneath father-mother—the
economic, financial, social, and cultural problems that cross through a
family: his belonging or his desire to belong to a superior or an
inferior “race,” the reactionary or the revolutionary tenor of a
familial group with which he is already preparing his ruptures and his
conformities.


What a muddle, what an emulsion the family is, agitated by backwashes,
pulled in one direction or another, in such a way that the Oedipal
bacillus takes or doesn’t take, imposes its mold or doesn’t succeed in
imposing it, pursuing directions of an entirely different nature that
traverse the family from the exterior. What we mean is that Oedipus is
born of an application or a reduction to personalized images, which
presupposes a social investment of a paranoiac type—which explains why
Freud first discovers the familial romance and Oedipus while reflecting
on paranoia. Oedipus is a dependency of the paranoiac territoriality,
whereas the schizophrenic investment commands an entirely different
determination, a family gasping for breath and stretched out over the
dimensions of a social field that does not reclose or withdraw: a
family-as-matrix for depersonalized partial objects, which plunge again
and again into the torrential or depleted flux of a historic cosmos, a
historic chaos. The matrical fissure of schizophrenia, as opposed to
paranoiac castration; and the line of escape as opposed to the “blue
line,” the blues.



\begin{quote}



\end{quote}



\begin{verse}
O mother \\{}
farewell \\{}
with a long black shoe \\{}
farewell \\{}
with Communist Party and a broken stocking\dots{}. \\{}
with your sagging belly \\{}
with your fear of Hitler \\{}
with your mouth of bad short stories\dots{}. \\{}
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks \\{}
with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War \\{}
with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers\dots{}. \\{}
with your eyes \\{}
with your eyes of Russia \\{}
with your eyes of no money\dots{}. \\{}
with your eyes of starving India\dots{}. \\{}
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots\dots{}. \\{}
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance \\{}
with your eyes with the pancreas removed \\{}
with your eyes of appendix operation \\{}
with your eyes of abortion \\{}
with your eyes of ovaries removed \\{}
with your eyes of shock \\{}
with your eyes of lobotomy \\{}
with your eyes of divorce\dots{}.\footnote{Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish,” IV, in \emph{Kaddish and Other Poems}, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), pp. 34–35.}
\end{verse}


Why these words, paranoia and schizophrenia, which are like talking
birds and girls’ first names? Why do social investments follow this
dividing line that gives them a specifically delirious content
(recreating history in delirium)? And what is this line, how can we
situate schizophrenia and paranoia on either side of it? Our assumption
is that everything happens on the body without organs; but this body
has, as it were, two faces. Elias Canetti has clearly shown how the
paranoiac organizes masses and “packs.” The paranoiac opposes them to
one another, maneuvers them.\footnote{* Elias Canetti, \emph{Crowds and Power} (New York: Viking Press, 1960), p. 434: “His mind was dominated by four kinds of crowds: his army, his treasure, his corpses and his court (and, with it, his capital). He juggled with them ceaselessly, but only succeeded in increasing one at the expense of another\dots{}. Whatever he did there was always \emph{one} crowd which he managed to preserve. In no circumstances did he ever cease to kill\dots{}. The heaps of corpses piled up in every province of his empire.”} The paranoiac engineers masses, he is
the artist of the large molar aggregates, the statistical formations or
gregariousnesses, the phenomena of organized crowds. He invests
everything that falls within the province of large numbers. The night of
the battle, Colonel Lawrence lines up the young naked corpses on the
full body of the desert. Judge Schreber attaches little men by the
thousands to his body. It might be said that, of the two directions in
**physics*—the molar direction that goes toward the large numbers and the
mass phenomena, and the molecular direction that on the contrary
penetrates into singularities, their interactions and connections at a
distance or between different orders—the paranoiac has chosen the first:
he practices macrophysics. And it could be said that by contrast the
schizo goes in the other direction, that of microphysics, of molecules
insofar as they no longer obey the statistical laws: waves and
corpuscles, flows and partial objects that are no longer dependent upon
the large numbers; infinitesimal lines of escape, instead of the
perspectives of the large aggregates.


Doubtless it would be a mistake to contrast these two dimensions in
terms of the collective and the individual. On the one hand, the
microunconscious presents no fewer arrangements, connections, and
interactions, although these arrangements are of an original type; on
the other hand, the form of individualized persons does not belong to
it, since it knows only partial objects and flows, but belongs instead
to the laws of statistical distribution of the molar unconscious or the
macrounconscious. Freud was Darwinian, neo-Darwinian, when he said that
in the unconscious everything was a problem of population (likewise, in
the contemplation of multiplicities he saw a sign of psychosis).\footnote{* In the article of 1913 on “The Unconscious,” Freud shows that psychosis causes small multiplicities to intervene, as opposed to neurosis, which requires a global object: for example, the multiplicity of holes. But Freud explains this psychotic phenomenon solely by invoking the power of verbal representation.} It
is therefore more a matter of the difference between two kinds of
collections or populations: the large aggregates and the
micromultiplicities. In both cases the investment is collective, it is
an investment of a collective field; even a lone particle has an
associated wave as a flow that defines the coexisting space of \emph{its}
presences. Every investment is collective, every fantasy is a group
fantasy and in this sense a position of reality. But the two kinds of
investments are radically different, according as the one bears upon the
molar structures that subordinate the molecules, and the other on the
contrary bears upon the molecular multiplicities that subordinate the
structured crowd phenomena. One is a \emph{subjugated group} investment, as
much in its sovereign form as in its colonial formations of the
gregarious aggregate, which socially and psychically represses the
desire of persons; the other, a \emph{subject-group} investment in the
transverse multiplicities that convey desire as a molecular phenomenon,
that is, as partial objects and flows, as opposed to aggregates and
persons.


It is true that social investments are made on the socius itself as a
full body, and that their respective poles necessarily relate to the
character or the “map” of this socius—earth, despot, or capital-money
(for each social machine the two poles, paranoiac and schizophrenic, are
distributed in varying ways). Whereas the paranoiac and the
schizophrenic, properly speaking, do not operate on the socius, but on
the body without organs in a pure state. It might then be said that the
paranoiac, in the clinical sense of the term, makes us spectators to the
imaginary birth of the mass phenomenon, and does so at a level that is
still microscopic. The body without organs is like the cosmic egg, the
**giant molecule* swarming with worms, bacilli, Lilliputian figures,
animalcules, and homunculi, with their organization and their machines,
minute strings, ropes, teeth, fingernails, levers and pulleys,
catapults: thus in Schreber the millions of spermatazoids in the
sunbeams, or the souls that lead a brief existence as little men on his
body. Artaud says: this world of microbes, which is nothing more than
coagulated nothingness. The two sides of the body without organs are,
therefore, the side on which the mass phenomenon and the paranoiac
investment corresponding to it are organized on a microscopic scale, and
the other side on which, on a submicroscopic scale, the molecular
phenomena and their schizophrenic investment are arranged. It is on the
body without organs, as a pivot, as a frontier between the molar and the
molecular, that the paranoia-schizophrenia division is made. Are we to
believe, then, that social investments are secondary projections, as if
a large two-headed schizonoiac, father of the primitive horde, were at
the base of the socius in general? We have seen that this is not at all
the case. The socius is not a projection of the body without organs;
rather, the body without organs is the limit of the socius, its tangent
of deterritorialization, the ultimate residue of a deterritorialized
socius. The socius—the earth, the body of the despot, capital-money—are
clothed full bodies, just as the body without organs is a naked full
body; but the latter exists at the limit, at the end, not at the origin.
And doubtless the body without organs haunts all forms of socius. But in
this very sense, if social investments can be said to be paranoiac or
schizophrenic, it is to the extent that they have paranoia and
schizophrenia as ultimate products under the determinate conditions of
capitalism.


From the standpoint of a universal clinical theory, paranoia and
schizophrenia can be presented as the two extreme oscillaions of a
pendulum oscillating around the position of a socius as a full body and,
at the limit, of a body without organs, one of whose sides is occupied
by the molar aggregates, and the other populated by molecular elements.
But one can also present this as a single line along which the different
forms of socius, their planes and their large aggregates, are arranged;
on each of these planes there is a paranoiac dimension, another that is
perverse, a kind of familial position, and a dotted line of escape or
schizoid breakthrough. The major line ends at the body without organs,
and there it either passes through the wall, opening onto the molecular
elements where it becomes in actual fact what it was from the start: the
schizophrenic process, the pure schizophrenic process of
deterritorialization. Or it strikes the wall, rebounds off it, and falls
back into the most miserably arranged territorialities of the modern
world as simulacra of the preceding planes, getting caught up in the
asylum aggregate of paranoia and schizophrenia as clinical entities, in
the artificial aggregates or societies established by perversion, in the
familial aggregate of Oedipal neuroses.


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-anti-oedipus-3.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage


\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{g-d-gilles-deleuze-felix-guattari-anti-oedipus-4.png}
\end{figure}
\clearpage

\section{2. The Molecular Unconscious}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4-section-2}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4-section-2}%


What is the meaning of this distinction between two regions: one
molecular and the other molar; one micropsychic or micrological, the
other statistical and gregarious? Is this anything more than a metaphor
lending the unconscious a distinction grounded in physics, when we speak
of an opposition between intra-atomic phenomena and the mass phenomena
that operate through statistical accumulation, obeying the laws of
aggregates? But in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of
physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors,
but matter itself. Nor is it our intention to revive the question of an
individual psychology and a collective psychology, and of the priority
of the one or the other; this distinction, as it appears in \emph{Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego}, remains completely stymied by
Oedipus. In the unconscious there are only populations, groups, and
machines. When we posit in one case an involuntariness (\emph{un
involontaire}) of the social and technical machines, in the other case
an unconscious of the desiring-machines, it is a question of a necessary
relationship between inextricably linked forces. Some of these are
elementary forces by means of which the unconscious is produced; the
others, resultants reacting on the first, statistical aggregates through
which the unconscious is represented and already suffers psychic and
social repression of its elementary productive forces.


But how can we speak of machines in this microphysical or micropsychic
region, \emph{there where there is desire}—that is to say, not only its
functioning, but formation and autoproduction? A machine works according
to the previous intercommunications of its structure and the positioning
of its parts, but does not set itself into place any more than it forms
or reproduces itself. This is even the point around which the usual
polemic between vitalism and mechanism revolves: the machine’s ability
to account for the workings of the organism, but its fundamental
inability to account for its formations. From machines, mechanism
abstracts a \emph{structural unity} in terms of which it explains the
functioning of the organism. Vitalism invokes an \emph{individual and
specific} unity of the living, which every machine presupposes insofar
as it is subordinate to organic continuance, and insofar as it extends
the latter’s autonomous formations on the outside. But it should be
noted that, in one way or another, the machine and desire thus remain in
an extrinsic relationship, either because desire appears as an effect
determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is
itself a system of means in terms of the aims of desire. The link
between the two remains secondary and indirect, both in the new means
appropriated by desire and in the derived desires produced by the
machines.


A profound text by Samuel Butler, “The Book of the Machines,”
nevertheless allows us to go beyond these points of view.\footnote{Samuel Butler, \emph{Erewhon, Everyman’s Library} (New York: E.P. Dutton; London: J.M. Dent, 1965), pp. 146–60.} It is
true that this text seems at first merely to contrast the two common
arguments, the one according to which the organisms are for the moment
only more perfect machines (“Whether those things which we deem most
purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an
infinite series of levers, beginning with those levers that are too
small for microscopic detection”\footnote{Ibid., p. 148.}), the other according to which
machines are never more than extensions of the organism (“The lower
animals keep all their limbs at home in their bodies, but many of man’s
are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various
parts of the world”\footnote{Ibid., p. 156.}). But there is a Butlerian manner for carrying
each of the arguments to an extreme point where it can no longer be
opposed to the other, a point of nondifference or \emph{dispersion}. For one
thing, Butler is not content to say that machines extend the organism,
but asserts that they are really limbs and organs lying on the body
without organs of a society, which men will appropriate according to
their power and their wealth, and whose poverty deprives them as if they
were mutilated organisms. For another, he is not content to say that
organisms are machines, but asserts that they contain such an abundance
of parts that they must be compared to very different parts of distinct
machines, each relating to the others, engineered in combination with
the others.


What is essential is this double movement whereby Butler drives both
arguments beyond their very limits. \emph{He shatters the vitalist argument
by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism,
and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question
the structural unity of the machine}. It is said that machines do not
reproduce themselves, or that they only reproduce themselves through the
intermediary of man, but “does any one say that the red clover has no
reproductive system because the bumble bee (and the bumble bee only)
must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The bumble bee is
a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves
has sprung from minute animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct
from our own\dots{}. These creatures are part of our reproductive system; then
why not we part of that of the machines?\dots{} We are misled \emph{by considering
any complicated machine as a single thing}; in truth it is a city or a
society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a
machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we look
at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual
which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore
assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise
from a single center; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare
fact that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two
others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that
vapour-engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that each part
of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose
function is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of
the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical
reproductive system.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 159.} In passing, Butler encounters the phenomenon
of surplus value of code, when a part of a machine captures within its
own code a code fragment of another machine, and thus owes its
reproduction to a part of another machine, the red clover and the bumble
bee; or the orchid and the male wasp that it attracts and intercepts by
carrying on its flower the image and the odor of the female wasp.


At \emph{this point of dispersion} of the two arguments, it becomes
immaterial whether one says that machines are organs, or organs,
machines. The two definitions are exact equivalents: man as a
“vertebro-machinate mammal,” or as an “aphidian parasite of machines.”
What is essential is not in the passage to infinity itself—the infinity
composed of machine parts or the temporal infinity of the
animalcules—but rather in what this passage blossoms into. Once the
structural unity of the machine has been undone, once the personal and
specific unity of the living has been laid to rest, a direct link is
perceived between the machine and desire, the machine passes to the
heart of desire, the machine is desiring and desire, machined. Desire is
not in the subject, but the machine in desire—with the residual subject
off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire periphery, a
parasite of machines, an accessory of vertebro-machinate desire. In a
word, the real difference is not between the living and the machine,
vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are
two states of the living as well. The machine taken in its structural
unity, the living taken in its specific and even personal unity, are
mass phenomena or molar aggregates; for this reason each points to the
extrinsic existence of the other. And even if they are differentiated
and mutually opposed, it is merely as two paths in the same statistical
direction. But in the other more profound or intrinsic direction of
multiplicities there is interpenetration, direct communication between
the molecular phenomena and the singularities of the living, that is to
say, between the small machines scattered in every machine, and the
small formations dispersed in every organism: a domain of nondifference
between the microphysical and the biological, there being as many living
beings in the machine as there are machines in the living. Why speak of
machines in this domain, when there would seem to be none, strictly
speaking—no structural unity nor any preformed mechanical
interconnections? “But there is the possibility of formation of such
machines—in indefinitely superimposed relays, in working cycles that
mesh with each other—which, once assembled, will obey the laws of
thermo-dynamics, but which in the process of assembly do not depend on
these laws, since the chain of assembly begins in a domain where by
definition there are as yet no statistical laws\dots{}. \emph{At this level,
functioning and formation are still confounded as in the molecule}; and,
starting from this level, two diverging paths open up, of which one will
lead to the more or less regular accumulations of individuals, the other
to the perfectings of the individual organization whose simplest schema
is the formation of a pipe.”\footnote{* Raymond Ruyer, \emph{La genèse des formes vivantes} (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), pp. 80–81. Taking up certain arguments of Bohr, Schrödinger, Jordan, and Lillie, Ruyer shows that the living is directly coupled to the individual phenomena of the atom, beyond the mass effects that appear in the internal mechanical circuits of the organism as well as in the external technical activities: “Classical physics only concerns itself with mass phenomena. In contrast, micro-physics naturally leads to biology. Starting from the individual phenomena of the atom, one can in fact go in two directions. Their statistical accumulation leads to the laws of common physics. But as these individual phenomena become complicated through systematic interactions—all the while keeping their individuality at the core of the molecule, then at the core of the macromolecule, then of the virus, then of the one-celled organism, by subordinating the mass phenomena—one is led all the way to the organism that no matter how large, remains in this sense microscopic” (p. 54). These themes are developed at length by Ruyer in \emph{Néo-finalisme} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).}


The real difference is therefore between on the one hand the molar
machines—whether social, technical, or organic—and on the other the
desiring-machines, which are of a molecular order. Desiring-machines are
the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional,
and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation;
chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly (\emph{montage}),
operating by nonlocalizable intercommunications and dispersed
localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization,
fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a surplus value of code,
and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part
apart or, as Butler would say, “in another department” that fits the
whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense, because they
proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative
flows and partial objects, inducing—always at a distance—transverse
connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions, thereby
producing selections, detachments, and remainders, with a transference
of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the
schizzes-flows.


Subsequently—rather, we should say on the other hand—when the machines
become unified at the structural level of techniques and institutions
that give them an existence as visible as a plate of steel; when the
living, too, become structured by the statistical unities of their
persons and their species, varieties, and locales; when a machine
appears as a single object, and a living organism appears as a single
subject; when the connections become global and specific, the
disjunctions exclusive, and the conjunctions biunivocal; then desire
does not need to project itself into these forms that have become
opaque. These forms are immediately molar manifestations, statistical
determinations of desire and of \emph{its own} machines. They are the same
machines (there is no difference in nature): here, as organic,
technical, or social machines apprehended in \emph{their} mass phenomenon, to
which they become subordinated; there, as desiring-machines apprehended
in their submicroscopic singularities that subordinate the mass
phenomena. That is why from the start we have rejected the idea that
desiring-machines belong to the domain of dreams or the Imaginary, and
that they stand in for the other machines. There is only desire and
environments, fields, forms of herd instinct. Stated differently, the
molecular desiring-machines are in themselves the investment of the
large molar machines or of the configurations that the desiring-machines
**form according to the laws of large numbers*\footnote{* Allen Wallis and Harry Roberts, in \emph{Statistics, a New Approach} (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1956), define the “law of large numbers” as follows: “the larger the samples, the less will be the variability in the sample proportions \dots{} the basis of the Law of Large Numbers is that for an improbable event to occur \emph{n} times is improbable to the \emph{n}th degree” (p. 123), “the larger the groups averaged the less the variation” (p. 159). And the consecutive sequences will be swamped by a large number of subsequent observations (see L. H. C. Tippett, \emph{Statistics} [New York: Oxford University Press, 1943], p. 87). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} in either or both
senses of subordination, in one sense and the other of subordination.
Desiring-machines in one sense, but organic, technical, or social
machines in the other: these are the same machines under determinate
conditions. By “determinate conditions” we mean those statistical forms
into which the machines enter as so many stable forms, unifying,
structuring, and proceeding by means of large heavy aggregates; the
selective pressures that group the parts retain some of them and exclude
others, organizing the crowds. These are therefore the same machines,
but not at all the same régime, the same relationships of magnitude, or
the same uses of syntheses. It is only at the submicroscopic level of
desiring-machines that there exists a functionalism—machinic
arrangements, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that
functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production
merge. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social
machines are not formed in the same way they function, and the technical
machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply
precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production
from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way
it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The
desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing,
mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with
them, what they make in themselves.


Desiring-machines work according to régimes of syntheses that have no
equivalent in the large aggregates. Jacques Monod has defined the
originality of these syntheses, from the standpoint of a molecular
biology or of a “microscopic cybernetics” without regard to the
traditional opposition between mechanism and vitalism. Here the
fundamental traits of synthesis are the indifferent nature of the
chemical signals, the indifference to the substrate, and the indirect
character of the interactions. Such formulas as these are negative only
in appearance, and in relation to the laws of aggregates, but must be
understood positively in terms of force (\emph{puissance}). “Between the
substrate of an allosteric enzyme and the ligands prompting or
inhibiting its activity there exists no chemically necessary
relationship of structure or of reactivity\dots{}. An allosteric protein
should be seen as a specialized product of molecular ‘engineering,’
enabling an interaction, positive or negative, to come about between
compounds without chemical affinity, and thereby eventually
subordinating any reaction to the intervention of compounds that are
chemically foreign and indifferent to this reaction. The way in which
allosteric interactions work hence permits a complete freedom in the
‘choice’ of controls. And these controls, having no chemical
requirements to answer to, will be the more responsive to physiological
requirements, and will accordingly be selected for the extent to which
they confer heightened coherence and efficiency upon the cell or
organism. In a word, the very gratuitousness of these systems, giving
molecular evolution a practically limitless field for exploration and
experiment, enabled it to elaborate the huge network of cybernetic
inter-connections.”\footnote{* Jacques Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity} (see reference note 27 [52 in this version]), pp. 77–78. And pp. 90–98: “With the globular protein we already have, at the molecular level, a veritable machine—a machine in its functional properties, but not, we now see, in its fundamental structure, where nothing but the play of blind combinations can be discerned. Randomness caught on the wing, preserved, reproduced by the machinery of invariance and thus converted into order, rule, necessity.”}


How, starting from this domain of chance or of real inorganization,
large configurations are organized that necessarily reproduce a
structure under the action of DNA and its segments, the genes,
performing veritable lottery drawings, creating switching points as
**lines of selection or evolution*—this, indeed, is what all the stages
of the passage from the molecular to the molar demonstrate, such as this
passage appears in the organic machines, but no less so in the social
machines with other laws and other figures. In this sense it was
possible to insist on a common characteristic of human cultures and of
living species, as “Markov chains”: aleatory phenomena that are
partially dependent. In the genetic code as in the social codes, what is
termed a signifying chain is more a jargon than a language (\emph{langage}),
composed of nonsignifying elements that have a meaning or an effect of
signification only in the large aggregates that they constitute through
a linked drawing of elements, a partial dependence, and a superposition
of relays.\footnote{* On the Markov chains and their applications to the living species as well as to cultural formations, see Ruyer, \emph{La genèse des formes vivantes}. Ch. 8. The phenomena of surplus value of code are clearly explained in this perspective of “semifortuitous sequences.” Several times Ruyer compares this with the language of schizophrenia.} It is not a matter of biologizing human history, nor of
anthropologizing natural history. It is a matter of showing the common
participation of the social machines \emph{and} the organic machines in the
desiring-machines. At man’s most basic stratum, the Id: the
schizophrenic cell, the schizo molecules, their chains and their
jargons. There is a whole biology of schizophrenia; molecular biology is
itself schizophrenic—as is microphysics. But inversely schizophrenia—the
theory of schizophrenia—is biological, biocultural, inasmuch as it
examines the machinic connections of a molecular order, their
distribution into maps of intensity on the giant molecule of the body
without organs, and the statistical accumulations that form and select
the large aggregates.


Szondi set out on this molecular path, discovering a genic unconscious
that he contrasted with the Freudian individual unconscious as well as
with Jung’s collective unconscious.\footnote{* Lipot Szondi, \emph{Experimental Diagnostics of Drives} (New York: Grune \& Stratton, 1952). Szondi’s work was the first to establish a fundamental relationship between psychoanalysis and genetics. See also the recent attempt by André Green, in terms of the advances made in molecular biology: “Répétition et instinct de mort,” \emph{Revue franç aise de psychanalyse}, May 1970.} He often calls this genic or
genealogical unconscious familial; and Szondi himself went on to study
schizophrenia using familial aggregates as his units of measure. But the
genic unconscious is familial only to a very small degree, much less so
than Freud’s unconscious, since the diagnosis is carried out by
comparing desire to the photographs of hermaphrodites, assassins, etc.,
instead of reducing it as usual to the images of daddy-mommy. Finally
some relation to the outside! A whole alphabet, an entire axiomatic done
with photos of mad people; this has to be tried, testing “the need for
paternal feeling” against a series of portraits of assassins. It is no
use saying this remains within the bounds of Oedipus, the truth is that
it throws them open in a remarkable way. The hereditary genes of drives
therefore play the role of simple stimuli that enter into variable
combinations following vectors that survey an entire social historical
field—an analysis of destiny.


In point of fact, the truly molecular unconscious cannot confine itself
to genes as its units of reproduction; these units are still expressive,
and lead to molar formations. Molecular biology teaches us that it is
only the DNA that is reproduced, and not the proteins. Proteins are both
products and units of production; they are what constitutes the
unconscious as a cycle or as the autoproduction of the unconscious—the
ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement of the desiring-machines
and the syntheses of desire. We have seen that, \emph{through} reproduction
and its objects (defined familially or genetically), it is always the
unconscious that produces itself in a cyclical orphan movement, a cycle
of destiny where it always remains a subject. It is precisely on this
point that the statutory independence of sexuality with regard to
generation rests. Szondi senses this direction—according to which one
must go beyond the molar to the molecular—so acutely that he takes
exception to all statistical interpretations of what is wrongly called
his “test.” What is more, he calls for going beyond contents toward the
realm of \emph{functions}. But he makes this advance, follows this direction,
only by going from aggregates or classes toward “categories,” of which
he establishes a systematically closed list—categories that are still
only expressive forms of existence that a subject is meant to choose and
combine freely. For this reason Szondi misses the internal or molecular
elements of desire, the nature of their machinic choices, arrangements,
and combinations. He also misses the real question of schizoanalysis:
What drives your own desiring-machines? What is their functioning? What
are the syntheses into which they enter and operate? What use do you
make of them, in all the transitions that extend from the molecular to
the molar and inversely, and that constitute the cycle whereby the
unconscious, remaining a subject, produces and reproduces itself?


We use the term \emph{Libido} to designate the specific energy of
desiring-machines; and the transformations of this energy—\emph{Numen} and
**Voluptas*—are never desexualizations or sublimations. This terminology
indeed seems extremely arbitrary. Considering the two ways in which the
desiring-machines must be viewed, what they have to do with a properly
sexual energy is not immediately clear: either they are assigned to the
molecular order that is their own, or they are assigned to the molar
order where they form the organic or social machines, and invest organic
or social surroundings. It is in fact difficult to present sexual energy
as directly cosmic and intra-atomic, and at the same time as directly
sociohistorical. It would be futile to say that love has to do with
proteins and society. This would amount to reviving yet once more the
old attempts at liquidating Freudianism, by substituting for the libido
a vague cosmic energy capable of all of the metamorphoses, or a kind of
socialized energy capable of all the investments. Or would we do better
to review Reich’s final attempt, involving a “biogenesis” that not
without justification is qualified as a schizoparanoiac mode of
reasoning? It will be remembered that Reich concluded in favor of an
intra-atomic cosmic energy—the orgone—generative of an electrical flux
and carrying submicroscopic particles, the bions. This energy produced
differences in potential or intensities distributed on the body
considered from a molecular viewpoint, and was associated with a
mechanics of fluids in this same body considered from a molar viewpoint.
What defined the libido as sexuality was therefore the association of
the two modes of operation, mechanical and electrical, in a sequence
with two poles, molar and molecular (mechanical tension, electrical
charge, electrical discharge, mechanical relaxation). Reich thought he
had thus overcome the alternative between mechanism and vitalism, since
these functions, mechanical and electrical, existed in matter in
general, but were combined in a particular sequence within the living.
And above all he upheld the basic psychoanalytic truth, the supreme
disavowal of which he was able to denounce in Freud: the independence of
sexuality with regard to reproduction, the subordination of progressive
or regressive reproduction to sexuality as a cycle.\footnote{* All of Reich’s last studies, biocosmic and biogenetic, are summarized at the end of Wilhelm Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm} (reference note 22), Ch. 7. The primacy of sexuality over generation and reproduction comes to be based on the cycle of sexuality (mechanical tension-electrical charge, etc.), which leads to a division of the cell: pp. 282–86. But very early in his work Reich reproached Freud for having abandoned the sexual position. \emph{It was not only the dissidents from Freud who abandoned this position, it was Freud himself, in a certain fashion}: a first time when he introduces the death instinct, and begins to speak of Eros instead of sexuality (Reich, pp. 124–27); next, when he makes anxiety into the cause of sexual repression, and no longer its result (p. 136); and more generally when he comes back to a traditional primacy of procreation over sexuality (p. 283: “Thus, \emph{procreation} is a function of sexuality, and not vice versa, as was hitherto believed. Freud had maintained the same thing with respect to psychosexuality, when he separated the concepts ‘sexual’ and ‘genital.’ But for a reason I was not able to understand he later stated that ‘sexuality in puberty’ is ‘in the service of procreation.’”) Here Reich is obviously referring to Freud’s Schopenhauerian or Weismannian texts, where sexuality comes under the sway of the species and the germen: for example, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in \emph{Collected Papers} (London; Hogarth Press), Vol. 4, pp. 36–38.}


If the details of Reich’s final theory are taken into consideration, we
admit that its simultaneously schizophrenic and paranoiac nature is no
obstacle where we are concerned—on the contrary. We admit that any
comparison of sexuality with cosmic phenomena such as “electrical
storms,” “the blue color of the sky and the blue-gray of atmospheric
haze,” the blue of the orgone, “St. Elmo’s fire, and the bluish
formations [of] sunspot activity,” fluids and flows, matter and
particles, in the end appear to us more adequate than the reduction of
sexuality to the pitiful little familialist secret. We think that
Lawrence and Miller have a more accurate evaluation of sexuality than
Freud, even from the viewpoint of the famous scientificity. It is not
the neurotic stretched out on the couch who speaks to us of love, of its
force and its despair, but the mute stroll of the schizo, Lenz’s outing
in the mountains and under the stars, the immobile voyage in intensities
on the body without organs. As to the whole of Reichian theory, it
possesses the incomparable advantage of showing the double pole of the
libido, as a molecular formation on the submicroscopic scale, and as an
investment of the molar formations on the scale of social and organic
aggregates. All that is missing is the confirmations of common sense:
why, in what sense is this sexuality?


Cynicism has said, or claimed to have said, everything there is to say
about love: that it is a matter of a copulation of social and organic
machines on a large scale (at bottom, love is in the organs; at bottom,
love is a matter of economic determinations, money). But what is
properly cynical is to claim a scandal where there is none to be found,
and to pass for bold while lacking boldness. Better the delirium of
common sense than its platitude. For the prime evidence points to the
fact that desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the
entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every
sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an
always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its
“gigantism”: no one has shown this more clearly than Charles Fourier. In
a word, the social as well as biological surroundings are the object of
unconscious investments that are necessarily desiring or libidinal, in
contrast with the preconscious investments of need or of interest. The
libido as sexual energy is the direct investment of masses, of large
aggregates, and of social and organic fields. We have difficulty
understanding what principles psychoanalysis uses to support its
conception of desire, when it maintains that the libido must be
desexualized or even sublimated in order to proceed to the social
investments, and inversely that the libido only resexualizes these
investments during the course of pathological regression.\footnote{* Freud, \emph{Three Case Histories} (reference note 42), p. 164: “Persons who have not freed themselves completely from the stage of narcissism, who, that is to say, have at that point a fixation which may operate as a disposing factor for a later illness, are exposed to the danger that some unusually intense wave of libido, finding no other outlet, may lead to a sexualization of their social instincts and so undo the work of sublimation which they had achieved in the course of their development. This result may be produced by anything that causes the libido to flow backwards (i.e., that causes a ‘regression’)\dots{}. paranoiacs \emph{endeavour to protect themselves against any such sexualization of their social instinctual cathexes}.”} Unless
the assumption of such a conception is still familialism—that is, an
assumption holding that sexuality operates only in the family, and must
be transformed in order to invest larger aggregates.


The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles
his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to
circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And
there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to
go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused.
Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A
revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much
force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and
mobilizing flows. It is not through a desexualizing extension that the
libido invests the large aggregates. On the contrary, it is through a
restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to
repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the
type “couple,” “family,” “person,” “objects.” And doubtless such a
blockage is necessarily justified: the libido does not come to
consciousness except in relation to a given body, a given person that it
takes as object. But our “object choice” itself refers to a conjunction
of flows of life and of society that this body and this person
intercept, receive, and transmit, always within a biological, social,
and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we
communicate. The persons to whom our loves are dedicated, including the
parental persons, intervene only as points of connection, of
disjunction, of conjunction of flows whose libidinal tenor of a properly
unconscious investment they translate. Thus no matter how well grounded
the love blockage is, it curiously changes its function, depending on
whether it engages desire in the Oedipal impasses of the couple and the
family in the service of the repressive machines, or whether on the
contrary it condenses a free energy capable of fueling a revolutionary
machine. (Here again, everything has already been said by Fourier, when
he shows the two contrary directions of the “captivation” or the
“mechanization” of the passions.) But we always make love with worlds.
And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover,
to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to
masses and large aggregates. There is always something statistical in
our loves, and something belonging to the laws of large numbers. And
isn’t it in this way that we must understand the famous formula of
Marx?—the relationship between man and woman is “the direct, natural,
and necessary relation of person to person.” That is, the relationship
between the two sexes (man and woman) is only the measure of the
relationship of sexuality in general, insofar as it invests large
aggregates (man and man)? Whence what came to be called the species
determination of the sexuality of the two sexes. And must it not also be
said that the phallus is not one sex, but sexuality in its entirety,
which is to say the sign of the large aggregate invested by the libido,
whence the two sexes necessarily derive, both in their separation (the
two homosexual series of man and man, woman and woman) and in their
statistical relations within this aggregate?


But Marx says something even more mysterious: that the true difference
is not the difference between the two sexes, but the difference between
the human sex and the “nonhuman” sex.\footnote{Karl Marx, \emph{Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”}, trans. Annette John and Joseph O’Malley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 88–90. And on this text of Marx, see the fine commentary by Lyotard (see reference note 12 [22 in this version]), pp. 138–41.} It is clearly not a question
of animals, nor of animal sexuality. Something quite different is
involved. If sexuality is the unconscious investment of the large molar
aggregates, it is because on its other side sexuality is identical with
the interplay of the molecular elements that constitute these aggregates
under determinate conditions. The dwarfism of desire as a correlate to
its gigantism. Sexuality and the desiring-machines are one and the same
inasmuch as these machines are present and operating in the social
machines, in their field, their formation, their functioning.
Desiring-machines are the nonhuman sex, the molecular machinic elements,
their arrangements and their syntheses, without which there would be
neither a human sex specifically determined in the large aggregates, nor
a human sexuality capable of investing these aggregates. In a few
sentences Marx, who is nonetheless so miserly and reticent where
sexuality is concerned, exploded something that will hold Freud and all
of psychoanalysis forever captive: \emph{the anthropomorphic representation
of sex}!


What we call anthropomorphic representation is just as much the idea
that there are two sexes as the idea that there is only one. We know how
Freudianism is permeated by this bizarre notion that there is finally
only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the
feminine, is defined as a lack, an absence. It could be thought at first
that such a hypothesis founds the omnipotence of a male homosexuality.
Yet this is not at all the case; what is founded here is rather the
statistical aggregate of intersexual loves. For if the woman is defined
as a lack in relation to the man, the man in his turn lacks what is
lacking in the woman, simply in another fashion: the idea of a single
sex necessarily leads to the erection of a phallus as an object on high,
which distributes lack as two nonsuperimposable sides and makes the two
sexes communicate in a common absence—\emph{castration}. Women, as
psychoanalysts or psychoanalyzed, can then rejoice in showing man the
way, and in recuperating equality in difference. Whence the irresistibly
comical nature of the formulas according to which one gains access to
desire through castration. But the idea that there are two sexes, after
all, is no better. This time, like Melanie Klein, one attempts to define
the female sex by means of positive characteristics, even if they be
terrifying. At least in this way one avoids phallocentrism, if not
anthropomorphism. But this time, far from founding the communication
between the two sexes, one founds instead their separation into two
homosexual series that remain statistical. And one does not by any means
escape castration. It is simply that castration, instead of being the
principle of sex conceived as the masculine sex (the great castrated
soaring Phallus), becomes the result of sex conceived as the feminine
sex (the little hidden absorbed penis). We maintain therefore that
**castration is the basis for the anthropomorphic and molar
representation of sexuality*. Castration is the universal belief that
brings together and disperses both men and women under the yoke of one
and the same illusion of consciousness, and makes them adore this yoke.
Every attempt to determine the nonhuman nature of sex—for example, “the
Great Other” in Lacan—while conserving myth and castration, is defeated
from the start. And what does Jean-François Lyotard mean, in his
commentary—so profound, nevertheless—on Marx’s text, when he sees the
opening of the nonhuman as having to be “the entry of the subject into
desire through castration”?\footnote{Jean-François Lyotard, \emph{Discours, figure} (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).} Long live castration, so that desire
may be strong? Only fantasies are truly desired? What a perverse, human,
all-too-human idea! An idea originating in bad conscience, and not in
the unconscious. Anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in the
very thing that founds it, the ideology of lack. The molecular
unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of castration, because
partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such;
because the multiple breaks never cease producing flows, instead of
repressing them, cutting them at a single stroke—the only break capable
of exhausting them; because the syntheses constitute local and
nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions:
everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman
containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all
capable of entering—men with women, women with men—into relations of
production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes.
Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a
hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even
two sexes, but \emph{n} sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the
**n* sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that
society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own
sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be
first of all: to each its own sexes.

\section{3. Psychoanalysis and Capitalism}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4-section-3}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4-section-3}%


The schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a machine, a synthesis
of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring-machines. The order of
desire is the order of \emph{production}; all production is at once
desiring-production and social production. We therefore reproach
psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having
shunted it into \emph{representation}. Far from showing the boldness of
psychoanalysis, this idea of unconscious representation marks from the
outset its bankruptcy or its abnegation: an unconscious that no longer
produces, but is content to \emph{believe}. The unconscious believes in
Oedipus, it believes in castration, in the law. It is doubtless true
that the psychoanalyst would be the first to say that, everything
considered, belief is not an act of the unconscious; it is always the
preconscious that believes. Shouldn’t it even be said that it is the
psychoanalyst who believes—the psychoanalyst in each of us? Would belief
then be an effect on the conscious material that the unconscious
representation exerts from a distance? But inversely, who or what
reduced the unconscious to this state of representation, if not first of
all a system of beliefs put in the place of productions? In reality,
social production becomes alienated in allegedly autonomous beliefs at
the same time that desiring-production becomes enticed into allegedly
unconscious representations. And as we have seen, it is the same
agency—the family—that performs this double operation, distorting and
disfiguring social desiring-production, leading it into an impasse.


Thus the link between \emph{representation-belief} and the family is not
accidental; it is of the essence of representation to be a familial
representation. But production is not thereby suppressed, it continues
to rumble, to throb beneath the representative agency (\emph{instance
représentative}) that suffocates it, and that it in return can make
resonate to the breaking point. Thus in order to keep an effective grip
on the zones of production, representation must inflate itself with all
the power of myth and tragedy, it must give a \emph{mythic and tragic
presentation} of the family—and a familial presentation of myth and
tragedy. Yet aren’t myth and tragedy, too, productions—forms of
production? Certainly not; they are production only when brought into
connection with real social production, real desiring-production.
Otherwise they are ideological forms, which have taken the place of the
units of production. \emph{Who believes in all this}—Oedipus, castration,
etc.? The Greeks? Then the Greeks did not produce in the same way they
believed? The Hellenists? Do the Hellenists believe that the Greeks
produced according to their beliefs? This is true at least of the
nineteenth-century Hellenists, about whom Engels said: you’d think they
really believed in all that—in myth, in tragedy. Is it the unconscious
that represents itself through Oedipus and castration? Or is it the
psychoanalyst—the psychoanalyst in us all, who represents the
unconscious in this way? For never has Engels’s remark regained so much
meaning: you’d think the psychoanalysts really believed in all this—in
myth, in tragedy. (They go on believing, whereas the Hellenists have
long since stopped.)


The Schreber case again applies: Schreber’s father invented and
fabricated astonishing little machines, sadistico-paranoiac machines—for
example head straps with a metallic shank and leather bands, for
restrictive use on children, for making them straighten up and
behave.\footnote{* W. G. Niederland discovered and reproduced Schreber’s father’s machines: see especially, “Schreber, Father and Son,” \emph{Psychoanalytic Quarterly}, Vol. 28 (1959), pp. 151–69. Quite similar instruments of pedagogical torture are to be found in the Contesse de Ségur: thus “the good behavior belt,” “with an iron plate for the back and an iron rod to hold the chin in place” (\emph{Comédies et proverbes, On ne prend pas les mouches}).} These machines play no role whatever in the Freudian
analysis. Perhaps it would have been more difficult to crush the entire
sociopolitical content of Schreber’s delirium of these desiring-machines
of the father had been taken into account, as well as their obvious
participation in a pedagogical social machine in general. For the real
question is this: of course the father acts on the child’s
unconscious—but does he act as a head of a family in an expressive
familial transmission, or rather as the agent of a machine, in a
machinic information or communication? Schreber’s desiring-machines
communicate with those of his father; but it is in this very way that
they are from early childhood the libidinal investment of a social
field. \emph{In this field the father has a role only as an agent of
production and antiproduction.} Freud, on the contrary, chooses the
first path: it is not the father who indicates the action of machines,
but just the opposite; thereafter there is no longer even any reason for
considering machines, whether as desiring-machines or as social
machines. In return, the father will be inflated with all the “forces of
myth and religion” and with phylogenesis, so as to ensure that the
little familial representation has the appearance of being coextensive
with the field of delirium. The production couple—the desiring-machines
and the social field—gives way to a representative couple of an entirely
different nature: family-myth. Once again, have you ever seen a child at
play: how he already populates the technical social machines with his
own desiring-machines, O sexuality—while the father or mother remains in
the background, from whom the child borrows parts and gears according to
his need, and who are there as agents of transmission, reception, and
interception: kindly agents of production or suspicious agents of
antiproduction.


Why was mythic and tragic representation accorded such a senseless
privilege? Why were expressive forms and a whole \emph{theater} installed
there where there were fields, workshops, factories, units of
production? The psychoanalyst parks his circus in the dumbfounded
unconscious, a real P. T. Barnum in the fields and in the factory. That
is what Miller, and already Lawrence, have to say against psychoanalysis
(the living are not believers, the seers do not believe in myth and
tragedy): “By retracing the paths to the earlier heroic life \dots{} you
defeat the very element and quality of the heroic, for the hero never
looks backward, nor does he ever doubt his powers. Hamlet was
undoubtedly a hero to himself, and for every Hamlet born the only true
course to pursue is the very course which Shakespeare describes. But the
question, it seems to me, is this: are we \emph{born} Hamlets? Were \emph{you}
born Hamlet? \emph{Or did you not rather create the type in yourself?}
Whether this be so or not, what seems infinitely more important is—\emph{why
revert to myth?}\dots{} This ideational rubbish out of which our world has
erected its cultural edifice is now, by a critical irony, being given
its poetic immolation, its mythos, \emph{through a kind of writing which},
because it is \emph{of} the disease and therefore \emph{beyond}, clears the ground
for fresh superstructures. (In my own mind the thought of ‘fresh
superstructures’ is abhorrent, but this is merely the awareness of a
process and not the process itself.) Actually, in process, I believe
with each line I write that I am scouring the womb, giving it the
**curette*, as it were. Behind this process lies the idea not of
‘edifice’ and ‘superstructure,’ which is culture and hence false, but of
continuous birth, renewal, \emph{life}, \emph{life}\dots{}. In the myth there is no life
for us. Only the myth lives in the myth\dots{}. \emph{This ability to produce the
myth is born out of awareness, out of ever-increasing consciousness.}
That is why, speaking of the schizophrenic nature of our age, I
said—‘until the process is completed the belly of the world shall be the
Third Eye.’ Now, Brother Ambrose, just what did I mean by that? What
could I mean except that from this intellectual world in which we are
swimming there must body forth a new world; but this new world can only
be bodied forth in so far as it is \emph{conceived}. And to conceive there
must first be desire,\dots{} Desire is instinctual and holy: it is only
through desire that we bring about the immaculate conception.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Hamlet} (Puerto Rico: Carrefour, 1939), Vol. 1, pp. 124–29.}


Everything is said in these pages from Miller: Oedipus (or Hamlet) led
to the point of autocritique; the expressive forms—myth and
tragedy—denounced as conscious beliefs or illusions, nothing more than
ideas; the necessity of a scouring of the unconscious, schizoanalysis as
a curettage of the unconscious; the matrical fissure in opposition to
the line of castration; the splendid affirmation of the orphan- and
producer-unconscious; the exaltation of the process as a schizophrenic
process of deterritorialization that must produce a new earth; and even
the functioning of the desiring-machines against tragedy, against “the
fatal drama of the personality,” against “the inevitable confusion
between mask and actor.” It is obvious that Miller’s correspondent,
Michael Fraenkel, does not understand. He talks like a psychoanalyst, or
like a nineteenth-century Hellenist: yes, myth, tragedy, Oedipus, and
Hamlet are good expressions, pregnant forms; they express the true
permanent drama of desire and knowledge. Fraenkel calls to his aid all
the commonplaces, Schopenhauer, and the Nietzsche of \emph{The Birth of
Tragedy}. He thinks Miller is unaware of these things, and never wonders
for a second why Nietzsche himself broke with \emph{The Birth of Tragedy},
why he stopped believing in tragic representation.


Michel Foucault has convincingly shown what break (\emph{coupure}) introduced
the irruption of production into the world of representation. Production
can be that of labor or that of desire, it can be social or desiring, it
calls forth forces that no longer permit themselves to be contained in
representation, and it calls forth flows and breaks that break through
representation, traversing it through and through: “an immense expanse
of shade” extended beneath the level of representation.\footnote{Michel Foucault, \emph{The Order of Things} (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 208–11 (on the opposition between desire or desiring-production and representation); pp. 253–56 (on the opposition between social production and representation, in Adam Smith and especially Ricardo).} And this
collapse or sinking of the classical world of representation is assigned
a date by Foucault; the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. So it seems that the situation is far more complex
than we made it out to be, since psychoanalysis participates to the
highest degree in this discovery of the units of production, which
subjugate all possible representations rather than being subordinated to
them. Just as Ricardo founds political or social economy by discovering
quantitative labor as the principle of every representable value, Freud
founds desiring-economy by discovering the quantitative libido as the
principle of every representation of the objects and aims of desire.
Freud discovers the subjective nature or abstract essence of desire,
just as Ricardo discovers the subjective nature or abstract essence of
labor, beyond all representations that would bind it to objects, to
aims, or even to particular sources. Freud is thus the first to
disengage desire itself (\emph{le désir tout court}), as Ricardo disengages
labor itself (\emph{le travail tout court}), and thereby the sphere of
production that effectively eclipses representation. And subjective
abstract desire, like subjective abstract labor, is inseparable from a
movement of deterritorialization that discovers the interplay of
machines and their agents underneath all the specific determinations
that still linked desire or labor to a given person, to a given object
in the framework of representation.


Desiring-production and machines, psychic apparatuses and machines of
desire, desiring-machines and the assembling of an analytic machine
suited to decode them: the domain of free syntheses where everything is
possible; partial connections, included disjunctions, nomadic
conjunctions, polyvocal flows and chains, transductive\footnote{* For a definition of transduction with respect to production and representation, see “Interview\Slash{}\emph{Félix Guattari}” in \emph{Diacritics: a review of contemporary criticism}, Fall 1974, p. 39: “Signs work as much as matter. Matter expresses as much as signs\dots{}. Transduction is the idea that, in essence, something is conducted, something happens between chains of semiotic expression, and material chains.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} breaks; the
relation of desiring-machines as formations of the unconscious with the
molar formations that they constitute statistically in organized crowds;
and the apparatus of social and psychic repression resulting from these
formations—such is the composition of the analytic field. And this
subrepresentative field will continue to survive and work, even through
Oedipus, even through myth and tragedy, which nevertheless mark the
reconciliation of psychoanalysis with representation. The fact remains
that a conflict cuts across the whole of psychoanalysis, the conflict
between mythic and tragic familial representation and social and
desiring-production. For myth and tragedy are systems of symbolic
representations that still refer desire to determinate exterior
conditions as well as to particular objective codes—the body of the
Earth, the despotic body—and that in this way confound the discovery of
the abstract or subjective essence. It has been remarked in this context
that each time Freud brings to the fore the study of the psychic
apparatuses, the social and desiring-machines, the mechanisms of the
drives, and the institutional mechanisms, his interest in myth and
tragedy tends to diminish, while at the same time he denounces in Jung,
then in Rank, the re-establishment of an exterior representation of the
essence of desire as an objective desire, alienated in myth or
tragedy.\footnote{* Didier Anzieu distinguishes between two periods in particular: 1906–1920, which “constitutes the great period of mythological works in the history of psychoanalysis”; then a period of relative discredit, as Freud turns toward the problems of the second topography [\emph{Translators’ note:} the id, ego, and super ego], and the relationships between desire and institutions, and takes less and less of an interest in a systematic exploration of myths (“Freud et la mythologie,” \emph{Incidences de la psychanalyse}, no 1 [1970], pp. 126–29).}


How can this very complex ambivalence of psychoanalysis be explained?
Several different things must be distinguished. In the first place,
symbolic representation indeed grasps the essence of desire, but by
referring it to large “objectifies” (\emph{objectités})\footnote{* \emph{objectités}: This term corresponds to the German \emph{objektität}. The following definition appears in \emph{Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968): “the form in which the thing-in-itself, the real, appears as an object.” (\emph{Translators’ note.})} as to the
specific elements that determine its objects, aims, and sources. It is
in this way that myth ascribes desire to the element of the earth as a
full body, and to the territorial code that distributes prescriptions
and prohibitions. Likewise tragedy ascribes desire to the full body of
the despot and to the corresponding imperial code. Consequently, the
understanding of symbolic representations may consist in a systematic
phenomenology of these elements and objectifies (as in the old
Hellenists or even Jung); or else these representations may be
understood by historical study that assigns them to their real and
objective social conditions (as with recent Hellenists). Viewed in the
latter fashion, representation implies a certain lag, and expresses less
a stable element than the conditioned passage from one element to
another: mythic representation does not express the element of the
earth, but rather the conditions under which this element fades before
the despotic element; and tragic representation does not express the
despotic element properly speaking, but the conditions under which—in
fifth-century Greece, for example—this element diminishes in favor of
the new order of the city-state.\footnote{On myth as the expression of the organization of a despotic power that represses the Earth, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{Les origines de la pensée grecque} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 109–16; and on tragedy as the expression of an organization of the city-state that represses in its turn the fallen despot, Vernant, “Oedipe sans complexe,” \emph{Raison présente}, August 1967.} It is obvious that neither one of
these ways of treating myth or tragedy is suited to the psychoanalytic
approach. The psychoanalytic method is quite different: rather than
referring symbolic representation to determinate objectifies and to
objective social conditions, psychoanalysis refers them to the
subjective and universal essence of desire as libido. Thus the operation
of \emph{decoding} in psychoanalysis can no longer signify what it signifies
in the sciences of man; the discovery of the secret of such and such a
code. Psychoanalysis must undo the codes so as to attain the
quantitative and qualitative flows of libido that traverse dreams,
fantasies, and pathological formations as well as myth, tragedy, and the
social formations. Psychoanalytic interpretation does not consist in
competing with codes, adding a code to the codes already recognized, but
in decoding in an absolute way, in eliciting something that is uncodable
by virtue of its polymorphism and its polyvocity.\footnote{* It cannot be said, therefore, that psychoanalysis adds a code—a psychological one—to the social codes through which histories and mythologists explain myths. Freud pointed this out apropos dreams: it is not a question of a deciphering process according to a code. In this regard see Jacques Derrida’s comments in \emph{L’écriture et la difference} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 310ff.: “It is doubtless true that [dream writing] works with a mass of elements codified in the course of an individual or collective history. But in its operations, its lexicon, and its syntax, a purely idiomatic residue remains irreducible, that must carry the whole weight of the interpretation, in the communication among unconsciouses. The dreamer invents his own grammar.”} It appears then
that the interest psychoanalysis has in myth (or in tragedy) is an
essentially critical interest, since the specificity of myth, understood
objectively, must melt under the rays of the subjective libido: it is
indeed the world of representation that crumbles, or tends to crumble.


It follows that, in the second place, the link between psychoanalysis
and capitalism is no less profound than that between political economy
and capitalism. This discovery of the decoded and deterritorialized
flows is the same as that which takes place for political economy and in
social production, in the form of subjective abstract labor, and for
psychoanalysis and in desiring-production, in the form of subjective
abstract libido. As Marx says, in capitalism the essence becomes
subjective—\emph{the activity of production in general}—and abstract labor
becomes something real from which all the preceding social formations
can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a generalized decoding or
a generalized process of deterritorialization: “The simplest
abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its
discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid
in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an
abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.” This is also
the case for desire as abstract libido and as subjective essence. Not
that a simple parallelism should be drawn between capitalist social
production and desiring-production, or between the flows of
money-capital and the shit-flows of desire. The relationship is much
closer: desiring-machines are in social machines and nowhere else, so
that the conjunction of the decoded flows in the capitalist machine
tends to liberate the free figures of a universal subjective libido. In
short, the discovery of an activity of production \emph{in general and
without distinction}, as it appears in capitalism, is the identical
discovery of \emph{both} political economy \emph{and} psychoanalysis, beyond the
determinate systems of representation.


Obviously this does not mean that the capitalist being, or the being in
capitalism, desires to work or that he works according to his desire.
But the identity of desire and labor is not a myth, it is rather the
active utopia par excellence that designates the capitalist limit to be
overcome through desiring-production. But why, precisely, is
desiring-production situated at the always counteracted limit of
capitalism? Why, at the same time as it discovers the subjective essence
of desire and labor—a common essence, inasmuch as it is the activity of
production in general—is capitalism continually realienating this
essence, and without interruption, in a repressive machine that divides
the essence in two, and maintains it divided—abstract labor on the one
hand, abstract desire on the other: political economy \emph{and}
psychoanalysis, political economy \emph{and} libidinal economy? Here we are
able to appreciate the full extent to which psychoanalysis belongs to
capitalism. For as we have seen, capitalism indeed has as its limit the
decoded flows of desiring-production, but it never stops repelling them
by binding them in an axiomatic that takes the place of the codes.
Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but
this movement is exorcised through factitious and artificial
reterritorializations. Capitalism is constructed on the ruins of the
territorial and the despotic, the mythic and the tragic representations,
but it re-establishes them in its own service and in another form, as
images of capital.


Marx summarizes the entire matter by saying that the subjective abstract
essence is discovered by capitalism only to be put in chains all over
again, to be subjugated and alienated—no longer, it is true, in an
exterior and independent element as objectity, but in the element,
itself subjective, of private property: “What was previously being
external to oneself—man’s externalization in the thing—has merely become
the act of externalizing—the process of alienating.” It is, in fact, the
form of private property that conditions the conjunction of the decoded
flows, which is to say their axiomatization in a system where the flows
of the means of production, as the property of the capitalists, is
directly related to the flow of so-called free labor, as the “property”
of the workers (so that the State restrictions on the substance or the
content of private property do not at all affect this form). It is also
the form of private property that constitutes the center of the
factitious reterritorializations of capitalism. And finally, it is this
form that produces the images filling the capitalist field of immanence,
“the” capitalist, “the” worker, etc. In other terms, capitalism indeed
implies the collapse of the great objective determinate representations,
for the benefit of production as the universal interior essence, but it
does not thereby escape the world of representation. It merely performs
a vast conversion of this world, by attributing to it the new form of an
infinite subjective representation.\footnote{* Michel Foucault shows that “the human sciences” found their principle in production and were constituted on the collapse of representation, but that they immediately re-establish a new type of representation, as unconscious representation (\emph{The Order of Things} [see reference note 14 [25 in this version]], pp. 352–67).}


We seem to be straying from the main concern of psychoanalysis, yet
never have we been so close. For here again, as we have seen previously,
it is in the interiority of its movement that capitalism requires and
institutes not only a social axiomatic, but an application of this
axiomatic to the privatized family. Representation would never be able
to ensure its own conversion without this application that furrows deep
into it, cleaves it, and forces it back upon itself. Thus subjective
abstract Labor as represented in private property has, as its correlate,
subjective abstract Desire as represented in the privatized family.
Psychoanalysis undertakes the analysis of this second term, as political
economy analyzes the first. Psychoanalysis is the technique of
application, for which political economy is the axiomatic. In a word,
psychoanalysis disengages the second pole in the very movement of
capitalism, which substitutes the infinite subjective representation for
the large determinate objective representations. It is in fact essential
that the limit of the decoded flows of desiring-production be doubly
exorcised, doubly displaced, once by the position of immanent limits
that capitalism does not cease to reproduce on an ever expanding scale,
and again by the marking out of an interior limit that reduces this
social reproduction to restricted familial reproduction.


Consequently, the ambiguity of psychoanalysis in relation to myth or
tragedy has the following explanation: psychoanalysis undoes them as
objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a
subjective universal libido; but it reanimates them, and promotes them
as subjective representations that extend the mythic and tragic contents
to infinity. Psychoanalysis does treat myth and tragedy, but it treats
them \emph{as} the dreams and the fantasies of private man, \emph{Homo
familia}—and in fact dream and fantasy are to myth and tragedy as
private property is to public property. What acts in myth and tragedy at
the level of objective elements is therefore reappropriated and raised
to a higher level by psychoanalysis, but as an unconscious dimension of
subjective representation (myth as humanity’s \emph{dream}). What acts as an
objective and public element—the Earth, the Despot—is now taken up
again, but as the expression of a subjective and private
reterritorialization: Oedipus is the fallen despot—banished,
deterritorialized—but a reterritorialization is engineered, using the
Oedipus complex conceived of as the daddy-mommy-me of today’s everyman.
Psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex gather up all beliefs, all that
has ever been believed by humanity, but only in order to raise it to the
condition of a \emph{denial} that preserves belief without believing in it
(it’s only a dream: the strictest piety today asks for nothing more).
Whence this double impression, that psychoanalysis is opposed to
mythology no less than to mythologists, but at the same time extends
myth and tragedy to the dimensions of the subjective universal: if
Oedipus himself “has no complex,” the Oedipus complex has no Oedipus,
just as narcissism has no Narcissus.\footnote{* Didier Anzieu, “Freud et la mythologie,” pp. 124,128: “Freud grants myth no specificity. This is one of the points that have most seriously encumbered the subsequent relations between psychoanalysts and anthropologists\dots{}. Freud undertakes a veritable leveling\dots{}. The article ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’ which constitutes an important step toward the revision of the theory of the drives, contains no allusion to the myth of Narcissus.”} Such is the ambivalence that
traverses psychoanalysis, and that extends beyond the specific problem
of myth and tragedy: with one hand psychoanalysis undoes the system of
objective representations (myth, tragedy) for the benefit of the
subjective essence conceived as desiring-production, while with the
other hand it reverses this production in a system of subjective
representations (dream and fantasy, with myth and tragedy posited as
their developments or projections). Images, nothing but images. What is
left in the end is an intimate familial theater, the theater of private
man, which is no longer either desiring-production or objective
representation. The unconscious as a stage. A whole theater put in the
place of production, a theater that disfigures this production even more
than could tragedy and myth when reduced to their meager ancient
resources.


Myth, tragedy, dream, and fantasy—and myth and tragedy reinterpreted in
terms of dream and fantasy—are the representative series that
psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production: social and
desiring-production. A theater series, instead of a production series.
But why in fact does representation, having become subjective
representation, assume this theatrical form (“There is a mysterious tie
between psychoanalysis and the theater”)? We are familiar with the
eminently modern reply of certain recent authors: the theater elicits
the finite structure of the infinite subjective representation. What is
meant by “elicit” is very complex, since the structure can never present
more than its own absence, or represent something not represented in the
representation: but it is claimed that the theater’s privilege is that
of staging this metaphoric and metonymic causality that marks both the
presence and the absence of the structures in its effects. While André
Green expresses reservations about the adequacy of the structure, he
does so only in the name of a theater necessary for the actualization of
this structure, playing the role of revealer, a place by which the
structure becomes visible.\footnote{* André Green goes very far in the analysis of the representation-theater-structure-unconscious relations: \emph{Un oeil en trop} (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), Prologue (especially p. 43, concerning “the representation of the nonrepresented in representation”). However, the criticism that Green makes of the structure is not conducted in the name of production, but in the name of representation, and invokes the necessity for extrastructural factors that must do nothing more than reveal the structure, and reveal it as Oedipal.} In her fine analysis of the phenomenon
of belief, Octave Mannoni likewise uses the theater model to show how
the denial of belief in fact implies a transformation of belief, under
the effect of a structure that the theater embodies or places on
stage.\footnote{Octave Mannoni, \emph{Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), Ch. 1 and 7.} We should understand that representation, when it ceases to
be objective, when it becomes subjective infinite—that is to say,
imaginary—effectively loses all consistency, unless it is supported by a
structure that determines the place and the functions of the subject of
representation, as well as the objects represented as images, and the
formal relations between them all. “Symbolic” thus no longer designates
the relation of representation to an objectity as an element; it
designates the ultimate elements of subjective representation, pure
signifiers, pure nonrepresented representatives whence the subjects, the
objects, and their relationships all derive. In this way the structure
designates the unconscious of subjective representation. The series of
this representation now presents itself: (imaginary) infinite subjective
representation-theatrical representation-structural representation. And
precisely because the theater is thought to stage the latent structure,
as well as to embody its elements and relations, it is in a position to
reveal the universality of this structure, even in the objective
representations that it salvages and reinterprets in terms of hidden
representatives, their migrations and variable relations. All former
beliefs are gathered up and revived in the name of a structure of the
unconscious: we are still pious. Everywhere, the great game of the
symbolic signifier that is embodied in the signifieds of the
Imaginary—Oedipus as a universal metaphor.


Why the theater? How bizarre, this theatrical and pasteboard
unconscious: the theater taken as the model of production. Even in Louis
Althusser we are witness to the following operation: the discovery of
social production as “machine” or “machinery,” irreducible to the world
of objective representation (\emph{Vorstellung}); but immediately the
reduction of the machine to structure, the identification of production
with a structural and theatrical representation (\emph{Darstellung}).\footnote{Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, \emph{Reading Capital}, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970).}
Now the same is true of both desiring-production and social production:
every time that production, rather than being apprehended in its
originality, in its reality, becomes \emph{reduced} (\emph{rabattue}) in this
manner to a representational space, it can no longer have value except
by its own absence, and it appears as a lack within this space. In
search of the structure in psychoanalysis, Moustafa Safouan is able to
present it as a “contribution to a theory of lack.” It is in the
structure that the fusion of desire with the impossible is performed,
with lack defined as castration. From the structure there arises the
most austere song in honor of castration—yes, yes, we enter the order of
desire through the gates of castration—once desiring-production has
spread out in the space of a representation that allows it to go on
living only as an absence and a lack unto itself. For a \emph{structural
unity} is imposed on the desiring-machines that joins them together in a
molar aggregate; the partial objects are referred to a totality that can
appear only as that which the partial objects lack, and as that which is
lacking unto itself while being lacking in them (the Great Signifier
“symbolizable by the inherency of a −1 in the ensemble of signifiers”).
Just how far will one go in the development of a lack of lack traversing
the structure? Such is the structural operation: it distributes lack in
the molar aggregate. The limit of desiring-production—the border line
separating the molar aggregates and their molecular elements, the
objective representations and the machines of desire—is now completely
displaced. The limit now passes only within the molar aggregate itself,
inasmuch as the latter is furrowed by the line of castration. The formal
operations of the structure are those of extrapolation, application, and
biunivocalization, which reduce the social aggregate of departure to a
familial aggregate of destination, with the familial relation becoming
“metaphorical for all the others” and hindering the molecular productive
elements from following their own line of escape.


When André Green looks for the reasons that establish the affinity of
psychoanalysis with the theatrical and structural representation it
makes visible, he offers two that are especially striking: the theater
raises the familial relation to the condition of a universal metaphoric
structural relation, whence the imaginary place and interplay of persons
derives; and inversely, the theater forces the play and the working of
machines into the wings, behind a limit that has become impassible
(exactly as in fantasy the machines are there, but \emph{behind the wall}).
In short, the displaced limit no longer passes between objective
representation and desiring-production, but between the two poles of
subjective representation, as infinite imaginary representation, and as
finite structural representation. Thereafter it is possible to oppose
these two aspects to each other, the imaginary variations that tend
toward the night of the indeterminate or the nondifferentiated, and the
symbolic invariant that traces the path of the differentiations: the
same thing is found all over, following a rule of inverse relation, or
double bind. All of production is conducted into the double impasse of
subjective representation. Oedipus can always be consigned to the
Imaginary, but no matter, it will be encountered again, stronger and
more whole, more lacking and triumphant by the very fact that it is
lacking, it will be encountered again in its entirety in symbolic
castration. And it’s a sure thing that structure affords us no means for
escaping familialism; on the contrary, it adds another turn, it
attributes a universal metaphoric value to the family at the very moment
it has lost its objective literal values. Psychoanalysis makes its
ambition clear: to relieve the waning family, to replace the broken-down
familial bed with the psychoanalyst’s couch, to make it so that the
“analytic situation” is \emph{incestuous in its essence}, so that it is its
own proof or voucher, on a par with Reality.\footnote{Serge Leclaire, \emph{Démasquer le réel} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), pp. 28–31.}


In the final analysis that is indeed what is at issue, as Octave Mannoni
shows: how can belief continue after repudiation, how can we continue to
be pious? We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that proceeded by
way of objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert is
growing: the old father is dead, the territorial father, and the son
too, the despot Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our
boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that
revolve within the infinite subjective representation. We will muster
all our strength so as to believe in these images, from the depths of a
structure that governs our relationships with them and our
identifications as so many effects of a symbolic signifier. The “good
identification.” We are all Archie Bunker at the theater, shouting out
before Oedipus: there’s my kind of guy, there’s my kind of guy!
Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken
up again as shadows projected on a stage. The great territorialities
have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the
subjective and private reterritorializations. What a perverse operation
psychoanalysis is, where this neoidealism, this rehabilitated cult of
castration, this ideology of lack culminates: \emph{the anthropomorphic
representation of sex}! In truth, they don’t know what they are doing,
nor what mechanism of repression they are fostering, for their
intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an
analyst’s consulting room without at least being aware that everything
has been \emph{played out} in advance: Oedipus and castration, the Imaginary
and the Symbolic, the great lesson of the inadequacy of being or of
dispossession. Psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a
reterritorialization, a retimbering of modern man on the “rock” of
castration.


The path marked out by Lacan led in a completely different direction. He
is not content to turn, like the analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of
the Imaginary and the Symbolic; he refuses to be caught up in the
Oedipal Imaginary and the oedipalizing structure, the imaginary identity
of persons and the structural unity of machines, everywhere knocking
against the impasses of a molar representation that the family closes
round itself. What is the use of going from the imaginary dual order to
the symbolic third (or fourth), if the latter is biunivocalizing whereas
the first is biunivocalized? As partial objects the desiring-machines
undergo two totalizations, one when the socius confers on them a
structural unity under a symbolic signifier acting as absence and lack
in an aggregate of departure, the other when the family imposes on them
a personal unity with imaginary signifieds that distribute, that
“vacuolize” lack in an aggregate of destination: a double abduction of
the orphan machines, inasmuch as the structure applies its articulation
to them, inasmuch as the parents lay their fingers on them. To trace
back from images to the structure would have little significance and
would not rescue us from representation, \emph{if the structure did not have
a reverse side} that is like the real production of desire.


This reverse side is the “real inorganization” of the molecular
elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or
interactions, since they are not partial (\emph{partiels}) in the sense of
extensive parts, but rather partial (“\emph{partiaux}”)\footnote{* \emph{partiel}: partial, incomplete; \emph{partial} (\emph{pl. partiaux}): partial, biased, as a biased judge. We have chosen to translate \emph{objets partiels} throughout as “partial objects” rather than as “part-objects” (as in Melanie Klein), in anticipation of this point in the book where Deleuze and Guattari shift from Klein’s concept of the partial objects as “part of,” hence as an incomplete part of a lost unity or totality (molar), toward a concept of the partial objects as biased, evaluating intensities that know no lack and are capable of selecting organs (molecular). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} like the
intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying
degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter); pure
positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without
exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the
connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions
polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter
that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any
structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs
that fills the space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire
that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying,
and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but
instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be
chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing,
depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and
holding together only by the absence of a link (nonlocalizable
connections), having no other statutory condition than that of being
dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves
dispersed.\footnote{* Lacan, \emph{Ecrits} (see reference note 19 [40 in this version]), pp. 657–59. Serge Leclaire has made a profound attempt to define within this perspective the reverse side of the structure as the “pure being of desire” (“La réalité du désir” [reference note 26], pp. 242–49). In desire he sees a multiplicity of prepersonal singularities, or indifferent elements that are defined precisely by the absence of a link. But this absence of a link—and of a meaning—is positive, “it constitutes the specific force of coherence of this constellation.” Of course, meaning and link can always be re-established, if only by inserting fragments assumed to be forgotten: this is even the very function of Oedipus. But “\emph{if the analysis again discovers the link between two elements, this is a sign that they are not the ultimate, irreducible terms of the unconscious.}” It will be noticed here that Leclaire uses the exact criterion of real distinction in Spinoza and Leibniz; the ultimate elements (the infinite attributes) are attributable to God, because they do not depend on one another and do not tolerate any relation of opposition or contradiction among themselves. The absence of all direct links guarantees their common participation in the divine substance. Likewise for the partial objects and the body without organs: the body without organs is substance itself, and the partial objects, the ultimate attributes or elements of substance.} It is this entire reverse side of the structure that
Lacan discovers, with the “o” as machine, and the “O” as nonhuman sex:
schizophrenizing the analytic field, instead of oedipalizing the
psychotic field.


Everything hinges on the way in which the structure is elicited from the
machines, according to planes of consistency or of structuration, and
lines of selection that correspond to the large statistical aggregates
or molar formations, and that determine the links and reduce production
to representation—\emph{that} is where the disjunctions become exclusive (and
the connections global, and the conjunctions, biunivocal), at the same
time that the support gains a specificity under a structural unity, and
the signs themselves become signifying under the action of a despotic
symbol that totalizes them in the name of its own absence or withdrawal.
Yes, in fact, there the production of desire can be \emph{represented} only
in terms of an extrapolated sign that joins together all the elements of
production in a constellation of which it is not itself a part. There
the absence of a tie necessarily appears as an absence, and no longer as
a positive force. There desire is necessarily referred to a missing
term, whose very essence is to be lacking. The signs of desire, being
nonsignifying, become signifying in representation only in terms of a
signifier of absence or lack. The structure is formed and appears only
in terms of the symbolic term defined as a lack. The great Other as the
nonhuman sex gives way, in representation, to a signifier of the great
Other as an always missing term, the all-too-human sex, the phallus of
molar castration.\footnote{* Lacan, \emph{Ecrits} (see reference note 19 [40 in this version]), p. 819: “For want of this signifier, all the others would represent nothing.” Serge Leclaire shows how the structure is organized around a missing term, or rather a signifier of lack: “It is the elective signifier of the absence of a link, the phallus, that we find again in the unique privilege of its relation to the essence of lack—an emblem of difference par excellence—the irreducible difference, the difference between the sexes\dots{}. If man can talk, this is because at one point in the language system there is a guarantor of the irreducibility of lack: the phallic signifier” (“La réalité du désir” [see reference note 26 [49 in this version]], p. 251). How strange all this is!}


Here too Lacan’s approach appears in all its complexity; for it is
certain that he does not enclose the unconscious in an Oedipal
structure. He shows on the contrary that Oedipus is imaginary, nothing
but an image, a myth; that this or these images are produced by an
oedipalizing structure; that this structure acts only insofar as it
reproduces the element of castration, which itself is not imaginary but
symbolic. There we have the three major planes of structuration, which
correspond to the molar aggregates: Oedipus as the imaginary
reterritorialization of private man, produced under the structural
conditions of capitalism, inasmuch as capitalism reproduces and revives
the archaism of the imperial symbol or the vanished despot. All three
are necessary—precisely in order to lead Oedipus to the point of its
self-critique. The task undertaken by Lacan is to lead Oedipus to such a
point. (Likewise, Elisabeth Roudinesco has clearly seen that, in Lacan,
the hypothesis of an unconscious-as-language does not closet the
unconscious in a linguistic structure, but leads linguistics to the
point of its autocritique, by showing how the structural organization of
signifiers still depends on a despotic Great Signifier acting as an
archaism.)\footnote{Elisabeth Roudinesco, “L’action d’une métaphore,” \emph{La Pensée}, February 1972. See in Jacques Lacan, \emph{Ecrits} (Paris: Editions du Seuil), p. 821, the way in which Lacan raises the idea of a “signifier of the lack of this symbol” above the “zero symbol,” taken in its linguistic sense.}


What is this point of self-criticism? It is the point where the
structure, beyond the images that fill it and the Symbolic that
conditions it within representation, reveals its reverse side as a
positive principle of nonconsistency that dissolves it: where desire is
shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements,
and where it lacks nothing, because it is defined as \emph{the natural and
sensuous objective being}, at the same time as the Real is defined as
**the objective being of desire*. For the unconscious of schizoanalysis
is unaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of images, structures,
and symbols. It is an orphan, just as it is an anarchist and an atheist.
It is not an orphan in the sense that the father’s name would designate
an absence, but in the sense that the unconscious reproduces itself
wherever the names of history designate present intensities (“the sea of
proper names”). The unconscious is not figurative, since its \emph{figural}
is abstract, the figure-schiz. It is not structural, nor is it symbolic,
for its reality is that of the Real in its very production, in its very
inorganization. It is not representative, but solely machinic, and
productive.


Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of
destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage.
Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego,
guilt, the law, castration. It is not a matter of pious destructions,
such as those performed by psychoanalysis under the benevolent neutral
eye of the analyst. For these are Hegel-style destructions, ways of
conserving. How is it that the celebrated neutrality, and what
psychoanalysis calls—dares to call—the disappearance or the dissolution
of the Oedipus complex, do not make us burst into laughter? We are told
that Oedipus is indispensable, that it is the source of every possible
differentiation, and that it saves us from the terrible
nondifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, is
herself part of Oedipus; her nondifferentiation is merely the reverse of
the exclusive differentiations created by Oedipus, she is herself
created by Oedipus: Oedipus necessarily operates in the form of this
double impasse. We are told that Oedipus in its turn must be overcome,
and that this is achieved through castration, latency, desexualization,
and sublimation. But what is castration if not still Oedipus, to the
\emph{n}th power, now symbolic, and therefore all the more virulent?
And what is latency, this pure fable, if not the silence imposed on
desiring-machines so that Oedipus can develop, be fortified in us, so
that it can accumulate its poisonous sperm and gain the time necessary
for propagating itself, and for passing on to our future children? And
what is the elimination of castration anxiety in its
turn—desexualization and sublimation—if not divine acceptance of, and
infinite resignation to, bad conscience, which consists for the woman of
“the appeased wish for a penis \dots{} destined to be converted into a wish
for a baby and for a husband,” and for the man in assuming his passive
attitude and in “[subjecting] himself to a father substitute”?\footnote{Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” \emph{Standard Edition}, Vol. 23, pp. 251–52.}


We are all the more “extricated” from Oedipus as we become a living
example, an advertisement, a theorem in action, so as to attract our
children to Oedipus: we have evolved in Oedipus, we have been structured
in Oedipus, and under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute,
we have learned the song of castration, the lack-of-being-that-is-life;
“yes it is through castration\Slash{}that we gain access\Slash{}to Deeeeesire.” What
one calls the disappearance of Oedipus is Oedipus become an idea. Only
the idea can inject the venom. Oedipus has to become an idea so that it
sprouts each time a new set of arms and legs, lips and mustache: “In
tracing back the ‘memory deaths’ your ego becomes a sort of mineral
theorem which constantly proves the futility of living.”\footnote{Miller, \emph{Hamlet}, pp. 124–25.} We have
been triangulated in Oedipus, and will triangulate in it in turn. From
the family to the couple, from the couple to the family. In actuality,
the benevolent neutrality of the analyst is very limited: it ceases the
instant one stops responding daddy-mommy. It ceases the instant one
introduces a little desiring-machine—the tape-recorder—into the
analyst’s office; it ceases as soon as a flow is made to circulate that
does not let itself be stopped by Oedipus, the mark of the triangle
(they tell you you have a libido that is too viscous, or too liquid,
contraindications for analysis).


When Fromm denounces the existence of a psychoanalytic bureaucracy, he
still doesn’t go far enough, because he doesn’t see what the stamp of
this bureaucracy is, and that an appeal to the pre-oedipal is not enough
to escape this stamp: the pre-oedipal, like the post-oedipal, is still a
way of bringing all of desiring-production—the anoedipal—back to
Oedipus. When Reich denounces the way in which psychoanalysis joins
forces with social repression, he still doesn’t go far enough, because
he doesn’t see that the tie linking psychoanalysis with capitalism is
not merely ideological, that it is infinitely closer, infinitely
tighter; and that psychoanalysis depends directly on an economic
mechanism (whence its relations with money) through which the decoded
flows of desire, as taken up in the axiomatic of capitalism, must
necessarily be reduced to a familial field where the application of this
axiomatic is carried out: Oedipus as the last word of capitalist
consumption-sucking away at daddy-mommy, being blocked and triangulated
on the couch; “So it’s\dots{}” Psychoanalysis, no less than the bureaucratic
or military apparatus, is a mechanism for the absorption of surplus
value, nor is this true from the outside, extrinsically; rather, its
very form and its finality are marked by this social function. It is not
the pervert, nor even the autistic person, who escapes psychoanalysis;
the whole of psychoanalysis is an immense perversion, a drug, a radical
break with reality, starting with the reality of desire; it is a
narcissism, a monstrous autism: the characteristic autism and the
intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital. At its most autistic,
psychoanalysis is no longer measured against any reality, it no longer
opens to any outside, but becomes itself the test of reality and the
guarantor of its own test: reality as the lack to which the inside and
the outside, departure and arrival, are reduced. Psychoanalysis \emph{index
sui}, with no other \emph{reference} than itself or “the analytic situation.”


Psychoanalysis states clearly that unconscious representation can never
be apprehended independently of the deformations, disguises, or
displacements it undergoes. Unconscious representation therefore
comprises essentially, by virtue of its own \emph{law}, a represented that is
displaced in relation to an agency in a constant state of displacement.
But from this, two unwarranted conclusions are drawn: that this agency
can be discovered by way of the displaced represented; and this,
precisely because this agency itself belongs to representation, as a
nonrepresented representative, or as a lack “that juts out into the
overfull (\emph{trop-plein}) of a representation.” This results from the fact
that displacement refers to very different movements: at times, the
movement through which desiring-production is continually overcoming the
limit, becoming deterritorialized, causing its flows to escape, going
beyond the threshold of representation; at times, on the contrary, the
movement through which the limit itself is displaced, and now passes to
the interior of the representation that performs the artificial
reterritorializations of desire. If the displacing agency can be
concluded from the displaced, this is only true in the second sense,
where molar representation is organized around a representative that
displaces the represented. But this is certainly not true in the first
sense, where the molecular elements are continually passing through the
links in the chain. We have seen in this perspective how the law of
representation perverted the productive forces of the unconscious, and
induced in its very structure a false image that caught desire in its
trap (the impossibility of concluding from the prohibition as to what is
actually prohibited). Yes, Oedipus is indeed the displaced represented;
yes, castration is indeed the representative, the displacing agency (\emph{le
déplaçant}), the signifier—but none of that constitutes an unconscious
material, nor does any of it concern the productions of the unconscious.
Oedipus, castration, the signifier, etc., exist at the crossroads of two
operations of capture: one where repressive social production becomes
replaced by beliefs, the other where repressed desiring-production finds
itself replaced by representations. To be sure, it is not psychoanalysis
that makes us believe: Oedipus and castration are demanded, then
demanded again, and these demands come from elsewhere and from deeper
down. But psychoanalysis did find the following means, and fills the
following function: causing beliefs to survive even after repudiation;
causing those who no longer believe in anything to continue believing;
reconstituting a private territory for them, a private Urstaat, a
private capital (dreams as capital, said Freud).


That is why, inversely, schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its
strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and
representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no
activity will be too malevolent. Causing Oedipus and castration to
explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song
of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back \emph{to the factory}. As
Charlus says, “A lot we care about your grandmother, you little shit!”
Oedipus and castration are no more than reactional formations,
resistances, blockages, and armorings whose destruction can’t come fast
enough. Reich intuits a fundamental principle of schizoanalysis when he
says that the destruction of resistances must not wait upon the
discovery of the material.\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm}, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1973), pp. 167–68. See also Wilhelm Reich, \emph{Character Analysis} (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1974).} But the reason for this is even more
radical than he thought: there is no unconscious material, so that
schizoanalysis has nothing to interpret. There are only resistances, and
then machines desiring-machines. Oedipus is a resistance; if we have
been able to speak of the intrinsically perverted nature of
psychoanalysis, this is due to the fact that perversion in general is
the artificial reterritorialization of the flows of desire, whose
machines on the contrary are indices of deterritorialized production.
The psychoanalyst reterritorializes on the couch, in the representation
of Oedipus and castration. Schizoanalysis on the contrary must disengage
the deterritorialized flows of desire, in the molecular elements of
desiring-production. We should again call to mind the practical rule
laid down by Leclaire, following Lacan, the rule of the right to
non-sense as well as to the absence of a link: you will not have reached
the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you
find or restore a link between two elements. (But how then can one see
in this extreme dispersion—machines dispersed in every machine—nothing
more than a pure “fiction” that must give way to Reality defined as a
lack, with Oedipus and castration back at a gallop, at the same time
that one reduces the absence of a link to a “signifier” of absence
charged with representing the absence, with linking this absence itself,
and with moving us back and forth from one pole of displacement to the
other? One falls back into the molar hole while claiming to unmask the
real.)


What complicates everything is that there is indeed a necessity for
desiring-production to be induced from representation, to be discovered
through its lines of escape. But this is true in a way altogether
different from what psychoanalysis believes it to be. The decoded flows
of desire form the free energy (libido) of the desiring-machines. The
desiring-machines take form and train their sights along a tangent of
deterritorialization that traverses the representative spheres, and that
runs along the body without organs. Leaving, escaping, but while causing
more escapes. The desiring-machines themselves are the flows-schizzes or
the breaks-flows that break and flow at the same time on the body
without organs: not the gaping wound represented in castration, but the
myriad little connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions by which every
machine produces a flow in relation to another that breaks it, and
breaks a flow that another produces. But how would these decoded and
deterritorialized flows of desiring-production keep from being reduced
to some representative territoriality, how would they keep from forming
for themselves yet another such territory, even if on the body without
organs as the indifferent support for a last representation? Even those
who are best at “leaving,” those who make leaving into something as
natural as being born or dying, those who set out in search of nonhuman
sex—Lawrence, Miller—stake out a far-off territoriality that still forms
an anthropomorphic and phallic representation: the Orient, Mexico, or
Peru. Even the schizo’s stroll or voyage does not effect great
deterritorializations without borrowing from territorial circuits: the
tottering walk of Molloy and his bicycle preserves the mother’s room as
the vestige of a goal; the vacillating spirals of \emph{The Unnamable} keep
the familial tower as an uncertain center where it continues to turn
while treading its own underfoot; the infinite series of juxtaposed and
unlocalized parks in \emph{Watt} still contains a reference to Mr. Knott’s
house, the only one capable of “pushing the soul out-of-doors,” but also
of summoning it back to its place. We are all little dogs, we need
circuits, and we need to be taken for walks. Even those best able to
disconnect, to unplug themselves, enter into connections of
desiring-machines that re-form little earths. Even Gisela Pankow’s great
deterritorialized subjects are led to discover the image of a family
castle under the roots of the uprooted tree that crosses through their
body without organs.\footnote{Gisela Pankow, \emph{L’homme et sa psychose} (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 68–72. And on the role of the house: “La dynamique de l’espace et le temps vécu,” \emph{Critique}, February 1972.}


Previously we distinguished two poles of delirium, one as the molecular
schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as the paranoiac molar
investment. But the perverted pole is equally opposed to the
schizophrenic pole, just as the reconstitution of territorialities is
opposed to the movement of deterritorialization. And if perversion in
the narrowest sense of the word performs a certain very specific type of
reterritorialization within the artifice, perversion in the broad sense
comprises all the types of reterritorializations, not merely artificial,
but also exotic, archaic, residual, private, etc.: thus Oedipus and
psychoanalysis as perversion. Even Raymond Roussel’s schizophrenic
machines turn into perverse machines in a theater representing Africa.
In short, there is no deterritorialization of the flows of schizophrenic
desire that is not accompanied by global or local reterritorializations,
reterritorializations that always reconstitute shores of representation.
What is more, the force and the obstinacy of a deterritorialization can
only be evaluated through the types of reterritorialization that
represent it; the one is the reverse side of the other. Our loves are
complexes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. What we love
is always a certain mulatto—male or female. The movement of
deterritorialization can never be grasped in itself, one can only grasp
its indices in relation to the territorial representations. Take the
example of dreams: yes, dreams are Oedipal, and this comes as no
surprise, since dreams are a perverse reterritorialization in relation
to the deterritorialization of sleep and nightmares. But \emph{why return to
dreams}, why turn them into the royal road of desire and the
unconscious, when they are in fact the manifestation of a superego, a
superpowerful and superarchaized ego (the Urszene of the Urstaat)? Yet
at the heart of dreams themselves—as with fantasy and delirium—machines
function as indices of deterritorialization. In dreams there are always
machines endowed with the strange property of passing from hand to hand,
of escaping and causing circulations, of carrying and being carried
away. The airplane of parental coitus, the father’s car, the
grandmother’s sewing machine, the little brother’s bicycle, all objects
of flight and theft, stealing and stealing away—the machine is always
infernal in the family dream. The machine introduces breaks and flows
that prevent the dream from being reconfined in its scene and
systematized within its representation. It makes the most of an
irreducible factor of non-sense, which will develop elsewhere and from
without, in the conjunctions of the real as such. Psychoanalysis, with
its Oedipal stubbornness, has only a dim understanding of this; for one
reterritorializes on persons and surroundings, but one deterritorializes
on machines. Is it Schreber’s father who acts through machines, or on
the contrary is it the machines themselves that function through the
father? \emph{Psychoanalysis settles on the imaginary and structural
representatives of reterritorialization, while schizoanalysis follows
the machinic indices of deterritorialization.} The opposition still
holds between the neurotic on the couch—as an ultimate and sterile land,
the last exhausted colony—and the schizo out for a walk in a
deterritorialized circuit.


The following excerpt from an article by Michel Cournot on Chaplin helps
us understand what schizophrenic laughter is, as well as the
schizophrenic line of escape or breakthrough, and the process as
deterritorialization, with its machinic indices: “The moment Charlie
Chaplin makes the board fall a second time on his head—a psychotic
gesture—he provokes the spectator’s laughter. Yes, but what laughter is
this? And what spectator? For example, the question no longer applies at
all, at this point in the film, of knowing whether the spectator must
see the accident coming or be surprised by it. It is as though the
spectator, at that very moment, were no longer in his seat, were no
longer in a position to observe things. A kind of perceptive gymnastics
has lead him, progressively, not to identify with the character of
**Modern Times*, but to experience so directly the resistance of the
events that he accompanies this character, has the same surprises, the
same premonitions, the same habits as he. Thus it is that the famous
**eating machine*, which in a sense, by its excess, is foreign to the
film (Chaplin had invented it twenty-two years before the film), is
merely the formal, absolute exercise that prepares for the conduct—also
psychotic—of the worker trapped in the machine, with only his
upside-down head sticking out, and who has Chaplin feed him his lunch,
since it is lunch time. If laughter is a reaction that takes certain
circuits, it can be said that Charlie Chaplin, as the film’s sequences
unfold, progressively \emph{displaces} the reactions, causes them to recede,
level by level, until the moment when the spectator is no longer master
of his own circuits, and tends to spontaneously take either a shorter
path, which is not passable, which is barred, or else a path that is
very explicitly posted as leading nowhere. After having suppressed the
spectator as such, Chaplin perverts the laughter, which comes to be like
so many \emph{short-circuits of a disconnected piece of machinery}. Critics
have occasionally spoken of the pessimism of \emph{Modern Times} and of the
optimism of the final image. Neither term suits the film. Charles
Chaplin in \emph{Modern Times} sketches rather, \emph{on a very small scale}, with
a precise stroke, the finished design of several oppressive and
fundamental manifestations. The leading character, played by Chaplin,
has to be neither active nor passive, neither consenting nor
insubordinate, since he is the pencil point that traces the design, he
is the stroke itself\dots{}. That is why the final image is without optimism.
One does not see what optimism would be doing at the conclusion of this
statement. This man and this woman seen from the back, all black, whose
shadows are not projected by any sun, advance toward nothing. The
wireless telegraph poles that run along the left side of the road, the
barren trees that dot the right side, do not meet at the horizon. There
is no horizon. The bald hills facing the spectator only form a line that
merges with the void hanging over them. Anyone can see that this man and
this woman are no longer alive. There is no pessimism here either. What
had to happen happened. They did not kill each other. They were not
brought down by the police. And it will not be necessary to go looking
for the alibi of an accident. Charles Chaplin did not dwell on this. He
went quickly, as usual. He traced the finished design.”\footnote{Michel Cournot, \emph{Le Nouvel Observateur}, Nov. 1, 1971.}


In its destructive task, schizoanalysis must proceed as quickly as
possible, but it can also proceed only with great patience, great care,
by successively undoing the representative territorialities and
reterritorializations through which a subject passes in his individual
history. For there are several layers, several planes of resistance that
come from within or are imposed from without. Schizophrenia as a
process, deterritorialization as a process, is inseparable from the
stases that interrupt it, or aggravate it, or make it turn in circles,
and reterritorialize it into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis. To a
point where the process cannot extricate itself, continue on, and reach
fulfillment, except insofar as it is capable of creating—what exactly?—a
new land. In each case we must go back by way of old lands, study their
nature, their density; we must seek to discover how the machinic indices
are grouped on each of these lands that permit going beyond them. How
can we reconquer the process each time, constantly resuming the journey
on these lands—Oedipal familial lands of neurosis, artificial lands of
perversion, clinical lands of psychosis? \emph{In Search of Lost Time} as a
great enterprise of schizoanalysis: all the planes are traversed until
their molecular line of escape is reached, their schizophrenic
breakthrough; thus in the kiss where Albertine’s face jumps from one
plane of consistency to another, in order to finally come undone in a
nebula of molecules. The reader always risks stopping at a given plane
and saying yes, \emph{that} is where Proust is explaining himself. But the
narrator-spider never ceases undoing webs and planes, resuming the
journey, watching for the signs or the indices that operate like
machines and that will cause him to go on further. This very movement is
humor, black humor. Oh, the narrator does not homestead in the familial
and neurotic lands of Oedipus, there where the global and personal
connections are established; he does not remain there, he crosses these
lands, he desecrates them, he penetrates them, he liquidates even his
grandmother with a machine for tying shoes. The perverse lands of
homosexuality, where the exclusive disjunctions of women with women, and
men with men, are established, likewise break apart in terms of the
machinic indices that undermine them. The psychotic earths, with their
conjunctions in place (Charlus is therefore surely mad, and Albertine
too, perhaps!), are traversed in their turn to a point where the problem
is no longer posed, no longer posed in this way. The narrator continues
his own affair, until he reaches the \emph{unknown country}, his own, the
**unknown land*, which alone is created by his own work in progress, the
**Search of Lost Time* “in progress,” functioning as a desiring-machine
capable of collecting and dealing with all the indices. He goes toward
these new regions where the connections are always partial and
nonpersonal, the conjunctions nomadic and polyvocal, the disjunctions
included, where homosexuality and heterosexuality cannot be
distinguished any longer: the world of transverse communications, where
the finally conquered nonhuman sex mingles with the flowers, a new earth
where desire functions according to its molecular elements and flows.
Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension;
it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs—an intensive
voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is
creating.


The patient resumption of the process, or on the contrary its
interruption—the two are so closely interrelated that they can only be
evaluated each within the other. How would the schizo’s voyage be
possible independent of certain circuits, how could it exist without a
land? But inversely, how can we be certain that these circuits don’t
reconstitute the lands—only too well known—of the asylum, the artifice,
or the family? We always return to the same question: from what does the
schizo suffer, he whose sufferings are unspeakable? Does he suffer from
the process itself, or rather from its interruptions, when he is
neuroticized in the family, in the land of Oedipus; when the one who
does not allow himself to be Oedipalized is psychoticized in the land of
the asylum; when the one who escapes the family and the asylum is
perverted in the artificial locales? Perhaps there is only one illness,
neurosis, the Oedipal decay against which all the pathogenic
interruptions of the process should be measured. Most of the modern
endeavors—outpatient centers, inpatient hospitals, social clubs for the
sick, family care, institutions, and even antipsychiatry—remain
threatened by a common danger, a danger which Jean Oury has been able to
analyze in depth: how does one avoid the institution’s re-forming an
asylum structure, or constituting perverse and reformist artificial
societies, or residual paternalistic or mothering pseudo families? We do
not have in mind the so-called community psychiatry endeavors, whose
admitted purpose is to triangulate, to Oedipalize everyone—people,
animals, and things—to a point where we will witness a new race of sick
people implore by reaction that they be given back an asylum, or a
little Beckettian land, a garbage can, so they can become catatonic in a
corner. But in a less openly repressive manner, who says that the family
is a good place, a good circuit for the deterritorialized schizo? Such a
thing would be very surprising, to say the least: “the therapeutic
potentialities of the familial surroundings.” The whole town, then, the
whole neighborhood? What molar unit will constitute a sufficiently
nomadic circuit? How does one prevent the unit chosen, even if a
specific institution, from constituting a perverted society of
tolerance, a mutual-aid society that hides the real problems? Will the
structure of the institution save it? But how will the structure break
its relationship with neuroticizing, perverting, psychoticizing
castration? How will this structure produce anything but a subjugated
group? How will it give free play to the process, when its entire molar
organization has the function of binding the molecular process? Even
antipsychiatry—especially sensitive to the schizophrenic breakthrough
and the intense voyage—tires out and proposes the image of a
subject-group that would become immediately reperverted, with former
schizos guiding the most recent ones, and, as relays, little chapels, or
better yet, a convent in Ceylon.


The only thing that can save us from these impasses is an effective
politicization of psychiatry. And doubtless, with R.D. Laing and David
Cooper antipsychiatry went very far in this direction. But it seems to
us that they still conceive of this politicization in terms of the
structure and the event, rather than the process itself. Furthermore,
they localize social and mental alienation on a single line, and tend to
consider them as identical by showing how the familial agent extends the
one into the other.\footnote{* David Cooper, “Aliénation mentale et aliénation sociale,” \emph{Recherches}, December 1968, pp. 48–49: “Social alienation comes for the most part to overlap the diverse forms of mental alienation\dots{}. Those admitted into a psychiatric hospital are admitted not so much because they are sick, as because they are protesting in a more or less adequate way against the social order. The social system in which they are caught thereby comes to reinforce the damages wrought by the familial system in which they grew up. This autonomy that they seek to affirm with regard to a microsociety acts as an indicator of a massive alienation performed by society as a whole.”} Between the two, however, the relationship is
rather that of an \emph{included disjunction}. This is because the decoding
and the deterritorialization of flows define the very process of
capitalism—that is, its essence, its tendency, and its external limit.
But we know that the process is continually interrupted, or the tendency
counteracted, or the limit displaced, by subjective
reterritorializations and representations that operate as much at the
level of capital as a subject (the axiomatic), as at the level of the
persons serving as capital’s agents (application of the axiomatic). But
we seek in vain to assign social alienation and mental alienation to one
side or the other, as long as we establish a relation of exclusion
between the two. The deterritorialization of flows in general
effectively merges with mental alienation, inasmuch as it \emph{includes} the
reterritorializations that permit it to subsist only as the state of a
particular flow, a flow of madness that is defined thus because it is
charged with representing whatever escapes the axiomatics and the
applications of reterritorialization in other flows. Inversely, one can
find the form of social alienation in action in all the
reterritorializations of capitalism, inasmuch as they keep the flows
from escaping the system, and maintain labor in the axiomatic framework
of property, and desire in the applied framework of the family; but this
social alienation includes in its turn mental alienation, which finds
itself represented or reterritorialized in neurosis, perversion, and
psychosis (the mental illnesses).


A true politics of psychiatry, or antipsychiatry, would consist
therefore in the following praxis: (1) undoing all the
reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2)
liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the
flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify a
particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the
flows of labor and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in
their most profound tendency. Here, madness would no longer exist as
madness, not because it would have been transformed into “mental
illness,” but on the contrary because it would receive the support of
all the other flows, including science and art—once it is said that
madness is called madness and appears as such only because it is
deprived of this support, and finds itself reduced to testifying all
alone for deterritorialization as a universal process. It is merely its
unwarranted privilege, a privilege beyond its capacities, that renders
it mad. In this perspective Foucault announced an age when madness would
disappear, not because it would be lodged within the controlled space of
mental illness (“great tepid aquariums”), but on the contrary because
the exterior limit designated by madness would be overcome by means of
other flows escaping control on all sides, and carrying us along.\footnote{* Michel Foucault, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre,” \emph{La Table ronde}, May 1964: “Everything that we experience today in the mode of the limit, or of strangeness, or of the unbearable, will have joined again with the serenity of the positive.”}


It should therefore be said that one can never go far enough in the
direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet—an
irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly
artificial nature in the perverted reterritorializations, but also in
the psychotic reterritorializations of the hospital, or even the
familial neurotic reterritorializations, we cry out, “More perversion!
More artifice!”—to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that
the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself
a new earth. Psychoanalysis is especially satisfying in this regard: its
entire perverted practice of the cure consists in transforming familial
neurosis into artificial neurosis (of transference), and in exalting the
couch, a little island with its commander, the psychoanalyst, as an
autonomous territoriality of the ultimate artifice. A little additional
effort is enough to overturn everything, and to lead us finally toward
other far-off places. The schizoanalytic flick of the finger, which
restarts the movement, links up again with the tendency, and pushes the
simulacra to a point where they cease being artificial images to become
indices of the new world. That is what the completion of the process is:
not a promised and a pre-existing land, but a world created in the
process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization.
The movement of the theater of cruelty; for it is the only theater of
production, there where the flows cross the threshold of
deterritorialization and produce the new land—not at all a hope, but a
simple “finding,” a “finished design,” where the person who escapes
causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing
himself. An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the
artistic machine, the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic
machine become parts and pieces of one another.

\section{4. The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4-section-4}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4-section-4}%


The negative or destructive task of schizoanalysis is in no way
separable from its positive tasks—all these tasks are necessarily
undertaken at the same time. The first positive task consists of
discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or the functioning
of \emph{his} desiring-machines, independently of any interpretations. What
are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is
the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes? The
schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional. In
this respect it cannot remain at the level of a still interpretative
examination—interpretative from the point of view of the unconscious—of
the social machines in which the subject is caught as a cog or as a
user; nor of the technical machines that are his prized possession, or
that he perfects or even produces through handiwork; nor of the
subject’s use of his machines in his dreams and his fantasies. These
machines are still too representative, and represent units that are too
large—even the perverted machines of the sadist or the masochist, even
the influencing machines of the paranoiac. We have seen in general that
the pseudo analyses of the “object” were really the lowest level of
analytic activity, even and especially when they claim to double the
real object with an imaginary object; and better a
how-to-interpret-your-dreams book than a psychoanalysis of the market
place.


The consideration of all these machines, however, whether they be real,
symbolic, or imaginary, must indeed intervene in a specific way—but as
functional indices to point us in the direction of the
desiring-machines, to which these indices are more or less close and
affinal. The desiring-machines in fact are only reached starting from a
certain threshold of dispersion that no longer permits either their
imaginary identity or their structural unity to subsist. (These
instances still belong to the order of interpretation, that is to say
the order of the signified \emph{or} the signifier.) Partial objects are what
make up the parts of the desiring-machines; partial objects define the
working machine or the working parts, but in a state of dispersion such
that one part is continually referring to a part from an entirely
different machine, like the red clover and the bumble bee, the wasp and
the orchid, the bicycle horn and the dead rat’s ass. Let’s not rush to
introduce a term that would be like a phallus structuring the whole and
personifying the parts, unifying and totalizing everything. Everywhere
there is libido as machine energy, and neither the horn nor the bumble
bee have the privilege of being a phallus: the phallus intervenes only
in the structural organization and the personal relations deriving from
it, where everyone, like the worker called to war, abandons his machines
and sets to fighting for a war trophy that is nothing but a great
absence, with one and the same penalty, one and the same ridiculous
wound for all—castration. This entire struggle for the phallus, this
poorly understood will to power, this anthropomorphic representation of
sex, this whole conception of sexuality that horrifies Lawrence
precisely because it is no more than a conception, because it is an idea
that “reason” imposes on the unconscious and introduces into the
passional sphere, and is not by any means a formation of this
sphere—here is where desire finds itself trapped, specifically limited
to human sex, unified and identified in the molar constellation. But the
desiring-machines live on the contrary under the order of dispersion of
the molecular elements. And one fails to understand the nature and
function of partial objects if one does not see therein such elements,
rather than parts of even a fragmented whole. As Lawrence said, analysis
does not have to do with anything that resembles a concept or a person,
“the so-called human relations are not involved.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” in \emph{Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious} (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. 30.} Analysis should
deal solely (except in its negative task) with the machinic arrangements
grasped in the context of their molecular dispersion.


Let us therefore return to the rule so clearly stated by Serge Leclaire,
even if he sees this only as a fiction instead of the real-desire
(\emph{réel-désir}): the elements or parts of the desiring-machines are
recognized by their mutual independence, such that nothing in the one
depends or should depend on something in the other. They must not be
opposed determinations of a same entity, nor the differentiations of a
single being, such as the masculine and the feminine in the human sex,
but different or really-distinct things (\emph{des réellement-distincts}),
distinct “beings,” as found in the dispersion of the nonhuman sex (the
clover and the bee). As long as schizoanalysis has not arrived at these
**disparate* elements, it has not yet discovered the partial objects as
the ultimate elements of the unconscious. It is in this sense that
Leclaire used the term “erogenous body” not to designate a fragmented
organism, but an emission of preindividual and prepersonal
singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity
or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real
distinction or the very absence of a link. Such is the case in the
schizoid sequences of Beckett: stones, pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe
bowl, a small limp bundle that is undefined, a cover for a bicycle bell,
half a crutch (“if one indefinitely runs up against the same set of pure
singularities, one can feel confident that he has drawn near the
singularity of the subject’s desire”).\footnote{Serge Leclaire, “La réalité du désir,” in \emph{Sexualité humaine} (Paris: Aubier, 1970), p. 245. And \emph{Séminaire Vincennes}, 1969, pp. 31–34 (the opposition between the “erogenous body” and the organism).} To be sure, one can always
establish or re-establish some sort of link between these elements:
organic links between organs or fragments of organs that eventually form
part of the multiplicity; psychological and axiological links—the good,
the bad—that finally refer to the persons or to the scenes from which
these elements are borrowed; structural links between the ideas or the
concepts apt to correspond to them. But it is not in this respect that
the partial objects are elements of the unconscious, and we cannot even
go along with the image of the partial objects that their inventor,
Melanie Klein, proposes. This is because, whether organs or fragments of
organs, the partial objects do not refer in the least to an organism
that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or a totality to
come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes
their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification
or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished,
every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw
partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself
dispersed. In short, \emph{partial objects are the molecular functions of the
unconscious}. That is why, when we insisted earlier on the difference
between desiring-machines and all the figures of molar machines, we were
fully aware that they were both contained in, and did not exist without,
one another, but we had to stress the difference in régime and in scale
between these two machinic species.


It is true that one might instead wonder how these conditions of
dispersion, of real distinction, and of the absence of a link permit any
machinic régime to exist—how the partial objects thus defined are able
to form machines and arrangements of machines. The answer lies in the
passive nature of the syntheses, or—what amounts to the same thing—in
the indirect nature of the interactions under consideration. If it is
true that every partial object emits a flow, it is also the case that
this flow is associated with another partial object and defines the
other’s potential field of presence, which is itself multiple (a
multiplicity of anuses for the flows of shit). The synthesis of
connection of the partial objects is indirect, since one of the partial
objects, in each point of its presence within the field, always breaks
the flow that another object emits or produces relatively, itself ready
to emit a flow that other partial objects will break. The flows are
two-headed, so to speak, and it is by means of these flows that every
productive connection is made, such as we have tried to account for with
the notion of flow-schiz or break-flow. So that the true activities of
the unconscious, causing to flow and breaking flows, consist of the
passive synthesis itself insofar as it ensures the relative coexistence
and displacement of the two different functions.


Now let us assume that the respective flows associated with two partial
objects at least partially overlap: their production remains distinct in
relation to the objects \emph{x} and \emph{y} that emit them, but not the fields
of presence in relation to the objects \emph{a} and \emph{b} that inhabit and
interrupt them, such that the partial \emph{a} and the partial \emph{b} become in
this regard indiscernible (thus the mouth and the anus, the mouth-anus
of the anorexic). And they are not indiscernible solely in the mixed
region, since one can always assume that, having exchanged their
function within this region, they cannot be further distinguished by
exclusion there where the two flows no longer overlap: one then finds
oneself before a new passive synthesis where \emph{a} and \emph{b} are in a
paradoxical relationship of included disjunction. Finally there remains
the possibility, not of an overlapping of the flows, but of a
permutation of the objects that emit them: one discovers fringes of
interference on the edge of each field of presence, fringes that testify
to the remainder of a flow in the other, and form residual conjunctive
syntheses guiding the passage or the heartfelt becoming from the one to
the other. A permutation involving 2, 3, \emph{n} organs; deformable abstract
polygons that make game of the figurative Oedipal triangle, and never
cease to undo it. Through binarity, overlapping, or permutation, all
these indirect passive syntheses are one and the same engineering of
desire. But who will be able to describe the desiring-machines of each
subject, what analysis will be exacting enough for this? Mozart’s
desiring-machine? “Raise your ass to your mouth,\dots{} ah, my ass burns like
fire, but \emph{what can be the meaning of that}? Perhaps a turd wants to
come out\dots{}. Yes, yes, turd, I know you, I see you, I feel you. What is
this—is such a thing possible?”\footnote{* From a letter by Mozart cited by Marcel Moré, \emph{Le Dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux} (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) P 124: “Having come of age, he found the means of concealing his divine essence, by indulging in scatological amusements.” More shows convincingly how the scatological machine works underneath and against the Oedipal “cage.”}


These syntheses necessarily imply the position of a body without organs.
This is due to the fact that the body without organs is in no way the
contrary of the organs-partial objects. It is itself produced in the
first passive synthesis of connection, as that which is going to
neutralize—or on the contrary put into motion—the two activities, the
two heads of desire. For as we have seen, it can be produced as the
amorphous fluid of antiproduction, just as it can be produced as the
support that appropriates for itself the flow production. It can as well
**repel* the organs-objects as \emph{attract} them, and appropriate them for
itself. But in repulsion as in attraction, the body without organs is
not in opposition to these organs-objects; it merely ensures its own
opposition, and their opposition, with regard to an organism. The body
without organs and the organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to
the organism. The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole,
but a whole alongside the parts—a whole that does not unify or totalize
them, but that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.


When it repels the organs, as in the mounting of the paranoiac machine,
the body without organs marks the external limit of the pure
multiplicity formed by these organs themselves insofar as they
constitute a nonorganic and nonorganized multiplicity. And when it
attracts them and fits itself over them, in the process of a
miraculating fetishistic machine, it still does not totalize them, unify
them in the manner of an organism: the organs-partial objects cling to
the body without organs, and enter into the new syntheses of included
disjunction and nomadic conjunction, of overlapping and permutation, on
this body—syntheses that continue to repudiate the organism and its
organization. Desire indeed passes through the body, and through the
organs, but not through the organism. That is why the partial objects
are not the expression of a fragmented, shattered organism, which would
presuppose a destroyed totality or the freed parts of a whole; nor is
the body without organs the expression of a “de-differentiated”
(“\emph{dé-différencié}”) organism stuck back together that would surmount
its own parts. The organs-partial objects and the body without organs
are at bottom one and the same thing, one and the same multiplicity that
must be conceived as such by schizoanalysis. \emph{Partial objects are the
direct powers of the body without organs, and the body without organs,
the raw material of the partial objects.}\footnote{* In his study on “Objet magique, sorcellerie et fétichisme” in \emph{Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse}, no. 2 (1970), Pierre Bonnafé clearly demonstrates in this respect the inadequacy of a notion like that of a fragmented body: “There is indeed a fragmenting of the body, but not at all with a feeling of loss or degradation. Quite to the contrary, as much for the holder as for the others, the body is fragmented by multiplication: the others no longer have to do with a simple person, but with a \emph{man to the x+y+z power} whose life has been immeasurably increased, dispersed while being united with other natural forces\dots{}, since its existence no longer rests at the center of its person, but has hidden itself in several far-off and impregnable locations” (pp. 166–67). Bonnafé recognizes in the magic object the existence of the three desiring syntheses: the connective synthesis, which combines the fragments of the person with those of animals or plants; the included disjunctive synthesis, which records the man-animal composite; the conjunctive synthesis, which implies a veritable migration of the remainder or residue.} The body without organs
is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and
the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that
produce the real in space starting from matter as
intensity=0. The body without organs is the
immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the
partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it
precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account
exclude or oppose one another. The partial objects and the body without
organs are the two material elements of the schizophrenic
desiring-machines: the one as the immobile motor, the others as the
working parts; the one as the giant molecule, the others as the
micromolecules—the two together in a relationship of continuity from one
end to the other of the molecular chain of desire.


The chain is like the apparatus of transmission or of reproduction in
the desiring-machine. Insofar as it brings together—without unifying or
uniting them—the body without organs and the partial objects, the
desiring-machine is inseparable both from the distribution of the
partial objects on the body without organs, and from the leveling effect
exerted on the partial objects by the body without organs, which results
in appropriation. The chain also implies another type of synthesis than
the flows; it is no longer the lines of connection that traverse the
productive parts of the machine, but an entire network of disjunction on
the recording surface of the body without organs. And we have doubtless
been able to present things in a logical order where the disjunctive
synthesis of recording seemed to follow after the connective synthesis
of production, with a part of the energy of production (Libido) being
converted into a recording energy (Numen). But in fact, from the
standpoint of the machine itself, there is no succession that ensures
the strict coexistence of the chains and the flows, as well as of the
body without organs and the partial objects. The conversion of a portion
of the energy does not occur at a given moment, but is a preliminary and
constant condition of the system. The chain is the network of included
disjunctions on the body without organs, inasmuch as these disjunctions
resect the productive connections; the chain causes them to pass over to
the body without organs itself, thereby channeling or “codifying” the
flows. However, the whole question is in knowing whether one can speak
of a \emph{code} at the level of this molecular chain of desire. We have seen
that a code implied two things—one or the other, or the two together: on
the one hand, the specific determination of the full body as a
territoriality of support; on the other hand, the erection of a despotic
signifier on which the entire chain depends. In this regard, in vain is
the axiomatic in profound opposition to codes; since it works on the
decoded flows, it cannot itself proceed except by effecting
reterriorializations and by reviving the signifying unity. The very
notions of code and axiomatic therefore seem to be valid only for the
molar aggregates, where the signifying chain forms a given determinate
configuration on a support that is itself specifically determined, and
in terms of a detached signifier. These conditions are not fulfilled
without exclusions forming and appearing in the disjunctive network—at
the same time as the connective lines take on a global and specific
meaning.


But it is another case altogether with the properly molecular chain:
insofar as the body without organs is a nonspecific and nonspecified
support that marks the molecular limit of the molar aggregates, the
chain no longer has any other function than that of deterritorializing
the flows and causing them to pass through the signifying wall, thereby
undoing the codes. The function of the chain is no longer that of coding
the flows on a full body of the earth, the despot, or capital, but on
the contrary that of decoding them on the full body without organs. It
is a chain of escape, and no longer a code. The signifying chain has
become a chain of decoding and deterritorialization, which must be
apprehended—and can only be apprehended—as the reverse of the codes and
the territorialities. This molecular chain is still signifying because
it is composed of signs of desire; but these signs are no longer
signifying, given the fact that they are under the order of the included
disjunctions where \emph{everything is possible}. These signs are points
whose nature is a matter of indifference, abstract machinic figures that
play freely on the body without organs and as yet form no structured
configuration—or rather, they form one no longer. As Jacques Monod says,
we must conceive of a machine that is such by its functional properties
but not by its structure, “where nothing but the play of blind
combinations can be discerned.”\footnote{Jacques Monod, \emph{Chance and Necessity}, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 98.} It is precisely the ambiguity of
what the biologists call a genetic code that enables us to understand
this kind of situation: for if the corresponding chain effectively forms
codes, inasmuch as it folds into exclusive molar configurations, it
undoes the codes by unfolding along a molecular fiber that includes all
the possible figures. Similarly, in Lacan, the symbolic organization of
the structure, with its exclusions that come from the function of the
signifier, has as its reverse side the real inorganization of desire.


It would seem that the genetic code points to a genic decoding: one need
only grasp the decoding and deterritorialization functions in their own
positivity, inasmuch as they imply a particular chain state that is
metastable and distinct both from any axiomatic and from any code. The
molecular chain is the form in which the genic unconscious, always
remaining subject, reproduces itself. And as we have seen, that is the
primary inspiration of psychoanalysis: it does not add a code to all
those that are already known. The signifying chain of the unconscious,
Numen, is not used to discover or decipher codes of desire, but to cause
absolutely decoded flows of desire, Libido, to circulate, and to
discover in desire that which scrambles all the codes and undoes all the
territorialities. It is true that Oedipus will restore psychoanalysis to
the status of a simple code, with the familial territoriality and the
signifier of castration. Worse yet, it will happen that psychoanalysis
itself wants to act as an axiomatic, which is the famous turning point
where it no longer even relates to the familial scene, but solely to the
psychoanalytic scene that supposedly answers for its own truth, and to
the psychoanalytic operation that supposedly answers for its own
success—the couch as an axiomatized earth, the axiomatic of the “cure”
as a \emph{successful} castration! But by recoding or axiomatizing the flows
of desire in this way, psychoanalysis makes a molar use of the
signifying chain that results in a misappreciation of all the syntheses
of the unconscious.


The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror
stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the
model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model
to death. Zero intensity. The death model appears when the body without
organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no
teeth—to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide. Yet
there is no real opposition between the body without organs and the
organs as partial objects; the only real opposition is to the molar
organism that is their common enemy. In the desiring-machine, one sees
the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put
aside his organs, to immobilize them, to silence them, but also,
impelled by the working parts that work in an autonomous or stereotyped
fashion, to reactivate the organs, to reanimate them with local
movements. It is a question of different parts of the machine, different
and coexisting, different in their very coexistence. Hence it is absurd
to speak of a death desire that would presumably be in qualitative
opposition to the life desires. Death is not desired, there is only
death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile
motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working
organs. There we do not have two desires but two parts, two kinds of
desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the machine itself. And yet
the problem persists: how can all that function together? For it is not
yet a functioning, but solely the (nonstructural) condition of a
molecular functioning. The functioning appears when the motor, under the
preceding conditions—i.e., without ceasing to be immobile and without
forming an organism—attracts the organs to the body without organs, and
appropriates them for itself in the apparent objective movement.
Repulsion is the condition of the machine’s functioning, but attraction
is the functioning itself. That the functioning depends on repulsion is
clear to us, inasmuch as it all works only by breaking down. One is then
able to say what this running or this functioning consists of: in the
cycle of the desiring-machine it is a matter of constantly translating,
constantly converting the death model into something else altogether,
which is the experience of death. Converting the death that rises from
within (in the body without organs) into the death that comes from
without (on the body without organs).


But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this
distinction between the experience of death and the model of death? Here
again, is it a death desire? A being-for-death? Or rather an investment
of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of
death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely
because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in
every intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of
every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from
which it is produced, in one moment, as that which grows or diminishes
according to an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski noted, “an afflux is
necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity”). We have
attempted to show in this respect how the relations of attraction and
repulsion produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a
new energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the
synthesis of conjunction. One might say that the unconscious as a real
subject has scattered an apparent residual and nomadic subject around
the entire compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all the
becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of
the desiring-machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and
feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations.
But in themselves, these intensive emotions are closest to the matter
whose zero degree they invest in itself. They control the unconscious
experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling,
**what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming*—in
the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc.,
forming zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity
controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.
And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the
end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then,
does actually happen. Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature
clearly, these two irreducible aspects of death; the one, according to
which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a
**One*—“\emph{one} never stops and never has done with dying”; and the other,
according to which this same subject, fixed as \emph{I}, actually dies—which
is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the
reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an \emph{I}, all the
while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops
it.\footnote{On “the double death,” see Maurice Blanchot, \emph{L’espace littéraire} (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 104, 160.}


From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personal deepening,
but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of
death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The
cycle is closed. For a new departure, since this \emph{I} is another? The
experience of death must have given us exactly enough broadened
experience, in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not
die. And that the subject as an adjacent part is always a “one” who
conducts the experience, not an \emph{I} who receives the model. For the
model itself is not the \emph{I} either, but the body without organs. And \emph{I}
does not rejoin the model without the model starting out again in the
direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the
experience, and starting out again, returning from the model to the
experience, is what \emph{schizophrenizing death} amounts to, the exercise of
the desiring-machines (which is their very secret, well understood by
the terrifying authors). The machines tell us this, and make us live it,
feel it, deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the
return to repulsion will condition other attractions, other
functionings, the setting in motion of other working parts on the body
without organs, the putting to work of other adjacent parts on the
periphery that have as much a right to say \emph{One} as we ourselves do.
“Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things:
other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where
the other collapsed!”\footnote{Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871.} The Eternal Return as experience, and as the
deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire.


How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be a song
of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, \emph{practically}, to
teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad song of death
emanates from it: \emph{eiapopeia}. From the start, and because of his
stubborn dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the
discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when
the dualism passed into a death instinct against Eros, this was no
longer a simple limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich
did not go wrong here, and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the
product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the
life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and
decoding them—even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a
crazy idea, given what had become of analysis. He demonstrated that
Freud, no less than Jung and Adler, had repudiated the sexual position:
the fixing of the death instinct in fact deprives sexuality of its
generative role on at least one essential point, which is the genesis of
anxiety, since this genesis becomes the autonomous cause of sexual
repression instead of its result; it follows that sexuality as desire no
longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization
on the contrary finds itself sanctified as the sole agency capable of
opposing the death desire. And how does it do this? By in principle
turning death against death, by making this turned-back death (\emph{la mort
retournée}) into a force of desire, by putting it in the service of a
pseudo life through an entire culture of guilt feeling.


There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a
theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic
ideal, Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life,
measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the
death of death wants very much to leave us with—a sublime resignation.
As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole
world breathed a sigh of relief: one knew what this meant, and that
everything was going to unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos
was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also \emph{for better}.\footnote{Reich, \emph{The Function of the Orgasm}. A correct interpretation—marked throughout by idealism—of Freud’s theory of culture and its catastrophic evolution concerning guilt feeling, can be found in Paul Ricoeur: on death, and “the death of death,” see \emph{De l’interprétation} (Paris: Edition’s du Seuil) pp. 299–303.}
Psychoanalysis becomes the training ground of a new kind of priest, the
director of bad conscience: bad conscience has made us sick, but that is
what will cure us! Freud did not hide what was really at issue with the
introduction of the death instinct: it is not a question of any fact
whatever, but merely of a principle, a question of principle. The death
instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given
in experience. This very point is remarkable: it is because death,
according to Freud, has neither a model nor an experience, that he makes
of it a transcendent principle.\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{The Problem of Anxiety}, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, Norton, 1936); or \emph{Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety}, trans. Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1936).} So that the psychoanalysts who
refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as those who
accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct \emph{since} there
was no model or experience in the unconscious; others, that there was a
death instinct precisely \emph{because} there was no model or experience. We
say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is
both the model and the experience of death in the unconscious. Death
then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be
judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of
its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle.


If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the
requirements of the dualism that maintains a qualitative opposition
between the drives (you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism
of the sexual drives and the ego drives has only a topological scope,
the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But
the same enterprise is continued and reinforced—eliminating the machinic
element of desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating
the libido, insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic
conversions in the machine (Libido-Numen-Voluptas). It is a matter of
imposing the idea of an energetic duality rendering the machinic
transformations impossible, with everything obliged to pass by way of an
indifferent neutral energy, that energy emanating from Oedipus and
capable of being added to either of the two irreducible
forms—neutralizing, mortifying life.\footnote{* On the impossibility of immediate qualitative conversions, and the necessity for going by way of neutral energy, see Sigmund Freud, \emph{The Ego and the Id}, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1961). This impossibility, this necessity is no longer understandable, it seems to us, if one agrees with Jean Laplanche that “the death drive has no energy of its own” (\emph{Vie et mort en psychanalyse} [Paris: Flammarion, 1970], p. 211). Therefore the death drive could not enter into a veritable dualism, or would have to be confused with the neutral energy itself, which Freud denies.} The purpose of the topological
and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the point of view of
**functional multiplicity* that alone is economic. (Szondi situates the
problem clearly: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning
mysteriously, which is to say oedipally, rather than \emph{n} genes of
drives—eight molecular genes, for example—functioning machinically?)


If one looks in this direction for the ultimate reason why Freud erects
a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found
in Freud’s practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with
the facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst’s conception of
psychoanalytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to
impose. Freud made the most profound discovery of the abstract
subjective essence of desire—Libido. But since he realienated this
essence, reinvesting it in a subjective system of representation of the
ego, and since he recoded this essence on the residual territoriality of
Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no
longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against
itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this
turning against life, is also the last way in which a depressive and
exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream that it is surviving:
“The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the \emph{preservation} of life \dots{} even
when he \emph{wounds} himself, this master of destruction, of
self-destructing—the very wound itself compels him \emph{to live}\dots{}.”\footnote{Nietzsche, \emph{On the Genealogy of Morals}, II, 13.} It
is Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of decay
and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier,
that makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life. Desire is
in itself not a desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives
and produces, that engineers. (For how could what is in life still
desire life? Who would want to call that a desire?) But desire must turn
back against itself in the name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the
weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananke; desire must
produce its shadow or its monkey, and find a strange artificial force
for vegetating in the void, at the heart of its own lack. For better
days to come? It must—but who talks in this way? what abjectness—become
a desire to be loved, and worse, a sniveling desire to have been loved,
a desire that is reborn of its own frustration: no, daddy-mommy didn’t
love me enough. Sick desire stretches out on the couch, an artificial
swamp, a little earth, a little mother. “Look at you, stumbling and
staggering with no use in your legs\dots{}. And it’s nothing but your wanting
to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes
your knees go all ricky.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, \emph{Aaron’s Rod} (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 101.} Just as there are two stomachs for the
ruminant, there must also exist two abortions, two castrations for sick
desire: once in the family, in the familial scene, with the knitting
mother; another time in an asepticized clinic, in the psychoanalytic
scene, with specialist artists who know how to handle the death instinct
and “bring off” castration, “bring off” frustration.


Is this really the right way to bring on better days? And aren’t all the
destructions performed by schizoanalysis worth more than this
psychoanalytic conservatory, aren’t they more a part of an affirmative
task? “Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides and
try to think up something different \dots{} if you realize that he is not a
god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions,
frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom
[=code] but a wanderer, along the
[deterritorialized] path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a
sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your
own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice [Numen]. To confess,
to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing it
doesn’t cost you a penny. Not only does it cost nothing—you actually
enrich others (instead of infecting them)\dots{}. The phantasmal world is the
world which has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of the
past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like
dragging a ball and chain\dots{}. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime
of not living life to the full.”\footnote{Henry Miller, \emph{Sexus} (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 429–30 (words in brackets added). One would do well to consult the exercises of comic psychoanalysis in \emph{Sexus}.} You weren’t born Oedipus, you
caused it to grow in yourself; and you aim to get out of it through
fantasy, through castration, but this in turn you have caused to grow in
Oedipus—namely, in yourself: the horrible circle. Shit on your whole
mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. What does schizoanalysis
ask? Nothing more than a bit of a \emph{relation to the outside}, a little
real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical
incompetence—the right to enter the analyst’s office and say it smells
bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego.


Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his “discovery” of the
death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of capitalist
war. More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of
psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of
hesitation. What we have tried to show apropos of capitalism is how it
inherited much from a transcendent death-carrying agency, the despotic
signifier, but also how it brought about this agency’s effusion in the
full immanence of its own system: the full body, having become that of
capital-money, suppresses the distinction between production and
antiproduction; everywhere it mixes antiproduction with the productive
forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits
(the axiomatic). The death enterprise is one of the principal and
specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism. It is
this itinerary that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the
death instinct: the death instinct is now only pure silence in its
transcendent distinction from life, but it effuses all the more,
throughout all the immanent combinations it forms with this same life.
Absorbed, diffuse, immanent death is the condition formed by the
signifier in capitalism, the empty locus that is everywhere displaced in
order to block the schizophrenic escapes and place restraints on the
flights.


The only modern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for
work, brought back to reason. In this sense the primitive and the
barbarian, with their ways of coding death, are children in comparison
to modern man and his axiomatic (so many unemployed are needed, so many
deaths, the Algerian War doesn’t kill more people than weekend
automobile accidents, planned death in Bengal, etc.). Modern man “raves
to a far greater extent. His delirium is a switchboard with thirteen
telephones. He gives his orders to the world. He doesn’t care for the
ladies. He is brave, too. He is decorated like crazy. In man’s game of
chance the death instinct, the silent instinct is decidedly well placed,
perhaps next to egoism. It takes the place of zero in roulette. The
house always wins. So too does death. The law of large numbers works for
death.”\footnote{L.-F. Céline, in \emph{L’Herne}, no. 3, p. 171.} It is now or never that we must take up a problem we had
left hanging. Once it is said that capitalism works on the basis of
decoded flows as such, how is it that it is infinitely further removed
from desiring-production than were the primitive or even the barbarian
systems, which nonetheless code and overcode the flows? Once it is said
that desiring-production is itself a decoded and deterritorialized
production, how do we explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its
statistics, performs an infinitely vaster repression of this production
than do the preceding régimes, which nonetheless did not lack the
necessary repressive means? We have seen that the molar statistical
aggregates of social production were in a variable relationship of
affinity with the molecular formations of desiring-production. What must
be explained is that the capitalist aggregate is the least affinal, at
the very moment it decodes and deterritorializes with all its might.


The answer is the death instinct, if we call instinct in general the
conditions of life that are historically and socially determined by the
relations of production and antiproduction in a system. We know that
molar social production and molecular desiring-production must be
evaluated both from the viewpoint of their identity in nature and from
the viewpoint of their difference in régime. But it could be that these
two aspects, nature and régime, are in a sense potential and are
actualized only in inverse proportion. Which means that where the
régimes are the closest, the identity in nature is on the contrary at
its minimum; and where the identity in nature appears to be at its
maximum, the régimes differ to the highest degree. If we examine the
primitive or the barbarian constellations, we see that the subjective
essence of desire as production is referred to large objectities, to the
territorial or the despotic body, which act as natural or divine
preconditions that thus ensure the coding or the overcoding of the flows
of desire by introducing them into systems of representation that are
themselves objective. Hence it can be said that the identity in nature
between the two productions is completely hidden there: as much by the
difference between the objective socius and the subjective full body of
desiring-production, as by the difference between the qualified codes
and overcodings of social production and the chains of decoding or of
deterritorialization belonging to desiring-production, and by the entire
repressive apparatus represented in the savage prohibitions, the
barbarian law, and the rights of antiproduction. And yet the difference
in régime, far from being accentuated and deepened, is on the contrary
reduced to a minimum, because desiring-production as an absolute limit
remains an exterior limit, or else stays unoccupied as an internalized
and displaced limit, with the result that the machines of desire operate
on this side of their limit within the framework of the socius and its
codes. That is why the primitive codes and even the despotic overcodings
testify to a polyvocity that functionally draws them nearer to a chain
of decoding of desire: the parts of the desiring-machine function in the
very workings of the social machine; the flows of desire enter and exit
through the codes that continue, however, to inform the model and
experience of death that are elaborated in the unity of the
sociodesiring-apparatus. And it is even less a question of the death
instinct to the extent that the model and the experience are better
coded in a circuit that never stops grafting the desiring-machines onto
the social machine and implanting the social machine in the
desiring-machines. Death comes all the more from without as it is coded
from within. This is especially true of the system of cruelty, where
death is inscribed in the primitive mechanism of surplus value as well
as in the movement of the finite blocks of debt. But even in the system
of despotic terror, where debt becomes infinite and where death
experiences an elevation that tends to make of it a \emph{latent} instinct,
there nonetheless subsists a model in the overcoding law, and an
experience for the overcoded subjects, at the same time as
antiproduction remains separate as the share owing to the overlord.


Things are very different in capitalism. Precisely because the flows of
capital are decoded and deterritorialized flows; precisely because the
subjective essence of production is revealed in capitalism; precisely
because the limit becomes internal to capitalism, which continually
reproduces it, and also continually occupies it as an internalized and
displaced limit; precisely for these reasons, the identity in nature
must appear for itself between social production and
desiring-production. But in its turn, this identity in nature, far from
favoring an affinity in régime between the two modes of production,
increases the difference in régime in a catastrophic fashion, and
assembles an apparatus of repression the mere idea of which neither
savagery nor barbarism could provide us. This is because, on the basis
of a general collapse of the large objectifies, the decoded and
deterritorialized flows of capitalism are not recaptured or co-opted,
but directly apprehended in a codeless axiomatic that consigns them to
the universe of subjective representation. Now this universe has as its
function the splitting of the subjective essence (the identity in
nature) into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private
property that reproduces the ever wider interior limits, and that of
abstract desire alienated in the privatized family that displaces the
ever narrower internalized limits. The double alienation—labor-desire—is
constantly increasing and deepening the difference in régime at the
heart of the identity in nature. At the same time that death is decoded,
it loses its relationship with a model and an experience, and becomes an
instinct; that is, it effuses in the immanent system where each act of
production is inextricably linked to the process of antiproduction as
capital. There where the codes are undone, the death instinct lays hold
of the repressive apparatus and begins to direct the circulation of the
libido. A mortuary axiomatic. One might then believe in liberated
desires, but ones that, like cadavers, feed on images. Death is not
desired, but what is desired is dead, already dead: images. Everything
labors in death, everything wishes for death. In truth, capitalism has
nothing to co-opt; or rather, its powers of co-option coexist more often
than not with what is to be co-opted, and even anticipate it. (How many
revolutionary groups \emph{as such} are already in place for a co-option that
will be carried out only in the future, and form an apparatus for the
absorption of a surplus value not even produced yet—which gives them
precisely an apparent revolutionary position.) In a world such as this,
there is no living desire that could not of itself cause the system to
explode, or that would not make the system dissolve at one end where
everything would end up following behind and being swallowed up—a
question of régime.


Here are the desiring-machines, with their three parts: the working
parts, the immobile motor, the adjacent part; their three forms of
energy: Libido, Numen, and Voluptas; and their three syntheses: the
connective syntheses of partial objects and flows, the disjunctive
syntheses of singularities and chains, and the conjunctive syntheses of
intensities and becomings. The schizoanalyst is not an interpreter, even
less a theater director; he is a mechanic, a micromechanic. There are no
excavations to be undertaken, no archaeology, no statues in the
unconscious: there are only stones to be sucked, a la Beckett, and other
machinic elements belonging to deterritorialized constellations. The
task of schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject’s
desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts
of energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows,
what chains, and what becomings in each case. Moreover, this positive
task cannot be separated from indispensable destructions, the
destruction of the molar aggregates, the structures and representations
that prevent the machine from functioning. It is not easy to rediscover
the molecules—even the giant molecule—their paths, their zones of
presence, and their own syntheses, amid the large accumulations that
fill the preconscious, and that delegate their representatives in the
unconscious itself, thereby immobilizing the machines, silencing them,
trapping them, sabotaging them, cornering them, holding them fast. \emph{In
the unconscious it is not the lines of pressure that matter, but on the
contrary the lines of escape}. The unconscious does not apply pressure
to consciousness; rather, consciousness applies pressure and
strait-jackets the unconscious, to prevent its escape. As to the
unconscious, it is like the Platonic opposite whose opposite draws near:
it flees or it perishes. What we have tried to show from the outset is
how the unconscious productions and formations were not merely repelled
by an agency of psychic repression that would enter into compromises
with them, but actually covered over by antiformations that disfigure
the unconscious in itself, and impose on it causations, comprehensions,
and expressions that no longer have anything to do with its real
functioning: thus all the \emph{statues}, the Oedipal images, the phantasmal
**mises en scène*, the Symbolic of castration, the effusion of the death
instinct, the perverse reterritorializations. So that one can never, as
in an interpretation, read the repressed through and in the repression,
since the latter is constantly inducing a false image of the thing it
represses: illegitimate and transcendent uses of the syntheses according
to which the unconscious can no longer operate in accordance with its
own constituent machines, but merely “represent” what a repressive
apparatus gives it to represent. It is the very form of interpretation
that shows itself to be incapable of attaining the unconscious, since it
gives rise to the inevitable illusions (including the structure and the
signifier) by means of which the conscious makes of the unconscious an
image consonant with its wishes: we are still pious, psychoanalysis
remains in the precritical age.


Doubtless these illusions would not take hold if they did not benefit
from a coincidence and a support in the unconscious itself that ensures
the “hold.” We have seen what this support was: primal repression, as
exerted by the body without organs at the moment of repulsion, at the
heart of molecular desiring-production. Without this primal repressions
psychic repression in the proper sense of the word could not be
delegated in the unconscious by the molar forces and thus crush
desiring-production. Repression properly speaking profits from an
occasion without which it could not interfere in the machinery of
desire.\footnote{Ibid.} In contrast to psychoanalysis, which itself falls into the
trap while causing the unconscious to fall into its trap, schizoanalysis
follows the lines of escape and the machinic indices all the way to the
desiring-machines. If the essential aspect of the destructive task is to
undo the Oedipal trap of repression properly speaking, and all its
dependencies, each time in a way adapted to the “case” in question, the
essential aspect of the first positive task is to ensure the machinic
conversion of primal repression, there too in an adapted variable
manner. Which is to say: undoing the blockage or the coincidence on
which the repression properly speaking relies; transforming the apparent
opposition of repulsion (the body without organs\Slash{}the machines-partial
objects) into a condition of real functioning; ensuring this functioning
in the forms of attraction and production of intensities; thereafter
integrating the failures in the attractive functioning, as well as
enveloping the zero degree in the intensities produced; and thereby
causing the desiring-machines to start up again. Such is the delicate
and focal point that fills the function of transference in
schizoanalysis—dispersing, schizophrenizing the perverse transference of
psychoanalysis.

\section{5. The Second Positive Task}
\hyperdef{amuse}{chapter-4-section-5}{}%
\label{textamuse:chapter-4-section-5}%


We cannot however allow the difference in régime to make us forget the
identity in nature. There are fundamentally two poles; but we would not
be satisfied if we had to present them merely as the duality of the
molar formations and the molecular formations, since there is not one
molecular formation that is not by itself an investment of a molar
formation. There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social
machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without
the desiring-machines that inhabit them on a small scale. Nor is there
any molecular chain that does not intercept and reproduce whole blocks
of molar code or axiomatic, nor any such blocks that do not contain or
seal off fragments of molecular chain. A sequence of desire is extended
by a social series, or a social machine contains desiring-machine parts
within its workings. The desiring micromultiplicities are no less
collective than the large social aggregates; they are strictly
inseparable and constitute one and the same process of production. From
this point of view, the duality of the poles passes less between the
molar and the molecular than to the interior of the molar social
investments, since \emph{in any case} the molecular formations are such
investments. That is why our terminology concerning the two poles has
necessarily varied. At times we contrasted the molar and the molecular
as the paranoiac, signifying, and structured lines of integration, and
the schizophrenic, machinic, and dispersed lines of escape; or again as
the staking out of the perverse reterritorializations, and as the
movement of the schizophrenic deterritorializations. At other times, on
the contrary, we contrasted them as the two major types of equally
social investments: the one sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a
reactionary or fascist tendency; the other nomadic and polyvocal, and of
a revolutionary tendency. In fact, in the schizoid declaration—“I am of
a race inferior for all eternity,” “I am a beast, a black,” “We are all
German Jews”—the historico-social field is no less invested than in the
paranoiac formula: “I am one of your kind, from the same place as you, I
am a pure Aryan, of a superior race for all time.”


From the viewpoint of the unconscious libidinal investment, all the
oscillations from one formula to the other are possible. How can this
be? How can the schizophrenic escape, with its molecular dispersion,
form an investment that is as strong and determined as the other? And
why are there two types of social investment that correspond to the two
poles? The answer is that everywhere there exist the molecular \emph{and} the
molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which
varies only according to the two directions of subordination, according
as the molecular phenomena are subordinated to the large aggregates, or
on the contrary subordinate them to themselves. At one of the poles the
large aggregates, the large forms of gregariousness, do not prevent the
flight that carries them along, and they oppose to it the paranoiac
investment only as an “escape in advance of the escape.” But at the
other pole, the schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in
withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the
social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at
it and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting
the molecular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall
what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the
conversion of schizophrenia as a process into an effectively
revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first of all the one
who can no longer bear “all that”: money, the stock market, the death
forces, Nijinsky said—values, morals, homelands, religions, and private
certitudes? There is a whole world of difference between the schizo and
the revolutionary: the difference between the one who escapes, and the
one who knows how to make what he is escaping escape, collapsing a
filthy drainage pipe, causing a deluge to break loose, liberating a
flow, resecting a schiz. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the
schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the
interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for
revolution. To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer:
what is not escape \emph{and social investment at the same time}? The choice
is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counterescape that motivates
all the conformist, reactionary, and fascisizing investments, and the
schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary investment.
Maurice Blanchot speaks admirably of this revolutionary escape, this
fall that must be thought and carried out as the most positive of
events: “What is this escape? The word is poorly chosen to please.
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live
tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals,
homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and
our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns
as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and
at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this immense flight
that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing
of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great
immobile movement. An escape in advance of the escape. [Consider the
example of one of these men] who, having had the revelation of the
mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false
pretences of residence. First he tries to take this movement as his own.
He would like to personally withdraw. He lives on the fringe\dots{}. [But]
perhaps that is what the fall is, that it can no longer be a personal
destiny, but the common lot.”\footnote{Maurice Blanchot, \emph{L’amitié} (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 232–33.} In this regard, the first thesis of
schizoanalysis is this: every investment is social, and in any case
bears upon a sociohistorical field.


Let us recall the major traits of a molar formation or of a form of
gregariousness (\emph{herd instinct}). They effect a unification, a
totalization of the molecular forces through a statistical accumulation
obeying the laws of large numbers. This unity can be the biological
unity of a \emph{species} or the structural unity of a socius: an organism,
social or living, is composed as a whole, as a global or complete
object. It is in relation to this new order that the partial objects of
a molecular order appear as a lack, at the same time that the whole
itself is said to be lacked by the partial objects. In this way desire
will be fused to lack. The myriad breaks-flows that determine the
positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity are fitted over vacuoles
of lack that perform this fusion in a statistical constellation of a
molar order. Freud demonstrated clearly in this respect how one went
from psychotic multiplicities of dispersion, founded on the breaks or
schizzes, to large vacuoles determined globally, of the neurosis and
castration type: the neurotic needs a global object in relation to which
the partial objects can be determined as a lack, and inversely.\footnote{See Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in \emph{Collected Papers}, Vol. 4, pp. 131–34: the two uses made of the sock—the psychotic use that treats it as a molecular multiplicity of stitches, and the neurotic use that treats it as a global object and molar lack.} But
on a more general level, the statistical transformation of molecular
multiplicity into a molar constellation is what organizes lack on a
large scale. Such an organization belongs essentially to the biological
or social organism—species or socius. There is no society that does not
arrange lack in its midst, by variable means peculiar to it. (These
means are not the same, for example, in a despotic type of society, or
in a capitalist society where the market economy raises them to a degree
of perfection unknown before capitalism.) This welding of desire to lack
is precisely what gives desire collective and personal ends, goals or
intentions—instead of desire taken in the real order of its production,
which behaves as a molecular phenomenon devoid of any goal or intention.


Nor must it be thought that the statistical accumulation results from
chance, or that it is a random result. This accumulation is on the
contrary the fruit of a selection exerting its force on the elements of
chance. When Nietzsche says that the selection is most often exerted \emph{in
favor of the large number}, he inaugurates a fundamental intuition that
will inspire modern thought. For what he means is that the large numbers
or the large aggregates do not exist prior to a selective pressure that
might elicit singular lines from them, but that, quite on the contrary,
these large numbers and aggregates are born of this selective pressure
that crushes, eliminates, or regularizes the singularities. Selection
does not presuppose a primary gregariousness; gregariousness presupposes
the selection and is born of it. “Culture” as a selective process of
marking or inscription invents the large numbers in whose favor it is
exerted. That is why statistics is not functional but structural, and
concerns chains of phenomena that selection has already placed in a
state of partial dependence (the Markov chains). This can even be seen
in the genetic code. In other terms, forms of gregariousness are never
indifferent: they refer back to the qualified forms that produce them by
creative selection. The order is not: gregariousness → selection, but on
the contrary, molecular multiplicity → forms of selection performing the
selection → molar or gregarious aggregates that result from this
selection.


What are these qualified forms—“formations of sovereignty,” as Nietzsche
said—that play the role of totalizing, unifying, signifying objectities,
that assign organizations, lacks, and goals? The full bodies determine
the different modes of the socius, veritable heavy aggregates of the
earth, the despot, and capital. Full bodies or clothed substances, which
are distinguished from the full body without organs or the naked matter
of molecular desiring-production.\footnote{For a first formulation of this notion of clothed and naked matter in terms of the repetition of difference and the Eternal Return, see the conclusion of Gilles Deleuze, \emph{Différence et répétition} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). (\emph{Translators’ note.})} If we wonder where these forms of
**force* come from, it is evident that they are not to be explained in
terms of any goal or end, since they are what determines goals and ends.
The form or quality of a given socius—the body of the earth, the body of
the despot, the body of capital-money—depends on a state or degree of
intensive development of the productive forces, insofar as these forces
define a man-nature independent of all the social formations, or rather
common to them all (what the Marxists term “the givens of useful
labor”). The form or quality of the socius is therefore itself produced,
but as the unengendered—that is, as the natural or divine precondition
of production corresponding to a given degree to which it affixes a
structural unity and apparent goals, to which it falls back, and whose
forces it appropriates, thereby determining the selections, the
accumulations, and the attractions without which these forces would not
assume a social character. It is indeed in this sense that social
production is desiring-production itself \emph{under determinate conditions}.
These determinate conditions are thus the forms of gregariousness as a
socius or full body, under whose effect the molecular formations
constitute molar aggregates.


Now we can present the second thesis of schizoanalysis: within the
social investments we will distinguish the unconscious libidinal
investment of group or desire, and the preconscious investment of class
or interest. The latter passes by way of the large social goals, and
concerns the organism and the collective organs, including the arranged
vacuoles of lack. A class is defined by a régime of syntheses, a state
of global connections, exclusive disjunctions, and residual conjunctions
that characterize the aggregate being considered. Membership in a class
refers to the role in production or antiproduction, to the place in the
inscription, to the portion that is due the subjects. The preconscious
class interest itself thus refers to the selections of flows, to the
detachments of codes, to the subjective remains or revenues. And from
this viewpoint it is indeed true that an aggregate comprises
**practically* only a single class, that class which has an interest in a
given régime. The other class can constitute itself only by a
counterinvestment that creates its own interest in terms of new social
aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.
Whence the necessity for the other class to be represented by a party
apparatus that assigns these aims and means, and effects a revolutionary
break in the preconscious domain—the Leninist break, for example. In
this domain of preconscious investments of class or interest it is
therefore easy to distinguish what is reactionary or reformist, or what
is revolutionary. But those who have an interest, in this sense, are
always of a smaller number than those whose interest, in some fashion,
“is had” or represented: the class from the standpoint of praxis is
infinitely less numerous or less extensive than the class taken in its
theoretical determination. Whence the subsisting contradictions within
the dominant class, i.e., the class pure and simple. This is obvious in
the capitalist régime where, for example, primitive accumulation can
take place only for the benefit of a restricted fraction of the whole of
the dominant class.\footnote{* Maurice Dobb, \emph{Studies in the Development of Capitalism} (see Ch. 3, reference note 70), p. 178: “There are reasons why the full flowering of industrial capitalism demands, not only a transfer of titles to wealth into the hands of the bourgeois class, but a concentration of the ownership of wealth into much fewer hands.”} But it is just as obvious for the Russian
Revolution, with its formation of a party apparatus.


This situation is not at all adequate, however, for resolving the
following problem: why do many of those who have or should have an
objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a
reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest
is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary
investment? Must we invoke in the one case a thirst for justice, a just
ideological position, as well as a correct and just view; and in the
other case a blindness, the result of an ideological deception or
mystification? Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to
recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty.
Here as elsewhere, the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that
hides the real problems, which are always of an organizational nature.
If Reich, at the very moment he raised the most profound of
questions—“Why did the masses desire fascism?”—was content to answer by
invoking the ideological, the subjective, the irrational, the negative,
and the inhibited, it was because he remained the prisoner of derived
concepts that made him fall short of the materialist psychiatry he
dreamed of, that prevented him from seeing how desire was part of the
infrastructure, and that confined him in the duality of the objective
and the subjective. (Consequently, psychoanalysis was consigned to the
analysis of the subjective, as defined by ideology.) But everything is
objective or subjective, as one wishes. That is not the distinction: the
distinction to be made passes into the economic infrastructure itself
**and into its investments*. Libidinal economy is no less objective than
political economy, and the political no less subjective than the
libidinal, even though the two correspond to two modes of different
investments of the same reality as social reality. There is an
unconscious libidinal investment of desire that does not necessarily
coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and that
explains how the latter can be perturbed and perverted in “the most
somber organization,” below all ideology.


Libidinal investment does not bear upon the régime of the social
syntheses, but upon the degree of development of the forces or the
energies on which these syntheses depend. It does not bear upon the
selections, detachments, and remainders effected by these syntheses, but
upon the nature of the codes and the flows that condition them. It does
not bear upon the social means and ends, but upon the full body as
socius, the formation of sovereignty, or the form of power for itself,
devoid of meaning and purpose, since the meanings and the purposes
derive from it, and not the contrary. It is doubtless true that
interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are
not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal
investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place
rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that
this is where our chances lie—since love drives us on. The manifest
syntheses are merely the preconscious indicators of a degree of
development; the apparent interests and aims are merely the preconscious
exponents of a social full body. As Klossowski says in his profound
commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power is identical with the violence
it exerts by its very absurdity, but it can exert this violence only by
assigning itself aims and meanings in which even the most enslaved
elements participate: “The sovereign formations will have no other
purpose than that of masking the absence of a purpose or a meaning of
their sovereignty by means of the organic purpose of their
creation,”\footnote{Pierre Klossowski, \emph{Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux} (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), pp. 174–75. Klossowski’s commentary on the formations of sovereignty according to Nietzsche (\emph{Herrschaftsgebilde}), their absurd power without purpose, and the ends or meanings they invent for themselves in terms of a degree of development of energy, is essential in every respect.} and the purpose of thereby converting the absurdity into
spirituality. That is why it is so futile to attempt to distinguish what
is rational and what is irrational in a society. To be sure, the role,
the place, and the part one has in a society, and from which one
inherits in terms of the laws of social reproduction, impel the libido
to invest a given socius as a full body—a given absurd power in which we
participate, or have the chance to participate, under the cover of aims
and interests. The fact remains that there exists a disinterested love
of the social machine, of the form of power, and of the degree of
development in and for themselves. Even in the person who has an
interest—and loves them besides with a form of love other than that of
his interest. This is also the case for the person who has no interest,
and who substitutes the force of a strange love for this
counterinvestment. Flows that run on the porous full body of a
socius—these are the object of desire, higher than all the aims. It will
never flow too much, it will never break or code enough—and in that very
way! Oh how beautiful the machine is! The officer of “In the Penal
Colony” demonstrates what an intense libidinal investment of a machine
can be, a machine that is not only technical but social, and through
which desire desires its own repression.


We have seen how the capitalist machine constituted a system of
immanence bordered by a great mutant flow, nonpossessive and
nonpossessed, flowing over the full body of capital and forming an
absurd power. Everyone in his class and his person receives something
from this power, or is excluded from it, insofar as the great flow is
converted into incomes, incomes of wages or of enterprises that define
aims or spheres of interest, selections, detachments, and portions. But
the investment of the flow itself and its axiomatic, which to be sure
requires no precise knowledge of political economy, is the business of
the unconscious libido, inasmuch as it is presupposed by the aims. We
see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest
with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always
**find* an interest, since it is here that they search for and measure
it. Interest always comes after. Antiproduction effuses in the system:
antiproduction is loved for itself, as is the way in which desire
represses itself in the great capitalist aggregate. Repressing desire,
not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for
oneself—that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy.
Capitalism garners and possesses the force of the aim and the interest
(\emph{power}), but it feels a disinterested love for the absurd and
nonpossessed force of the machine. Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself
or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of
the system. A violence without purpose, a joy, a pure joy in feeling
oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes.
Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken,
fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to
the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving
that has neither an interest nor a purpose. A sort of art for art’s sake
in the libido, a taste for a job well done, each one in his own place,
the banker, the cop, the soldier, the technocrat, the bureaucrat, and
why not the worker, the trade-unionist. Desire is agape.


Not only can the libidinal investment of the social field interfere with
the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the
most exploited, to seek their ends in an oppressive machine, but what is
reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest
does not necessarily coincide with what is reactionary or revolutionary
in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious
investment bears upon new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But
it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido continues to
invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows.
It is all the easier, and the contradiction is all the better masked, as
a state of forces does not prevail over the former state without
preserving or reviving the old full body as a residual and subordinated
territoriality (witness how the capitalist machine revives the despotic
Urstaat, or how the socialist machine preserves a State and market
monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the
libido embraces the new body—the new force that corresponds to the
effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the
preconscious—it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment
is itself revolutionary. For the same breaks do not pass at the level of
the unconscious desires and the preconscious interests. The preconscious
revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a
socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a
formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new
conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with
investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary
in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the
unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without
organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates
in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown
subordination.


The preconscious revolution refers to a new régime of social production
that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the
unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius that
conditions this change as a form of power; it refers within this socius
to the régime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the body
without organs. It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one
case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is
measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into
a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break
is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the
flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape,
and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks. The
most general principle of schizoanalysis is that desire is always
constitutive of a social field. In any case desire belongs to the
infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social
production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But
these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire
is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a
given form of power and gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the
large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on
the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in
this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary
break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics
of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the
second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production
and the position of its multiplicities. It is understandable, therefore,
that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest
and its preconscious investments, but not be so—and even remain fascist
and police-like—from the standpoint of its libidinal investments. Truly
revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply
unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest
never takes the place of a machine of desire.


A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a \emph{subjugated
group}, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a
form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production.
The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already
presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the
subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself
the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value
therefrom; the effusion of antiproduction and death-carrying elements
within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal;
the phenomena of group “superegoization,” narcissism, and hierarchy—the
mechanisms for the repression of desire. A \emph{subject-group}, on the
contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves
revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and
subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production;
productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group
invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a
death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the
symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy
or a group superego. What complicates everything, it is true, is that
the same individuals can participate in both kinds of groups in diverse
ways (Saint-Juste, Lenin). Or the same group can present both
characteristics at the same time, in diverse situations that are
nevertheless coexistent. A revolutionary group can already have
reassumed the form of a subjugated group, yet be determined under
certain conditions to continue to play the role of a subject-group. One
is continually passing from one type of group to the other.
Subject-groups are continually deriving from subjugated groups through a
rupture of the latter: they mobilize desire, and always cut its flows
again further on, overcoming the limit, bringing the social machines
back to the elementary forces of desire that form them.\footnote{* On the group and its rupture or schiz, see Jean-Pierre Faye, “Eclats,” \emph{Change}, no. 7, p. 217: “What counts what is effective in our opinion, is not such and such a group, but rather the dispersion or the Diaspora produced by their splinterings (\emph{éclats}).” Also pp. 212–13, on the necessarily polyvocal character of subject-groups and their writing.}


But inversely, they are also continually closing up again, remodeling
themselves in the image of subjugated groups: re-establishing interior
limits, reforming a great break that the flows will not pass through or
overcome, subordinating the desiring-machines to the repressive
aggregate that they constitute on a large scale. There is a speed of
subjugation that is opposed to the coefficients of transversality. And
what revolution is not tempted to turn against its subject-groups,
stigmatized as anarchistic or irresponsible, and to liquidate them? How
do we combat the deadly inclination that makes a group pass from its
revolutionary libidinal investments to revolutionary investments that
are simply preconscious investments or investments of interest, then to
preconscious investments that are simply reformist? And where do we even
situate such and such a group? Did it ever have revolutionary
unconscious investments? The surrealist group, for example, with its
fantastic subjugation, its narcissism, and its superego? (It can happen
that one lone man functions as a flow-schiz, as a subject-group, through
a break with the subjugated group from which he excludes himself or is
excluded: Artaud-the-schizo). And where do we situate the psychoanalytic
group within this complexity of social investments? Every time we wonder
when it started going bad, it is always necessary to trace further back
in time. Freud as the group superego, an oedipalizing grandfather,
establishing Oedipus as an interior limit, with all kinds of little
Narcissuses around, and Reich-the-marginal, plotting a tangent of
deterritorialization, causing the flows of desire to circulate, smashing
the limit. breaching the wall. But it is not just a matter of literature
or even psychoanalysis. It is a matter of politics—though not, as we
shall see, of a \emph{program}.


The task of schizoanalysis is therefore to reach the investments of
unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are
differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and
insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also
of coexisting with them in opposite modes. In the generation-gap
conflict we hear old people reproach the young, in the most malicious
way, for putting their desires (a car, credit, a loan, girl-boy
relationships) ahead of their interests (work, savings, a good
marriage). But what appears to other people as raw desire still contains
complexes of desire and interest, and a mixture of forms of desire and
of interest that are specifically reactionary and vaguely revolutionary.
The situation is completely muddled. It seems that schizoanalysis can
make use only of indices—the machinic indices—in order to discern, at
the level of groups or individuals, the libidinal investments of the
social field. Now in this respect it is sexuality that constitutes the
indices. Not that the revolutionary capacity can be evaluated in terms
of the objects, the aims, or the sources of the sexual drives animating
an individual or a group; assuredly perversions, and even sexual
emancipation, give no privilege as long as sexuality remains confined
within the framework of the “dirty little secret.” It is in vain that
the secret is published, that one demands one’s right to be heard; it
can even be disinfected, treated in a psychoanalytic or scientific
manner, yet thereby one stands a greater chance of killing desire, or of
inventing forms of liberation for it drearier than the most repressive
prison—as long as one has not succeeded in rescuing sexuality from the
category of secrets, even if public, even if disinfected: i.e., as long
as it has not been rescued from the Oedipal-narcissistic origin imposed
on it as the lie under which it can merely become cynical, shameful, and
mortified. It is a lie to claim to liberate sexuality, and to demand its
rights to objects, aims, and sources, all the while maintaining the
corresponding flows within the limits of an Oedipal code (conflict,
regression, resolution, sublimation of Oedipus), and while continuing to
impose a familialist and masturbatory form or motivation on it that
makes any perspective of liberation futile in advance. For example, no
“gay liberation movement” is possible as long as homosexuality is caught
up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a
relation that ascribes them both to a common Oedipal and castrating
stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two
noncommunicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal
inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of
desire (included disjunctions, local connections, nomadic conjunctions).
In short, sexual repression, more insistent than ever, will survive all
the publications, demonstrations, emancipations, and protests concerning
the liberty of sexual objects, sources, and aims, as long as sexuality
is kept—consciously or not—within narcissistic, Oedipal, and castrating
co-ordinates that are enough to ensure the triumph of the most rigorous
censors, the gray gentlemen mentioned by Lawrence.


Lawrence shows in a profound way that sexuality, including chastity, is
a matter of flows, an infinity of different and even contrary flows.
Everything depends on the way in which these flows—whatever their
object, source, and aim—are coded and broken according to uniform
figures, or on the contrary taken up in chains of decoding that resect
them according to mobile and nonfigurative points (the flows-schizzes).
Lawrence attacks the poverty of the immutable identical images, the
figurative roles that are so many tourniquets cutting off the flows of
sexuality: “fiancée, mistress, wife, mother”—one could just as easily
add “homosexuals, heterosexuals,” etc.—all these roles are distributed
by the Oedipal triangle, father-mother-me, a representative ego thought
to be defined in terms of the father-mother representations, by
fixation, regression, assumption, sublimation—and all of that according
to what rule? The law of the great Phallus that no one possesses, the
despotic signifier prompting the most miserable struggle, a common
absence for all the reciprocal exclusions where the flows dry up,
drained by bad conscience and \emph{ressentiment}. “\dots{}sticking a woman on a
pedestal, or the reverse, sticking her beneath notice; or making a
‘model’ housewife of her, or a ‘model’ mother, or a ‘model’ help-meet.
All mere devices for avoiding any contact with her. A woman is not a
‘model’ anything. She is not even a distinct and definite personality\dots{}.
A woman is a strange soft vibration on the air, going forth unknown and
unconscious, and seeking a vibration of response. Or else she is a
discordant, jarring, painful vibration, going forth and hurting everyone
within range. \emph{And a man the same}.”\footnote{D.H. Lawrence, “We Need One Another,” in \emph{Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence} (New York: The Viking Press, 1936), p. 191.} Let’s not be too quick to make
light of the pantheism of flows present in such texts as this: it is not
easy to de-oedipalize even nature, even landscapes, to the extent that
Lawrence could. The fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and
schizoanalysis is the following: schizoanalysis attains a nonfigurative
and nonsymbolic unconscious, a pure abstract figural dimension
(“abstract” in the sense of abstract painting), flows-schizzes or
real-desire, apprehended below the minimum conditions of identity.


What does psychoanalysis do, and first of all what does Freud do, if not
maintain sexuality under the morbid yoke of the little secret, while
finding medical means for rendering it public, for making it into an
open secret, the analytic Oedipus? We are told, “See here, it’s quite
normal, everybody’s like that,” but one continues to embrace the same
humiliating and degrading conception of sexuality, the same figurative
conception \emph{as the censors}’. It is certain that psychoanalysis has not
made its pictorial revolution. There is a hypothesis dear to Freud: the
libido does not invest the social field as such except on condition that
it be desexualized and sublimated. If he holds so closely to this
hypothesis, it is because he wants above all to keep sexuality in the
limited framework of Narcissus and Oedipus, the ego and the family.
Consequently, every sexual libidinal investment having a social
dimension seems to him to testify to a pathogenic state, a “fixation” in
narcissism, or a “regression” to Oedipus and to the pre-oedipal stages,
by means of which homosexuality will be explained as a reinforced drive,
and paranoia as a means of defense.\footnote{Sigmund Freud, \emph{Three Case Histories} (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970), p. 162.} We have seen on the contrary
that what the libido invested, through its loves and sexuality, was the
social field itself in its economic, political, historical, racial, and
cultural determinations: in delirium the libido is continually
re-creating History, continents, kingdoms, races, and cultures. Not that
it is advisable to put historical representations in the place of the
familial representations of the Freudian unconscious, or even the
archetypes of a collective unconscious. It is merely a question of
ascertaining that our choices in matters of love are at the crossroads
of “vibrations,” which is to say that they express connections,
disjunctions, and conjunctions of flows that cross through a society,
entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or
contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born. Africas and
Orients, always following the underground thread of the libido. Not
geohistorical figures or statues, although our apprenticeship is more
readily accomplished with these figures, with books, histories, and
reproductions, than with our mommy. But flows and codes of socius that
do not portray anything, that merely \emph{designate} zones of libidinal
intensity on the body without organs, and that are emitted, captured,
intercepted by the being that we are then determined to love, like a
point-sign, a singular point in the entire network of the intensive body
that responds to History, that vibrates with it. Never was Freud more
adventurous than in \emph{Gradiva}. In short, our libidinal investments of
the social field, reactionary or revolutionary, are so well hidden, so
unconscious, so well masked by the preconscious investments, that they
appear only in our sexual choices of lovers. A love is not reactionary
or revolutionary, but it is the index of the reactionary or
revolutionary character of the social investments of the libido. The
desiring sexual relationships of man and woman (or of man and man, or
woman and woman) are the index of social relationships between people.
Love and sexuality are the exponents or the indicators, this time
unconscious, of the libidinal investments of the social field. Every
loved or desired being serves as a collective agent of enunciation. And
it is certainly not, as Freud believed, the libido that must be
desexualized and sublimated in order to invest society and its flows; on
the contrary, it is love, desire, and their flows that manifest the
directly social character of the nonsublimated libido and its sexual
investments.


For those looking for a thesis topic on psychoanalysis, one should not
suggest vast considerations on analytic epistemology, but modest and
rigorous topics such as the theory of maids or domestic servants in
Freud’s thought. There are some real indices in such areas. On the
subject of maids—who are present everywhere in the cases studied by
Freud—there occurs an exemplary hesitation in Freudian thought, a
hesitation too quickly resolved in favor of what was to become a dogma
of psychoanalysis. Philippe Girard, in unpublished remarks that seem to
us to have a wide application, situates the problem at several levels.
In the first place, Freud discovers “his own” Oedipus in a complex
social context that brings into play the older half brother from the
rich side of the family, and the thievish maid as the poor woman.
Secondly, the familial romance and fantasy activity in general will be
presented by Freud as a veritable drift of the social field, where one
substitutes persons of a \emph{higher or lower rank} for the parents (the son
of a princess kidnapped by gypsies, or the son of a poor man taken in by
bourgeois); Oedipus was already doing this when he claimed a low birth
of servant parents. Thirdly, the Rat Man not only installs his neurosis
in a social field determined from one end to the other as military, he
not only makes it revolve around a form of torture originating in the
Orient, but also in this very field he causes his neurosis to oscillate
between two poles constituted by \emph{the rich woman and the poor woman},
under the effect of a strange unconscious communication with the
unconscious of the father. Lacan was the first to emphasize these
themes, which were enough to challenge the whole of Oedipus; and he
shows the existence of a “social complex” where the subject at times
attempts to assume his own role—but at the price of a splitting of the
sexual object into a rich woman and a poor woman—and at other times
ensures the unity of the object, but this time at the price of a
splitting of “his own social function” at the other extremity of the
chain. Fourthly, the Wolf Man demonstrates a marked taste for the poor
woman: the peasant girl on all fours washing some clothes, or the
servant scrubbing the floor.\footnote{On the first point, Ernest Jones, \emph{The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud} (New York: Basic Books, 1953), Vol. 1, Ch. 1. For the second point, Freud, “The Familial Romance of the Neuroses” (1909). For the third point. \emph{The Rat Man}, passim, and Jacques Lacan, “Le mythe individuel du névrosé,” \emph{C.D.U.}, pp. 7–18 (and p. 25 on the necessity of a “critique of the entire system of Oedipus”). For the fourth point, see Freud, “The Wolf Man,” \emph{Three Case Histories}, pp. 205, 285, 286.}


The fundamental problem with regard to these texts is the following:
must we see, in all these \emph{sexual-social} investments of the libido and
these object choices, mere dependences of a familial Oedipus? Must we
save Oedipus at all costs by interpreting these investments and object
choices as defenses against incest? (Thus the familial romance, or
Oedipus’s own wish to have been born of poor parents who would cleanse
him of his crime.) Must these be understood as compromises and
substitutes for incest? (Thus in “The Wolf Man,” the peasant girl as a
substitute for the sister, having the same name as she, or the girl on
hands and knees, working, as a substitute for the mother surprised in
the coitus scene; and in \emph{The Rat Man}, the disguised repetition of the
paternal situation, making it possible to enrich or impregnate Oedipus
with a fourth “symbolic” term charged with accounting for the splittings
through which the libido invests the social field.) Freud makes a firm
choice of this last direction; all the more firm in that, according to
his own confession, he wants to set things straight with Jung and Adler.
And after having ascertained in the Wolf Man case the existence of an
“intention of debasing” the woman as love object, he concludes that it
is merely a matter of a “rationalization,” and that the “true underlying
determination” almost always leads us back to the sister, to the mommy,
considered as the only “purely erotic motives”! Taking up the eternal
refrain of Oedipus, the eternal lullaby, he writes: “A child pays no
regard to social distinctions, which have little meaning for it as yet;
and it classes people of inferior rank with its parents if they love it
as its parents do.”\footnote{Freud, \emph{Three Case Histories}, p. 291. See also pp. 205, 286.}


We always fall back into the false alternative where Freud was led by
Oedipus, and then confirmed in this position by his controversy with
Adler and Jung: either, he says, you will abandon the sexual position of
the libido in favor of an individual and social will to power, or in
favor of a prehistoric collective unconscious—or you will recognize
Oedipus, making of it the sexual abode of the libido, and you will make
daddy-mommy into “the purely erotic motive.” Oedipus: the touchstone of
the pure psychoanalyst, on which to sharpen the sacred blade of a
**successful castration*. Yet what was the other direction, glimpsed for
a moment by Freud apropos of the familial romance, before the Oedipal
trapdoor slams shut? It is the direction rediscovered, at least
hypothetically, by Philippe Girard: there is no family where vacuoles
are not arranged, and where extrafamilial breaks are not manifest, by
means of which the libido is engulfed in order to sexually invest the
nonfamilial—i.e., \emph{the other class} as determined under the empirical
rubrics of the “richest and the poorest,” and sometimes both at once.
Wouldn’t the Great Other, indispensable to the position of desire, be
the Social Other, social difference apprehended and invested as the
nonfamily within the family itself? The other class is by no means
grasped by the libido as a magnified or impoverished image of the
mother, but as the foreign, the nonmother, the nonfather, the nonfamily,
**the index of what is nonhuman in sex*, and without which the libido
would not assemble its desiring-machines. Class struggle goes to the
heart of the ordeal of desire. The familial romance is not a derivative
of Oedipus; Oedipus is a drift of the familial romance, and thereby of
the social field. It is not a question of denying the importance of
parental coitus, and the position of the mother; but when this position
makes the mother resemble a floorwasher, or an animal, what authorizes
Freud to say that the animal or the maid stand for the mother,
independently of the social or generic differences, instead of
concluding that the mother also functions as something other than the
mother, and gives rise in the child’s libido to an entire differentiated
social investment at the same time as she opens the way to a relation
with the nonhuman sex? For whether the mother works or not, whether the
mother is from a richer or poorer background than the father, etc., has
to do with breaks and flows that traverse the family, but that overreach
it on all sides and are not familial.


From the start we wonder if the libido knows father-mother, or rather if
it makes the parents function as something entirely different, as agents
of production in relation to other agents in sociodesiring-production.
From the point of view of libidinal investment, parents not only open to
the other, they are themselves countersected and divided by the other
who defamilializes them according to the laws of social production and
desiring-production: the mother herself functions as rich woman or poor
woman, maid or princess, pretty girl or old lady, animal or Blessed
Virgin, and all at once. Everything passes into the machine that causes
the properly familial determinations to disintegrate. What the orphan
libido invests is a field of social desire, a field of production and
antiproduction with its breaks and flows, where the parents are
apprehended in nonparental functions and roles confronting other roles
and other functions. Does this amount to saying that the parents have no
unconscious role as such? Of course they have an unconscious role, but
in two quite specific ways that deprive them even more of their supposed
autonomy. In accordance with the distinction made by embryologists with
regard to the egg between the stimulus and the organizer, parents are
**stimuli having an indifferent value* that trigger the allocation of
gradients or zones of intensity on the body without organs: it is in
relation to the parents that in each case wealth or poverty will be
situated, the relative richest or poorest, as empirical forms of social
difference—so that within this difference the parents again appear,
allocated to such and such a zone, but under a different rubric from
that of parents. And the organizer is the social field of desire, which
alone \emph{designates} the zones of intensity, with all the beings that
populate these zones and determine their libidinal investment. Secondly,
the parents as parents are terms of application that express the
reduction of the social field invested by the libido to a finite
aggregate of destination, where the destination finds nothing but
impasses and blockages consonant with the mechanisms of psychic and
social repression active in this field: Oedipus, such is Oedipus. In
each of these senses, the third thesis of schizoanalysis posits the
primacy of the libidinal investments of the social field over the
familial investment, both in point of fact and by statute: an
indifferent stimulus at the beginning, an extrinsic result at the point
of arrival. The relation to the nonfamilial is always primary: in the
form of sexuality of the field in social production, and the nonhuman
sex in desiring-production (gigantism and dwarfism).


One often has the impression that families have understood the lesson of
psychoanalysis only too well, even from far off or by osmosis, in the
air of the times: \emph{they play at Oedipus}, a sublime alibi. But behind
all this, there is an economic situation: the mother reduced to
housework, or to a difficult and uninteresting job on the outside;
children whose future remains uncertain; the father who has had it with
feeding all those mouths—in short, a fundamental relation to the outside
of which the psychoanalyst washes his hands, too attentive to seeing
that his clients play nice games. Now the economic situation, the
relation to the outside, is what the libido invests and counterinvests
as sexual libido. One gets off on flows and the breaks in these flows.
Let us consider for a moment the motivations that lead someone to be
psychoanalyzed: it involves a situation of economic dependence that has
become unbearable for desire, or full of conflicts for the investment of
desire. The psychoanalyst, who says so many things about the necessity
for money in the cure, remains supremely indifferent to the question of
who is footing the bill. For example, the analysis reveals the
unconscious conflicts of a woman with her husband, but the husband is
paying for his wife’s analysis. This isn’t the only time we encounter
the duality of money, as a structure of external financing and as a
means of internal payment, along with the objective “dissimulation” that
it comprises, essential to the capitalist system. But it is interesting
to find this essential concealment, miniaturized, occupying a place of
honor in the analyst’s office. The analyst talks about Oedipus, about
castration and the phallus, about the necessity of assuming one’s sex,
as Freud says, the human sex, and the necessity for the woman to
renounce her desire for the penis and for the man to renounce his male
protest. We maintain that there is not one woman—more particularly, not
one child—who can as such “assume” her or his situation in a capitalist
society, precisely because this situation has nothing to do with the
phallus and castration, but directly concerns an unbearable economic
dependence. And the woman and the children who succeed in “assuming” do
so only by detours and determinations completely distinct from their
being-woman and their being-child. Nothing to do with the phallus, but
much to do with desire, with sexuality as desire. For the phallus has
never been either the object or the cause of desire, but is itself the
castrating apparatus, the machine for putting lack into desire, for
drying up all the flows, and for making all the breaks \emph{from} the
outside and \emph{from} the Real into one and the same break \emph{with} the
outside, \emph{with} the Real.


Too much always penetrates from the outside, where the analyst is
concerned, too much penetrates into his office. Even the closed familial
scene appears to him to be an excessive outside. He promotes the pure
analytic scene, an office Oedipus and an office castration, that should
be its own reality, its own proof, and that, contrary to the movement,
proves itself only by not working, by being interminable. Psychoanalysis
has become quite a stupefying drug, where the strangest personal
dependence allows the clients to forget, during the time spent in
sessions on the couch, the economic dependencies that drive them there
in the first place (a bit like the way the decoding of flows entails a
reinforcement of bondage). Do these psychoanalysts who are oedipalizing
women, children, blacks, and animals know what they are doing? We dream
of entering their offices, opening the windows and saying, “It smells
stuffy in here—some relation with the outside, if you please.” For
desire does not survive cut off from the outside, cut off from its
economic and social investments and counterinvestments. And if there is,
to use Freud’s terms, a “purely erotic motive,” it is certainly not
Oedipus that harbors it, nor the phallus that actuates it, nor
castration that transmits it. The erotic, the purely erotic motive
pervades the social field, wherever desiring-machines are agglutinated
or dispersed in social machines, and where love-object choices occur at
the meeting place of the two kinds of machine, following lines of escape
or integration. Will Aaron leave with his flute, which is not a phallus,
but a desiring-machine and a process of deterritorialization?


Let us suppose that we are granted everything: it will only be granted
**afterward*. It is only afterward that the libido would invest the
social field, and that it would “participate” in the social and the
metaphysical. Which permits the preservation of the fundamental Freudian
position, according to which the libido must be desexualized in order to
perform such investments, but begins with Oedipus, me, father and mother
(the pre-oedipal stages relating structurally or eschatologically to the
Oedipal organization). We have seen that this conception of the
afterward implied a radical misunderstanding with regard to the nature
of the actual factors. For either the libido is caught up in molecular
desiring-production and knows nothing of persons just as it knows
nothing of the ego—even the most undifferentiated ego of
narcissism—since its investments are already differentiated, but
differentiated according to the prepersonal régime of partial objects,
of singularities, of intensities, of gears and parts of machines of
desire, where one would have a hard time recognizing mother or father or
me (we have seen how contradictory it was to invoke the partial objects,
and to make of them representatives of parental persons or the supports
of familial relations); or on the other hand the libido invests persons
and an ego, but is already caught up in a social production and social
machines that do not merely differentiate them as familial beings, but
as derivatives of the molar aggregate to which they belong under this
other régime.


It is indeed true that the social and the metaphysical arrive at the
same time, in accordance with the two simultaneous meanings of
**process*, as the historical process of social production and as the
metaphysical process of desiring-production. But they do not come
afterward. Lindner’s painting again asserts its presence, where the
turgid little boy has already plugged a desiring-machine into a social
machine, short-circuiting the parents, who can only intervene as agents
of production and antiproduction in one case as in the other. There is
only the social and the metaphysical. If something crops up afterward,
it is certainly not the social and metaphysical investments of the
libido, the unconscious syntheses; rather, on the contrary, it is
Oedipus, narcissism, and the entire series of psychoanalytic concepts.
The factors of production are always “actual,” and are so from the
tenderest age; “actual” does not signify recent as opposed to infantile,
but rather in action, as opposed to what is virtual and will come about
under certain conditions. Oedipus is virtual and reactional. Let us
consider the conditions under which Oedipus arrives: an aggregate of
departure—transfinite, constituted by all the objects, agents, and
relations of sociodesiring-production—is reduced to a finite familial
aggregate as an aggregate of arrival (a minimum of three terms, which
one can and even must augment, but not to infinity). Such an
**application* in fact presupposes a fourth, extrapolated, mobile term,
the symbolic abstract phallus, charged with performing the folding or
the correspondence; but this application effectively operates on the
three persons who constitute the minimum familial constellation, or on
their substitutes—father, mother, child. One does not stop there, since
these three terms tend to be reduced to two, either in the scene of
castration where the father kills the child, or in the scene of the
terrible mother where the mother kills the child or the father. Then
from two we pass to one in narcissism, which in no way precedes Oedipus
but is its product. That is why we speak of an Oedipal-narcissistic
machine, at the end of which the ego encounters its own death, as the
zero term of a pure abolition that has haunted oedipalized desire from
the start, and that is identified now, at the end, as Thanatos. 4, 3, 2,
1, 0—Oedipus is a race for death.


Since the nineteenth century, the study of mental illnesses and madness
has remained the prisoner of the familial postulate and its correlates,
the personological correlate and the egoic postulate (\emph{le postulat
moiïque}). We have seen, following Foucault, how nineteenth-century
psychiatry had conceived of the family as both cause and judge of the
illness, and the closed asylum as an artificial family charged with
internalizing guilt and with instituting responsibility, enveloping
madness no less than its cure in a father-child relationship everywhere
present. In this respect, far from breaking with psychiatry,
psychoanalysis transported its requirements outside the asylum walls,
and first imposed a certain “free,” intensive, phantasmal use of the
family that seemed particularly suited to what was isolated as the
neuroses. But the resistance of the psychoses on the one hand, and the
necessity for taking into account a social etiology on the other hand,
has led psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to redeploy under open
conditions the order of an extended family, which is still believed to
possess the secret of the illness as well as its cure. After the family
has been internalized in Oedipus, Oedipus is externalized in the
symbolic order, in the institutional order, in the community order, the
sectorial order, etc. This progression contains a constant of all modern
attempts at reform. And if this tendency appears in its most naive form
in community psychiatry aimed at adjustment—“the therapeutic return to
the family,” to the identity of persons and the integrity of the ego,
the whole works being blessed by successful castration in a sacred
triangular form—the same tendency in more disguised forms is at work in
other trends. It is not by chance that Lacan’s symbolic order has been
diverted, utilized for grounding a structural Oedipus applicable to
psychosis, and for extending the familial co-ordinates beyond their real
and even imaginary domain. It is not by chance that institutional
analysis has difficulty in maintaining a position against the
reconstitution of artificial families where the symbolic order, embodied
in the institution, re-forms group Oedipuses, with all the lethal
characteristics of the subjugated groups.


What is more, antipsychiatry has sought the secret of a causality at
once social and schizophrenic in the redeployed families. This is
perhaps where the mystification appears most clearly, because
antipsychiatry, by certain of its aspects, was the most suited to break
with the traditional familial reference. What does one see, in fact, in
the American familialist studies pursued by antipsychiatrists?
Completely ordinary families are baptized as schizophrenogenic, as well
as completely ordinary familial mechanisms, and an ordinary familial
logic, i.e., neuroticizing at worst. In so-called schizophrenic familial
monographs everyone easily recognizes his own daddy, his own mommy. For
example, Bateson’s “double impasse” or “double bind”: where is there a
father who doesn’t simultaneously transmit the two contradictory
injunctions—“Let’s be friends, son, I’m the best friend you’ve got,” and
“Watch out, son, don’t treat me like one of your buddies”? There is
nothing there with which to make a schizophrenic. We have seen in this
sense that the double impasse in no way defined a specific
schizophrenogenic mechanism, but merely characterized Oedipus in the
whole of its extension. If there is a veritable impasse, a veritable
contradiction, it is the one into which the researcher himself is led,
when he claims to assign schizophrenogenic social mechanisms, and at the
same time to discover them within the order of the family, which both
social production and the schizophrenic process escape. This
contradiction is perhaps especially perceptible in Laing, because he is
the most revolutionary of the antipsychiatrists. At the very moment he
breaks with psychiatric practice, undertakes assigning a veritable
social genesis to psychosis, and calls for a continuation of the
“voyage” as a process and for a dissolution of the “normal ego,” he
falls back into the worst familialist, personological, and egoic
postulates, so that the remedies invoked are no more than a “sincere
corroboration among parents,” a “recognition of the real persons,” a
discovery of the true ego or self as in Martin Buber.\footnote{R.D. Laing, \emph{Self and Others} (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 113–14, 125.} Even more
than the hostility of traditional authorities, perhaps this is the
source of the actual failure of the antipsychiatric undertakings, of
their co-option for the benefit of adaptational forms of familial
psychotherapy and of community psychiatry, and of Laing’s own retreat to
the Orient. And is it not a contradiction on another level, but
analogous, when some, attempting to hasten the teaching of Lacan, place
it back on a familial and personological axis—whereas Lacan assigns the
cause of desire in a nonhuman “object,” heterogeneous to the person,
below the minimum conditions of identity, escaping the intersubjective
co-ordinates as well as the world of meanings?


Long live the Ndembu, for if we follow the detailed account by the
ethnologist Turner, the Ndembu doctor alone has been able to treat
Oedipus as an appearance, a decor, and to go back to the unconscious
libidinal investments of the social field. Oedipal familialism, even and
especially in its most modern forms, makes impossible the discovery of
what one claims nevertheless to be searching for today:
schizophrenogenic social production. In the first place, it is futile to
affirm that the family expresses more profound social contradictions,
for one confers on it a value as microcosm, gives it the role of a
necessary relay for the transformation of social into mental alienation;
what is more, one acts as if the libido did not directly invest the
social contradictions as such, and in order to awaken, needed these
contradictions translated according to the family code. By that very
fact, one has already substituted a familial causation or expression for
social production, and finds oneself back within the categories of
idealist psychiatry. Whatever one’s stake in all of this, society is
thereby justified: all that remains to contest it with are vague
considerations on the sick nature of the family, or more generally
still, considerations on the modern way of life. One has therefore
glossed over what is essential: that society is schizophrenizing at the
level of its infrastructure, its mode of production, its most precise
capitalist economic circuits; and that the libido invests this social
field, not in a form where it would be expressed and translated by means
of a family-microcosm, but in the form where it causes its nonfamilial
breaks and flows, invested as such, to enter into the family; hence,
that the familial investments are always a result of the sociodesiring
libidinal investments, which alone are primary; finally, that mental
alienation refers directly to these investments and is no less social
than social alienation, which refers for its part to the preconscious
investments of interest.


Not only does one thereby fail to correctly evaluate social production
in its pathogenic nature, but secondly, one also fails to understand the
schizophrenic process in its relationship with the schizophrenic as a
sick person. For one attempts to neuroticize everything. And doubtless
one thus conforms to the family’s mission, which is to produce neurotics
by means of its oedipalization, its system of impasses, its delegated
psychic repression, without which social repression would never find
docile and resigned subjects, and would not succeed in choking off the
flows’ lines of escape. We don’t feel any need to attach the slightest
importance to psychoanalysis’s claim to cure neurosis, since, for it,
curing consists of an infinite maintenance, an infinite resignation, an
accession to desire by way of castration—and of the establishment of
conditions where the subject is able to spread, to pass the sickness to
his offspring, rather than dying celibate, impotent, and masturbatory.
Again, perhaps it will be discovered that \emph{the only incurable is the
neurotic}—whence interminable psychoanalysis. It is a cause for
self-congratulation when one succeeds in transforming a schizo into a
paranoiac or a neurotic. Such a transformation perhaps entails many
misunderstandings. For the schizo is the one who escapes all Oedipal,
familial, and personological references—I’ll no longer say me, I’ll no
longer say daddy-mommy—and he keeps his word. Now the question is,
first, if that is what makes him ill, or if on the contrary that is the
schizophrenic process, which is not an illness, not a “breakdown” but a
“breakthrough,” however distressing and adventurous: breaking through
the wall or the limit separating us from desiring-production, causing
the flows of desire to circulate. Laing’s importance lies in the fact
that, starting from certain intuitions that remained ambiguous in
Jaspers, he was able to indicate the incredible scope of this voyage.
With the result that schizoanalysis would come to nothing if it did not
add to its positive tasks the constant destructive task of
disintegrating the normal ego. Lawrence, Miller, and then Laing were
able to demonstrate this in a profound way: it is certain that neither
men nor women are clearly defined personalities, but rather vibrations,
flows, schizzes, and “knots.” The ego refers to personological
co-ordinates from which it results, persons in their turn refer to
familial co-ordinates, and we shall see what the familial constellation
refers to in order to produce individuals in its turn. The task of
schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their
presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose
and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting,
receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply
the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and
assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group
everyone with others. For everyone is a little group (\emph{un groupuscule})
and must live as such—or rather, like the Zen tea box broken in a
hundred places, whose every crack is repaired with cement made of gold,
or like the church tile whose every fissure is accentuated by the layers
of paint or lime covering it (the contrary of castration, which is
unified, molarized, hidden, scarred, unproductive). Schizoanalysis is so
named because throughout its entire process of treatment it
schizophrenizes, instead of neuroticizing like psychoanalysis.


What makes the schizophrenic ill, since the cause of the illness is not
schizophrenia as a process? What transforms the breakthrough into a
breakdown? It is the constrained arrest of the process, or its
continuation in the void, or the way in which it is forced to take
itself as a goal. We have seen in this sense how social production
produced the sick schizo: constructed on decoded flows that constitute
its profound tendency or its absolute limit, capitalism is constantly
counteracting this tendency, exorcizing this limit by substituting
internal relative limits for it that it can reproduce on an ever
expanding scale, or an axiomatic of flows that subjects this tendency to
the harshest forms of despotism and repression. It is in this sense that
contradiction installs itself not only at the level of the flows that
traverse the social field, but at the level of their libidinal
investments, which form the flows’ constituent parts—between the
paranoiac reconstruction of the Urstaat and the positive schizophrenic
lines of escape. Thereafter three possibilities emerge. First, the
process is arrested, the limit of desiring-production is displaced,
travestied, and now passes over into the Oedipal subaggregate. So the
schizo is effectively neuroticized, and it is this neuroticization that
constitutes his illness, for in any case neuroticization precedes
neurosis, the latter being the result of the former. Or, second, the
schizo resists neuroticization and oedipalization. Even the use of
modern resources, the pure analytic scene, the symbolic phallus,
structural foreclosure, and the name of the father do not succeed in
“taking” on him. (Here again, in these modern resources, what a strange
use is made of Lacan’s discoveries—Lacan, who was the first on the
contrary to schizophrenize the analytic field!) In this second case the
process, confronted with a neuroticization that it resists, but that
suffices to block it on all sides, is led to take itself as an end: a
psychotic is produced who escapes the delegated repression properly
speaking only to take refuge in primal repression, closing the body
without organs around itself and silencing his desiring-machines.
Catatonia rather than neurosis, catatonia rather than Oedipus and
castration—but it is still an effect of neuroticization, a countereffect
of one and the same illness. Or—the third case—the process sets to
turning round in the void. Since it is now a process of
deterritorialization, it can no longer search for and create its new
land. Confronted with Oedipal reterritorialization—an archaic, residual,
ludicrously restricted sphere—it will form still more artificial lands
that, barring an accident, accommodate themselves in one way or another
to the established order: the pervert. After all, Oedipus was already an
artificial sphere, O family! And the resistance to Oedipus, the return
to the body without organs was still an artificial sphere, O asylum! So
that everything is perversion. But everything is psychosis and paranoia
as well, since everything is set in motion by the counterinvestment of
the social field that produces the psychotic. Again, everything is
neurosis, since it is an outcome of the neuroticization that runs
counter to the process. Finally, everything is process, schizophrenia as
process, since it is against schizophrenia that everything is measured;
its peculiar trajectory, its neurotic arrests, its perverse
continuations in the void, its psychotic finalizations.


Inasmuch as Oedipus arises out of an application of the entire social
field to the finite familial figure, it does not imply just any
investment of this field by the libido, but a very particular investment
that renders this application possible and necessary. That is why
Oedipus seemed to us a paranoiac’s idea before being a neurotic’s
feeling. In fact, the paranoiac investment consists in subordinating
molecular desiring-production to the molar aggregate it forms on one
surface of the full body without organs, enslaving it by that very fact
to a form of socius that exercises the function of a full body under
determinate conditions. The paranoiac engineers masses, and is
continually forming large aggregates, inventing heavy apparatuses for
the regimentation and the repression of the desiring-machines. Doubtless
it is not hard for him to appear reasonable, by appealing to collective
interests and goals, reforms to be brought about, sometimes even
revolutions to be made. But madness breaks through, beneath the
reformist investments, or the reactionary and fascist investments, which
assume a reasonable appearance only in the light of the preconscious,
and which animate the strange discourse of an organization of society.
Even its language is demented. Listen to a Secretary of State, a
general, the boss of a firm, a technician. Listen to the great paranoiac
din beneath the discourse of reason that speaks for others, in the name
of the silent majority. The explanation is that, beneath preconscious
goals and interests, a uniquely unconscious investment rises up that
embraces a full body for itself, independently of all aims, and a degree
of development for itself, independently of all reason: that very degree
and no other, don’t take another step; that very socius and no other,
hands off. A disinterested love of the molar machine, a veritable
enjoyment, with all the hatred it contains for those who do not submit
to the molar machine: the entire libido is at stake. From the point of
view of libidinal investment, it is clear that there are few differences
between a reformist, a fascist, and sometimes even certain
revolutionaries, who are distinguished from one another only in a
preconscious fashion, but whose unconscious investments are of the same
type, even when they do not adopt the same body. We can’t go along with
Maud Mannoni when she sees the first historical act of antipsychiatry in
the 1902 decision granting Judge Schreber his liberty and
responsibility, despite the recognized continuation of his delirious
ideas.\footnote{Maud Mannoni, \emph{Le psychiatre, son fou et la psychanalyse} (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), Ch. 7.} There is room for doubting that the decision would have been
the same if Schreber had been schizophrenic rather than paranoiac, if he
had taken himself for a black or a Jew rather than a pure Aryan, if he
had not proved himself so competent in the management of his wealth, and
if in his delirium he had not displayed a taste for the socius of an
already fascisizing libidinal investment. As machines of subjugation,
the social machines give rise to incomparable loves, which are not
explained by their interests, since interests derive from them instead.
At the deepest level of society there is delirium, because delirium is
the investment of a socius as such, beyond goals. And it is not merely
the despot’s body to which the paranoiac lovingly aspires, but the body
of capital-money as well, or a new revolutionary body, the moment it
becomes a form of power and gregariousness. To be possessed by this body
as well as possessing it; to engineer subjugated groups for which one
becomes so many cogs and parts; to insert oneself into the machine to
find there at last the enjoyment of the mechanisms that pulverize
desire—such is the paranoiac experience.


Now Oedipus appears to be a relatively innocent thing, a private kind of
thing to be treated in the analyst’s office. But we ask precisely what
type of unconscious social investment Oedipus presupposes, since
psychoanalysis does not invent Oedipus; psychoanalysis is content to
live off Oedipus, to develop and promote it, and to give it a marketable
medical form. Inasmuch as the paranoiac investment enslaves
desiring-production, it is very important for it that the limit of this
production be displaced, and that it pass to the interior of the socius,
as a limit between two molar aggregates, the social aggregate of
departure and the familial subaggregate of arrival that supposedly
corresponds to it, in such a way that desire is caught in the trap of a
familial psychic repression that comes to double the weight of social
repression. The paranoiac applies his delirium to the family—and to his
own family—but it is first of all a delirium of races, ranks, classes,
and universal history. In short, Oedipus implies within the unconscious
itself an entire reactionary and paranoiac investment of the social
field that acts as an oedipalizing factor, and that can fuel as well as
counteract the preconscious investments. From the standpoint of
schizoanalysis, the analysis of Oedipus therefore consists in tracing
back from the son’s confused feelings to the delirious ideas or the
lines of investment of the parents, of their internalized
representatives and their substitutes: not in order to attain the whole
of a family, which is never more than a locus of application and
reproduction, but in order to attain the social and political units of
libidinal investment. With the result that all familialist
psychoanalysis—with the psychoanalyst at the fore—warrants a
schizoanalysis. Only one way to spend time on the couch: schizoanalyze
the psychoanalyst.


We have maintained throughout that, by dint of their difference in
nature with regard to the preconscious investments of interest, the
unconscious investments of desire had sexuality as an index in their
social scope itself. Which does not mean, of course, that one need only
invest the poor woman, the maid, or the whore to have revolutionary
loves. There are no revolutionary or reactionary loves, which is to say
that loves are not defined by their objects, any more than by the
sources and aims of the desires and the drives. But there are \emph{forms} of
love that are the indices of the reactionary or the revolutionary
character of the investment made by the libido of a sociohistorical or
geographic field, from which the loved and desired beings receive their
definition. Oedipus is one of these forms, the index of a reactionary
investment. And the well-defined figures, the well-identified roles, the
clearly distinct persons, in short the image-models of which Lawrence
spoke—mother, fiancée, mistress, wife, saint or whore, princess and
maid, rich woman and poor woman—are dependents of Oedipus, even in their
reversals and their substitutions. The very form of these images, their
configurations, and the whole of their possible relations are the
product of a code, or of a social axiomatic to which the libido
addresses itself through them. Persons are simulacra derived from a
social aggregate whose code is unconsciously invested for itself. That
is why love and desire exhibit reactionary, or else revolutionary,
indices; the latter emerge on the contrary as nonfigurative indices,
where persons give way to decoded flows of desire, to lines of
vibration, and where the cross-sections of images give way to schizzes
that constitute singular points, points-signs with several dimensions
causing flows to circulate rather than canceling them. Nonfigurative
loves, indices of a revolutionary investment of the social field, and
which are neither Oedipal nor pre-oedipal since it all amounts to the
same thing, but innocently anoedipal, and which give the revolutionary
the right to say, “Oedipus? Never heard of it.” Undoing the form of
persons and the ego, not in behalf of a pre-oedipal undifferentiated,
but in behalf of anoedipal lines of singularities, the
desiring-machines. For there is indeed a sexual revolution, which does
not concern objects, aims, or sources, but only machinic forms or
indices.


The fourth and final thesis of schizoanalysis is therefore the
distinction between two poles of social libidinal investment: the
paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid
revolutionary pole. Once again, we see no objection to the use of terms
inherited from psychiatry for characterizing social investments of the
unconscious, insofar as these terms cease to have a familial connotation
that would make them into simple projections, and from the moment
delirium is recognized as having a primary social content that is
immediately adequate. The two poles are defined, \emph{the one} by the
enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious
aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of
power or selective sovereignty; \emph{the other} by the inverse subordination
and the overthrow of power. \emph{The one} by these molar structured
aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regularize those
that they retain in codes or axiomatics; \emph{the other} by the molecular
multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large
aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations. \emph{The
one} by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the
flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the
limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images
that come to fill the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this
aggregate, \emph{the other} by lines of escape that follow the decoded and
deterritorialized flows, inventing their own nonfigurative breaks or
schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the
territorialized limit that separates them from desiring-production. And
to summarize all the preceding determinations: \emph{the one} is defined by
subjugated groups, \emph{the other} by subject-groups. It is true that we
still run up against all kinds of problems concerning these
distinctions. In what sense does the schizoid investment constitute, to
the same extent as the other one, a real investment of the
sociohistorical field, and not a simple utopia? In what sense are the
lines of escape collective, positive, and creative? What is the
relationship between the two unconscious poles, and what is their
relationship with the preconscious investments of interest?


We have seen that the unconscious paranoiac investment was grounded in
the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the preconscious
aims and interests that it assigns and distributes. The fact remains
that such an investment does not endure the light of day: it must always
hide under assignable aims or interests presented as the general aims
and interests, even though in reality the latter represent only the
members of the dominant class or a fraction of this class. How could a
formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determinate gregarious aggregate,
endure being invested for their brute force, their violence, and their
absurdity? They would not survive such an investment. Even the most
overt fascism speaks the language of goals, of law, order, and reason.
Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic
rationality. And this is necessarily the case, since it is in the
irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons is inextricably
fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that determines it. What is
more, the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as
if devoid of an aim, would be enough to transform it completely, to make
it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to the
schizorevolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished
without overthrowing power, without reversing subordination, \emph{without
returning production itself to desire}: for it is only desire that lives
from having no aim. Molecular desiring-production would regain its
liberty to master in its turn the molar aggregate under an overturned
form of power or sovereignty. That is why Klossowski, who has taken the
theory of the two poles of investment the furthest, but still within the
category of an active utopia, is able to write: “Every sovereign
formation would thus have to foresee the destined moment of its
disintegration\dots{}. No formation of sovereignty, in order to crystalize,
will ever endure this \emph{prise de conscience}: for as soon as this
formation becomes conscious of its immanent disintegration in the
individuals who compose it, these same individuals decompose it\dots{}. By way
of the circuitous route of science and art, human beings have many times
revolted against this fixity; this capacity notwithstanding, the
gregarious impulse in and by science caused this rupture to fail. The
day humans are able to behave as \emph{intentionless phenomena}—for every
intention at the level of the human being always obeys the laws of its
conservation, its continued existence—on that day a new creature will
declare the integrity of existence\dots{}. Science demonstrates by its very
method that the \emph{means} that it constantly elaborates do no more than
reproduce, on the outside, an interplay of forces by themselves \emph{without
aim} or \emph{end} whose combinations obtain such and such a result\dots{}.
However, no science can develop outside a constituted social grouping.
In order to prevent science from calling social groups back in question,
these groups take science back in hand \dots{} [integrate it] into the diverse
industrial schemes; its autonomy appears strictly inconceivable. A
conspiracy joining together art and science presupposes a rupture of all
our institutions and a total upheaval of the means of production\dots{}. If
some conspiracy, according to Nietzsche’s wish, were to use science and
art in a plot whose ends were no less suspect, industrial society would
seem to foil this conspiracy in advance by the kind of \emph{mise en scène}
it offers for it, under pain of effectively suffering what this
conspiracy reserves for this society: i.e., the breakup of the
institutional structures that mask the society into a plurality of
experimental spheres finally revealing the true face of modernity—an
ultimate phase that Nietzsche saw as the end result of the evolution of
societies. In this perspective, art and science would then emerge as
sovereign formations that Nietzsche said constituted the object of his
countersociology—art and science establishing themselves as dominant
powers, on the ruins of institutions.”\footnote{Klossowski, \emph{Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux}, pp. 175, 202–203, 213–14. The opposition between aggregates of gregariousness and multiplicities of singularities is developed throughout this book, and then in Pierre Klossowski, \emph{La monnaie vivante} (Paris: Losfeld, 1970).}


Why this appeal to art and science, in a world where scientists and
technicians and even artists, and science and art themselves, work so
closely with the established sovereignties—if only because of the
structures of financing? Because art, as soon as it attains its own
grandeur, its own genius, creates chains of decoding and
deterritorialization that serve as the foundation for desiring-machines,
and make them function. Take the example of the Venetian School in
painting: at the same time that Venice develops the most powerful
commodity capitalism, bordering an Urstaat, that grants it a large
degree of autonomy, its painting apparently molds itself to a Byzantine
code where even the colors and the lines are subordinated to a signifier
that determines their hierarchy as a vertical order. But toward the
middle of the fifteenth century, when Venetian capitalism confronts the
first signs of its decline, something breaks out in this painting: what
would appear to be another world opens up, an \emph{other} art, where the
lines are deterritorialized, the colors are decoded, and now only refer
to the relations they entertain among themselves, and with one another.
A horizontal or transverse organization of the canvas is born, with
lines of escape or breakthrough. Christ’s body is engineered on all
sides and in all fashions, pulled in all directions, playing the role of
a full body without organs, a locus of connection for all the machines
of desire, a locus of sadomasochistic exercises where the artist’s joy
breaks free. Even homosexual Christs. Organs become direct powers of the
body without organs, and emit flows on it that the myriad wounds, such
as Saint Sebastian’s arrows, come to cut and cut again in such a way as
to produce other flows. Persons and organs cease to be coded according
to hierarchized collective investments; each person, each organ has a
merit all its own, and tends to its own affairs: the infant Jesus looks
from one side while the Virgin Mary listens from the other, Jesus stands
for all the desiring children, the Virgin stands for all the desiring
women, a joyous activity of profanation extends beneath this generalized
privatization. A painter such as Tintoretto paints the creation of the
world like a race represented in its whole length with God Himself on
the sidelines, giving the starting signal across the track as the
figures speed away in a transversal direction. Suddenly a painting by
Lotto surges forth that could just as easily be from the nineteenth
century. And of course this decoding of the flows of painting, these
schizoid lines of escape that form desiring-machines on the horizon, are
taken up again in scraps from the old code, or else introduced into new
codes, and first of all into a properly pictorial axiomatic that chokes
off the escapes, closes the whole constellation to the transversal
relations between lines and colors, and reduces it to archaic or new
territorialities (perspective, for example). So true is it that the
movement of deterritorialization can only be grasped as the reverse side
of territorialities, even the residual, artificial, or factitious ones.
But at least something arose whose force fractured the codes, undid the
signifies, passed under the structures, set the flows in motion, and
effected breaks at the limits of desire: a breakthrough. It does not
suffice to say that the nineteenth century is already there in the
middle of the fifteenth, since the same would have to be said of the
Byzantine code underneath which strange liberated flows were already
circulating. We have seen this in the case of the painter Turner, and
his most accomplished paintings that are sometimes termed “incomplete”:
from the moment there is genius, there is something that belongs to no
school, no period, something that achieves a breakthrough—art as a
**process* without goal, but that attains completion as such.


The codes and their signifiers, the axiomatics and their structures, the
imaginary figures that come to occupy them as well as the purely
symbolic relationships that gauge them, constitute properly aesthetic
molar formations that are characterized by goals, schools, and periods.
They relate these aesthetic formations to greater social aggregates,
finding in them a field of application, and everywhere enslave art to a
great castrating machine of sovereignty. There is a pole of reactionary
investment for art as well, a somber paranoiac-Oedipal-narcissistic
organization. A foul use of painting, centering around the dirty little
secret, even in abstract painting where the axiomatic does without
figures: a style of painting whose secret essence is scatological, an
oedipalizing painting, even when it has broken with the Holy Trinity as
the Oedipal image, a neurotic or neuroticizing painting that makes the
process into a goal or an arrest, an interruption, or a continuation in
the void. This style of painting flourishes today, under the usurped
name of modern painting—a poisonous flower—and brought one of Lawrence’s
heroes to speak much like Henry Miller of the need to have done with
pouring out one’s merciful and pitiful guts, these “flows of corrugated
iron.”\footnote{The authors are referring here to D. H. Lawrence’s “We Need One Another” (see reference note 41 [69 in this version]) and to the comical psychoanalytical scene in Henry Miller’s \emph{Sexus}, pp. 429–31. (\emph{Translators’ revised note.})} The productive breaks projected onto the enormous
unproductive cleavage of castration, the flows that have become flows of
“corrugated iron,” the openings blocked on all sides. And perhaps this,
as we have seen, is where we find the commodity value of art and
literature: a paranoiac \emph{form of expression} that no longer even needs
to “signify” its reactionary libidinal investments, since these
investments function on the contrary as its signifier; an Oedipal \emph{form
of content} that no longer even needs to represent Oedipus, since the
“structure” suffices. But on the other, the schizorevolutionary, pole,
the value of art is no longer measured except in terms of the decoded
and deterritorialized flows that it causes to circulate beneath a
signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the
parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence; a writing with
pneumatic, electronic, or gaseous indifferent supports, and that appears
all the more difficult and intellectual to intellectuals as it is
accessible to the infirm, the illiterate, and the schizos, embracing all
that flows and counterflows, the gushings of mercy and pity knowing
nothing of meanings and aims (the Artaud experiment, the Burroughs
experiment). It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity,
which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its
beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if
aesthetic, and underneath recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that
fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it
proceeds—art as “experimentation.”\footnote{* See all of John Cage’s work, and his book \emph{Silence} (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961): “The word \emph{experimental} is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown” (p. 13) And regarding the active or practical notions of \emph{decoding}, of \emph{deconstruction}, and of the work s \emph{process}, the reader is referred to the excellent commentaries of Daniel Charles on Cage, “Musique et anarchie,” in \emph{Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie}, July 1971, where there is violent anger on the part of some participants in the discussion, reacting to the idea that there is no longer any code.}


And the same will be said of science: the decoded flows of knowledge are
first bound in the properly scientific axiomatics, but these axiomatics
express a bipolar hesitation. One of the poles is the great social
axiomatic that retains from science what must be retained in terms of
market needs and zones of technical innovation: the great social
aggregate that makes the scientific subaggregates into so many
applications that are characteristic of and that correspond to it—in
short, the set of methods that is not content to bring scientists back
to “reason” but anticipates any deviance on their part, imposes a goal
on them, and makes scientists and science into an agency perfectly
subjugated to the formation of sovereignty (for example, the way in
which nondeterminism was only tolerated to a point, then ordered to make
its peace with determinism). But the other pole is the schizoid pole, in
whose proximity flows of knowledge schizophrenize, and not only flee
across the social axiomatic, but pass beyond their own axiomatics,
generating increasingly deterritorialized signs, figures-schizzes that
are no longer either figurative or structured, and reproduce or produce
an interplay of phenomena without aim or end: science as
experimentation, as previously defined. In this domain as in the others,
isn’t there a properly libidinal conflict between a
paranoiac-Oedipalizing element of science, and a schizorevolutionary
element? That very conflict that leads Lacan to say there exists a drama
for the scientist. (“J.R. Mayer, Cantor, I will not draw up an honor
roll of these dramas that sometimes lead to madness\dots{}, a list that could
not include itself in Oedipus, unless it were to call Oedipus in
question.”\footnote{Lacan, \emph{Ecrits}, p. 870.} Since, in point of fact, Oedipus does not intervene in
these dramas as a familial figure or even as a mental structure; its
intervention is determined by an axiomatic acting as an oedipalizing
factor, resulting in a specifically scientific Oedipus.) And in contrast
to Lautreamont’s song that rises up around the
paranoiac-Oedipal-narcissistic pole—“\emph{O rigorous mathematics\dots{}.
Arithmetic! algebra! geometry! imposing trinity! luminous
triangle!}”—there is another song: O schizophrenic mathematics,
uncontrollable and mad desiring-machines!


In the capitalist formation of sovereignty—the full body of
capital-money as the socius—the great social axiomatic has replaced the
territorial codes and the despotic overcodings that characterized the
preceding formations; and a molar, gregarious aggregate has formed,
whose mode of subjugation has no equal. We have seen on what foundations
this aggregate operated: a whole field of immanence that is reproduced
on an always larger scale, that is continually multiplying its axioms to
suit its needs, that is filled with images and with images of images,
through which desire is determined to desire its own repression
(\emph{imperialism}); an unprecedented decoding and deterritorialization,
which institutes a combination as a system of differential relations
between the decoded and deterritorialized flows, in such a way that
social inscription and repression no longer even need to bear directly
upon bodies and persons, but on the contrary precede them (\emph{axiomatic}:
regulation and application); a surplus value determined as a surplus
value of flux, whose extortion is not brought about by a simple
arithmetical difference between two quantities that are homogeneous and
belong to the same code, but precisely by differential relations between
heterogeneous magnitudes that are not raised to the same power: a flow
of capital and a flow of labor as human surplus value in the industrial
essence of capitalism, a flow of financing and a flow of payment or
incomes in the monetary inscription of capitalism, a market flow and a
flow of innovation as machinic surplus value in the operation of
capitalism (\emph{surplus value} as the first aspect of its immanence), a
ruling class that is all the more ruthless as it does not place the
machine in its service, but is the servant of the capitalist machine: in
this sense, a single class, content for its part with drawing incomes
that, however enormous, differ only arithmetically from the workers’
wages-income, whereas this class functions on a more profound level as
creator, regulator, and guardian of the great nonappropriated,
nonpossessed flow, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks
at every step along the way the interior limits of capitalism, their
perpetual displacement, and their reproduction on an always larger scale
(\emph{the movement of interior limits} as the second aspect of the
capitalist field of immanence, defined by the circular relationship
“great flux of financing-reflux of incomes in wages-afflux of raw
profit”); the effusion of antiproduction within production, as the
realization or the absorption of surplus value, in such a way that the
military, bureaucratic, and police apparatus finds itself grounded in
the economy itself, which directly produces libidinal investments for
the repression of desire (\emph{antiproduction} as the third aspect of
capitalist immanence, expressing the twofold nature of capitalism:
production for production’s sake, but under the conditions of capital).


There is not one of these aspects—not the least operation, the least
industrial or financial mechanism—that does not reveal the insanity of
the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its
rationality: not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of
**this* pathological state, \emph{this} insanity, “the machine works too,
believe me”. The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming
mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and
this is the source of its rationality. Marx’s black humor, the source of
**Capital*, is his fascination with such a machine: how it came to be
assembled, on what foundation of decoding and deterritorialization; how
it works, always more decoded, always more deterritorialized; how its
operation grows more relentless with the development of the axiomatic,
the combination of the flows; how it produces the terrible single class
of gray gentlemen who keep up the machine; how it does not run the risk
of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking to the
very end investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive
and subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end.
**Long live capital in all its reality, in all its objective
dissimulation!* Except in ideology, there has never been a humane,
liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty
having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror
having no parallel in the despotic régime of terror. Wage increases and
improvements in the standard of living are realities, but realities that
derive from a given supplementary axiom that capitalism is always
capable of adding to its axiomatic in terms of an enlargement of its
limits: let’s create the New Deal; let’s cultivate and recognize strong
unions; let’s promote participation, the single class; let’s take a step
toward Russia, which is taking so many toward us; etc. But within the
enlarged reality that conditions these islands, exploitation grows
constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways,
final solutions of the “Jewish problem” variety are prepared down to the
last detail, and the Third World is organized as an integral part of
capitalism. The reproduction of the interior limits of capitalism on an
always wider scale has several consequences: it permits increases and
improvements of standards at the center, it displaces the harshest forms
of exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also multiplies
enclaves of overpopulation in the center itself, and easily tolerates
the so-called socialist formations. (It is not kibbutz-style socialism
that troubles the Zionist state, just as it is not Russian socialism
that troubles world capitalism.) There is no metaphor here: the
factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they \emph{are} prisons.


Everything in the system is insane: this is because the capitalist
machine thrives on decoded and deterritorialized flows; it decodes and
deterritorializes them still more, but while causing them to pass into
an axiomatic apparatus that combines them, and at the points of
combination produces pseudo codes and artificial reterritorializations.
It is in this sense that the capitalist axiomatic cannot but give rise
to new territorialities and revive a new despotic Urstaat. The great
mutant flow of capital is pure deterritorialization, but it performs an
equivalent reterritorialization when converted into a reflux of means of
payment. The Third World is deterritorialized in relation to the center
of capitalism but belongs to capitalism, being a pure peripheral
territoriality of capitalism. The system teems with preconscious
investments of class and of interest. And capitalists first have an
interest in capitalism. A statement as commonplace as this is made for
another purpose: capitalists have an interest in capitalism \emph{only}
through the tapping of profits that they extract from it. But no matter
how large the extraction of profits, it does not define capitalism. And
for what does define capitalism, for what conditions profit, theirs is
an investment of desire whose nature—unconscious-libidinal—is altogether
different, and is not simply explained by the conditioned profits, but
on the contrary itself explains that a small-time capitalist, with no
great profits or hopes, fully maintains the entirety of his libidinal
investments: the libido investing the great flow that is not convertible
as such, not appropriated as such—“nonpossession and nonwealth,” in the
words of Bernard Schmitt, who among modern economists has for us the
incomparable advantage of offering a delirious interpretation of an
unequivocally delirious economic system (at least he goes all the way).
In short, a truly unconscious libido, a disinterested love: this machine
is fantastic.


If one keeps in mind the tautological statement made above, one can then
understand that people whose preconscious investments of interest do
not, or should not, go in the direction of capitalism, can maintain an
unconscious libidinal investment consonant with capitalism, or that
scarcely threatens it. In the first case, they confine and localize
their preconscious interest in wage increases and the improvement of the
standard of living; powerful organizations represent them, which get
nasty as soon as the nature of their aims is questioned (“It’s clear
that you’re not workers, you have no idea whatsoever of real struggles,
let’s attack profits for a better management of the system, vote for a
clean Paris—Welcome, Mister Brezhnev”). And how, indeed, could one fail
to find one’s interest in the hole where one has sunk it, at the heart
of the capitalist system? Or else, in the second case, there is truly a
new investment of interest, new aims that presuppose another body than
that of capital-money; those exploited become conscious of their
preconscious interest, and this interest is truly revolutionary—a major
break \emph{from the standpoint of the preconscious}.


But it is not enough for the libido to invest a new social body
corresponding to these new aims, in order for it to perform a
revolutionary break at the unconscious level with the same mode as the
preconscious break. In fact, the two levels do not function in the same
mode. The new socius invested by the libido as a full body can very well
function as an autonomous territoriality, but one that is caught and
wedged in the capitalist machine, and is localizable in the field of its
market. For the great flow of mutant capital repels its limits, adds new
axioms, and maintains desire within the mobile framework of its expanded
limits. There can be a preconscious revolutionary break, with no real
libidinal and unconscious revolutionary break. Or rather the order of
things is as follows: there is first a real libidinal revolutionary
break, which then shifts into the position of a simple revolutionary
break with regard to aims and interests, and finally re-forms a merely
specific reterritoriality, a specific body on the full body of capital.
Subjugated groups are continually deriving from revolutionary
subject-groups. One more axiom. This is no more complicated than in the
case of abstract painting. Everything begins with Marx, continues on
with Lenin, and ends with the refrain, “Welcome, Mister Brezhnev.” Is
this still a case of revolutionaries speaking to another revolutionary,
or rather a village clamoring for a new prefect? And if one were to ask
when it all started to go bad, how far back must we go for an answer,
back to Lenin, back to Marx? So true is it that the various investments,
even when opposed, can coexist with one another in complexes that are
not the province of Oedipus, but that do concern the sociohistorical
field, its preconscious and unconscious conflicts and contradictions,
about which it can only be said that they fall back on Oedipus,
Marx-the-father, Lenin-the-father, Brezhnev-the-father. Fewer and fewer
people believe in all this but it makes no difference, since capitalism
is like the Christian religion, it lives precisely from a lack of
belief, it does not need it a motley painting of all that has been
believed.


But the reverse is also true: capitalism is constantly escaping on all
sides. Its productions, its art, and its science form decoded and
deterritorialized flows that do not merely submit to the corresponding
axiomatic, but cause some of their currents to pass through the mesh of
the axiomatic, underneath the recodings and the reterritorializations.
Subject-groups in their turn derive from subjugated groups by way of
ruptures in the latter. Capitalism is continually cutting off the
circulation of flows, breaking them and deferring the break, but these
same flows are continually overflowing, and intersecting one another
according to schizzes that turn against capitalism and slash into it.
Capitalism, which is always ready to expand its interior limits, remains
threatened by an exterior limit that stands a greater chance of coming
to it and cleaving it from within, in proportion as the interior limits
expand. That is why the lines of escape are singularly creative and
positive: they constitute an investment of the social field that is no
less complete, no less total than the contrary investment. The paranoiac
and the schizoid investments are like two opposite poles of unconscious
libidinal investment, one of which subordinates desiring-production to
the formation of sovereignty and to the gregarious aggregate that
results from it, while the other brings about the inverse subordination,
overthrows the established power, and subjects the gregarious aggregate
to the molecular multiplicities of the productions of desire. And if it
is true that delirium is coextensive with the social field, these two
poles are found to coexist in every case of delirium, and fragments of
schizoid revolutionary investment are found to coincide with blocks of
paranoiac reactionary investment. The oscillation between the two poles
is a constituent aspect of the delirium.


It appears, however, that the oscillation is not equal, and that as a
rule the schizoid pole is potential in relation to the actual paranoiac
pole (how can we count on art and science except as potentialities,
since their actuality is easily controlled by the formations of
sovereignty?). This results from the fact that the two poles of
unconscious libidinal investment do not maintain the same relationship,
nor the same form of relationship, with the preconscious investments of
interest. On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest
fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and
reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational
character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of
interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the
investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests
that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively
revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac
investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius
continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of
the higher interests of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of
causality. In the other case, the preconscious interest must on the
contrary discover the necessity for a different sort of investment, and
must perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in
question of aims and interests.


In each case the problem is different: it is not enough to construct a
new socius as full body; one must also pass to the other side of this
social full body, where the molecular formations of desire that must
master the new molar aggregate operate and are inscribed. Only by making
this passage do we reach the revolutionary break and investment of the
libido. This cannot be achieved except at the cost of, and by means of a
rupture with, causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that
traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its
faces to the other. Never an individual exile, never a personal desert,
but a collective exile and a collective desert. It is only too obvious
that the destiny of the revolution is linked solely to the interest of
the dominated and exploited masses. But it is the nature of this link
that poses the real problem, as either a determined causal link or a
different sort of connection. It is a question of knowing how a
revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relationship with the
exploited masses or the “weakest links” of a given system. Do these
masses or these links act in their own place, within the order of causes
and aims that promote a new socius, or are they on the contrary the
place and the agent of a sudden and unexpected irruption, an irruption
of desire that breaks with causes and aims and overturns the socius,
revealing its other side? In the subjugated groups, desire is still
defined by an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system
of macroscopic relations that determine the large aggregates under a
formation of sovereignty. Subject-groups on the other hand have as their
sole cause a rupture with causality, a revolutionary line of escape; and
even though one can and must assign the objective factors, such as the
weakest links, within causal series that made such a rupture possible,
only what is of the order of desire and its irruption accounts for the
reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place.\footnote{On the analysis of subject-groups and their relations with desire and with causality, see Jean-Paul Sartre, \emph{Critique de la raison dialectique} (Paris. Gallimard, 1960).}


It is clear how everything can coexist and intermix: in the “Leninist
break,” for example, when the Bolshevik group, or at least a part of
this group, becomes aware of the immediate possibility of a proletarian
revolution that would not follow the anticipated causal order of the
relations of forces, but that would singularly precipitate things by
plunging into a breach (the escape, or “revolutionary defeatism”). In
reality, everything coexists: still hesitant preconscious investments in
the case of some people who do not believe in this possibility,
revolutionary preconscious investments in those who see the possibility
of a new socius but maintain it in an order of molar causality that
already makes of the party a new form of sovereignty; and finally
unconscious revolutionary investments that perform a real rupture with
causality in the order of desire. And in the same people the most varied
kinds of investments can coexist at such and such a moment, the two
kinds of groups can interpenetrate. This is because the two groups are
like determinism and freedom in Kant’s philosophy: they indeed have the
same “object”—and social production is never anything other than
desiring-production, and vice versa—but they don’t share the same law or
the same régime.


The actualization of a revolutionary potentiality is explained less by
the preconscious state of causality in which it is nonetheless included,
than by the efficacy of a libidinal break at a precise moment, a schiz
whose sole cause is desire—which is to say the rupture with causality
that forces a rewriting of history on a level with the real, and
produces this strangely polyvocal moment when everything is possible. Of
course the schiz has been prepared by a subterranean labor of causes,
aims, and interests working together; of course this order of causes
runs the risk of closing and cementing the breach in the name of the new
socius and its interests. Of course one can always say after the fact
that history has never ceased being governed by the same laws of
aggregates and large numbers. The fact remains that the schiz came into
existence only by means of a desire without aim or cause that charted it
and sided with it. While the schiz is possible without the order of
causes, it becomes real only by means of something of another order:
Desire, the desert-desire, the revolutionary investment of desire. And
that is indeed what undermines capitalism: where will the revolution
come from, and in what form \emph{within} the exploited masses? It is like
death—where, when? It will be a decoded flow, a deterritorialized flow
that runs too far and cuts too sharply, thereby escaping from the
axiomatic of capitalism. Will it come in the person of a Castro, an
Arab, a Black Panther, or a Chinaman on the horizon? A May ’68, a
home-grown Maoist planted like an anchorite on a factory smokestack?
Always the addition of an axiom to seal off a breach that has been
discovered; fascist colonels start reading Mao, we won’t be fooled
again; Castro has become impossible, even in relation to himself;
vacuoles are isolated, ghettos created; unions are appealed to for help;
the most sinister forms of “dissuasion” are invented; the repression of
interest is reinforced—but where will the new irruption of desire come
from?\footnote{André Glucksmann has analyzed the nature of this special counterrevolutionary axiomatic in “Le discours de la guerre,” \emph{L’Herne} (1967).}


Those who have read us this far will perhaps find many reasons for
reproaching us: for believing too much in the pure potentialities of art
and even of science; for denying or minimizing the role of classes and
class struggle; for militating in favor of an irrationalism of desire;
for identifying the revolutionary with the schizo; for falling into
familiar, all-too-familiar traps. This would be a bad reading, and we
don’t know which is better, a bad reading or no reading at all. And in
all probability there are far more serious reproaches to be made, which
we haven’t even thought of. As for those we have named, we hold in the
first place that art and science have a revolutionary potential, and
nothing more, and that this potential appears all the more as one is
less and less concerned with what art and science mean, from the
standpoint of a signifier or signifieds that are necessarily reserved
for specialists; but that art and science cause increasingly decoded and
deterritorialized flows to circulate in the socius, flows that are
perceptible to everyone, which force the social axiomatic to grow ever
more complicated, to become more saturated, to the point where the
scientist and the artist may be determined to rejoin an objective
revolutionary situation in reaction against authoritarian designs of a
State that is incompetent and above all castrating by nature. (For the
State imposes a specifically artistic Oedipus, a specifically scientific
Oedipus.)


Secondly, we have not at all minimized the importance of preconscious
investments of class or interest, which are based in the infrastructure
itself. But we attach all the more importance to them as they are the
index in the infrastructure of a libidinal investment of another nature,
and that can coincide as well as clash with them. Which is merely a way
to pose the question, “How can the revolution be betrayed?”—once it has
been said that betrayals don’t wait their turn, but are there from the
very start (the maintenance of paranoiac unconscious investments in
revolutionary groups). And if we put forward desire as a revolutionary
agency, it is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many
manifestations of interest, but not one manifestation of desire, which
would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at the
kindergarten level. We believe in desire as in the irrational of every
form of rationality, and not because it is a lack, a thirst, or an
aspiration, but because it is the production of desire: desire that
produces—real-desire, or the real in itself. Finally, we do not at all
think that the revolutionary is schizophrenic or vice versa. On the
contrary, we have consistently distinguished the schizophrenic as an
entity from schizophrenia as a process; now the schizophrenic as entity
can only be defined in relation to the arrests, the continuations in the
void, or the finalist illusions that repression imposes on the process
itself. This explains why we have only spoken of a schizoid pole in the
libidinal investment of the social field, so as to avoid as much as
possible the confusion of the schizophrenic process with the production
of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic process (the schizoid pole) is
revolutionary, in the very sense that the paranoiac method is
reactionary and fascist; and it is not these psychiatric categories,
freed of all familialism, that will allow us to understand the
politico-economic determinations, but exactly the opposite.


And then, above all, we are not looking for a way out when we say that
schizoanalysis \emph{as such} has strictly no political program to propose.
If it did have one, it would be grotesque and disquieting at the same
time. It does not take itself for a party or even a group, and does not
claim to be speaking for the masses. No political program will be
elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis. Finally,
schizoanalysis is something that does not claim to be speaking for
anything or anyone, not even—in fact especially not—for psychoanalysis:
nothing more than impressions, the impression that things aren’t going
well in psychoanalysis, and that they haven’t been since the start. We
are still too competent; we would like to speak in the name of an
absolute incompetence. Someone asked us if we had ever seen a
schizophrenic—no, no, we have never seen one. If someone reading this
book feels that things are fine in psychoanalysis, we’re not speaking
for him, and for him we take back everything we have said. So what is
the relationship between schizoanalysis and politics on the one hand,
and between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis on the other? Everything
revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire.
Schizoanalysis as such does not raise the problem of the nature of the
socius to come out of the revolution; it does not claim to be identical
with the revolution itself. Given a socius, schizoanalysis only asks
what place it reserves for desiring-production; what generative role
desire enjoys therein; in what forms the conciliation between the régime
of desiring-production and the régime of social production is brought
about, since in any case it is the same production, but under two
different régimes; if, on this socius as a full body, there is thus the
possibility for going from one side to another, i.e., from the side
where the molar aggregates of social production are organized, to this
other side, no less collective, where the molecular multiplicities of
desiring-production are formed; whether and to what extent such a socius
can endure the reversal of power such that desiring-production
subjugates social production and yet does not destroy it, since it is
the same production working under the difference in régime; if there is,
and how there comes to be, a formation of subject-groups; etc.


If someone retorts that we are claiming the famous rights to laziness,
to nonproductivity, to dream and fantasy production, once again we are
quite pleased, since we haven’t stopped saying the opposite, and that
desiring-production produces the real, and that desire has little to do
with fantasy and dream. As opposed to Reich, schizoanalysis makes no
distinction in nature between political economy and libidinal economy.
Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the machinic, social, and technical
indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the
parts, wheels, and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them
to enter into their own parts, wheels, and motors. Everyone knows that a
schizo is a machine; all schizos say this, and not just little Joey. The
question to be asked is whether schizophrenics are the living machines
of a dead labor, which are then contrasted to the dead machines of
living labor as organized in capitalism. Or whether instead desiring,
technical, and social machines join together in a process of
schizophrenic production that thereafter has no more schizophrenics to
produce. In her \emph{Lettre aux ministres}, Maud Mannoni writes: “One of
these adolescents, declared unfit for studies, does admirably well in a
third-level class, provided he works some in mechanics. He has a passion
for mechanics. The man in the garage has been his best therapist. If we
take mechanics away from him he will become schizophrenic again.”\footnote{Maud Mannoni, \emph{Lettre aux ministres}.}
Her intention is not to praise ergotherapy or the virtues of social
adaptation. She marks the point where the social machine, the technical
machine, and the desiring-machine join closely together and bring their
régimes into communication. She asks if our society can handle that, and
what it is worth if it can’t. And this is indeed the direction the
social, technical, scientific, and artistic machines take when they are
revolutionary: they form desiring-machines for which they are already
the index in their own régime, at the same time that the
desiring-machines form them in the régime that is theirs, and as a
position of desire.


What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and
psychoanalysis, when the negative and positive tasks of schizoanalysis
are taken as a whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts of unconscious
or two interpretations of the unconscious: the one schizoanalytic, the
other psychoanalytic; the one schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal;
the one abstract and nonfigurative, the other imaginary; but also the
one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the other
structural; the one molecular, microphysical, and micrological, and the
other molar or statistical; the one material, the other ideological; the
one productive, the other expressive. We have seen how the negative task
of schizoanalysis must be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing,
de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy;
decoding, deterritorializing—a terrible curettage, a malevolent
activity. But everything happens at the same time. For at the same time
the process is liberated—the process of desiring-production, following
its molecular lines of escape that already define the mechanic’s task of
the schizoanalyst. And the lines of escape are still full molar or
social investments at grips with the whole social field: so that the
task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case
the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their
possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious
investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these—in
short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression
of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it
turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We’ll never go too far
with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth
(“In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing”) is not to
be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest
the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it
coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production,
this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as
long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how,
effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis
proceed.

\chapter{Appendix: Balance-Sheet for “Desiring-Machines”}
\hyperdef{amuse}{appendix}{}%
\label{textamuse:appendix}%



\begin{quote}


1. How desiring-machines differ from gadgets—from phantasies or
imaginary projective systems—from tools or real projective systems—from
perverse machines) which however put us on the track of
desiring-machines.



\end{quote}


Desiring-machines have nothing to do with gadgets, or little homemade
inventions, or with phantasies. Or rather they are related, but from the
opposite direction, because gadgets, improvised contraptions, and
phantasies are the residue of desiring-machines; they have come under
the sway of specific laws of the foreign market of capitalism, or of the
home market of psychoanalysis (it is a function of the psychoanalytic
“contract” to reduce the states lived by the patient, to translate them
into phantasies). Desiring-machines cannot be equated with the
adaptation of real machines, or fragments of real machines, to a
symbolical process, nor can they be reduced to dreams of fantastic
machines operating in the Imaginary. In both instances, one witnesses
the conversion of an element of production into a mechanism of
individual consumption (phantasies as psychic consumption or
Psychoanalytic breast-feeding). It goes without saying that
psychoanalysis feels at ease with gadgets and phantasies, an environment
in which it can develop all its castrating Oedipal obsessions. But that
tells us nothing of consequence about machines and their relation to
desire.


The artistic and literary imagination conceives a great number of absurd
machines: whether through the indeterminate character of the motor or
energy source, through the physical impossibility of the organization of
the working parts, or through the logical impossibility of the mechanism
of transmission. For example, Man Ray’s \emph{Dancer-Danger}, subtitled
“impossibility,” offers two degrees of absurdity: neither the clusters
of cog-wheels nor the large transmission wheel are able to function.
Insofar as this machine is supposed to represent the whirl of a Spanish
dancer, it can be said that it expresses mechanically, by means of the
absurd, the impossibility for a machine to execute such a movement (the
dancer is not a machine). But one can also say: there must be a dancer
here who functions as a part of a machine; this machine component can
only be a dancer; here is the machine of which the dancer is a component
part. The object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order
to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or
impossible substitutions of the ones for the other, but to bring them
into communication in order to show how \emph{humans are a component part} of
the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a machine. The
other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans. We are
not using a metaphor, however, when we speak of machines: \emph{humans
constitute a machine} as soon as this nature is communicated by
recurrence to the ensemble of which they form a part under specific
conditions. The human-horse-bow ensemble forms a nomadic war machine
under the conditions of the steppe. Men form a labor machine under the
bureaucratic conditions of the great empires. The Greek foot-soldier
together with his arms constitute a machine under the conditions of the
phalanx. The dancer combines with the floor to compose a machine under
the perilous conditions of love and death \dots{} We do not start from a
metaphorical usage of the word machine, but from a (confused) hypothesis
concerning origins: the way in which heterogeneous elements are
determined to constitute a machine through \emph{recurrence and
communications}; the existence of a “machinic phylum.” Ergonomics comes
close to this point of view when it sets the general problem, no longer
in terms of adaptation or substitution—the adaptation of man to the
machine, and of the machine to man—but in terms of recurrent
communication within systems made up of men and machines. It is true
that just as ergonomists become convinced that they are confining
themselves in this way to a purely technological approach, they raise
the problems of power and oppression, of revolution and desire, with an
involuntary vigor that is infinitely greater than in the adaptive
approaches.


There is a classic schema that is inspired by the tool: the tool as the
extension and the projection of the living being, the operation by means
of which man progressively emerges, the evolution from the tool to the
machine, the reversal in which the machine grows more and more
independent of man \dots{} But this schema has many drawbacks. It does not
offer us any means to apprehend the reality of desiring-machines and
their presence throughout this circuit. It is a biological and evolutive
schema, which determines the machine as an event occurring at a given
moment in the mechanical lineage that begins with the tool. It is
humanistic and abstract, isolating the productive forces from the social
conditions of their exercise, involving a man-nature dimension common to
all the social forms, to which are thus lent relations of evolution. It
is imaginary, phantasmal and solipsistic, even when it is applied to
real tools, to real machines, since it rests entirely on the hypothesis
of projection (Róheim for example, who adopts this schema, shows the
analogy between the physical projection of tools and the psychic
projection of phantasies).\footnote{Géza Róheim, \emph{Psychoanalysis and Anthropology}, International Universities Press (1968).} We believe on the contrary that it is
necessary to posit, \emph{from the outset}, the difference in nature between
the tool and the machine: the one as an agent of contact, the other as a
factor of communication; the one being projective, the other recurrent;
the one referring to the possible and the impossible, the other to the
probability of a less-probable; the one acting through the functional
synthesis of a whole, the other through real distinctions in an
ensemble. Functioning as a component part in conjunction with other
parts is very different from being an extension or a projection, or
being replaced (an instance where there is no communication). Pierre
Auger shows that a machine is constituted from the moment there is
communication between two portions of the outside world that are really
distinct in a system that is possible although less probable.\footnote{Pierre Auger, \emph{L’Homme microscopique}, Paris: Flammarion (1951), p. 138.} One
and the same thing can be a tool or a machine, according to whether the
“machinic phylum” takes hold of it or not, passes or does not pass
through it. Hoplite weapons existed as tools from early antiquity, but
they became components of a machine, \emph{along with} the men who wielded
them, under the conditions of the phalanx and the Greek city-state. When
one refers the tool to man, in accordance with the traditional schema,
one deprives oneself of any possibility of understanding how man \emph{and}
the tool \emph{become or already are} distinct components of a machine in
relation to an actual machinic agency. And we believe moreover that
there are always machines that precede tools, always phyla that
determine at a given moment which tools, which men will enter as machine
components in the social system being considered.


Desiring-machines are neither imaginary projections in the form of
phantasies, nor real projections in the form of tools. The whole system
of projections derives from machines, and not the reverse. Should the
desiring-machine be defined then by a kind of introjection, by a certain
perverse use of the machine? Let us take the example of the telephone
exchange: by dialing an unassigned number, connected to an automatic
answering device (“the number you dialed is not in service\dots{}”) one can
hear the overlay of an ensemble of teeming voices, calling and answering
each other, crisscrossing, fading out, passing over and under each
other, inside the automatic voice, very short messages, utterances
obeying rapid and monotonous codes. There is the Tiger; it is rumored
that there is even an Oedipus in the network; boys calling girls, boys
calling boys. One easily recognizes the very form of perverse artificial
societies, or a society of Unknowns. A process of reterritorialization
is connected to \emph{a movement of deterritorialization that is ensured by
the machine} (groups of ham radio transmitters afford the same perverse
structure). It is certain that public institutions are not troubled by
these secondary benefits of a private use of the machine, in fringe or
interference phenomena. But at the same time there is something more
here than a simple perverse subjectivity, be it that of a group. The
normal telephone may be a machine for communication, but it functions as
a tool as long as it serves to project or extend voices that are not as
such a part of the machine. But in our example communication attains a
higher degree, inasmuch as the voices enter into the make-up of the
machine, become components of the machine, distributed and apportioned
in chance fashion by the automatic device. The less probable is
constructed on the basis of the entropy of the set of voices that cancel
each other out. It is from this perspective that there is not only a
perverse use or adaptation of a technical-social machine, but the
superposing of a true objective desiring-machine, the construction of a
desiring-machine within the technical social machine. It may be that
desiring-machines are born in this way in the artificial margins of a
society, although they develop in a completely different way and bear no
resemblance to the forms of their birth.


In his commentary on this phenomenon of the telephone exchange, Jean
Nadal writes: “It is, I believe, the most successful and complete
desiring-machine I am aware of. It has everything: desire works freely
in it, with the erotic agency of the voice as a partial object, in the
sphere of chance and multiplicity, and connects up with a flow that
irradiates a whole social field of communication through the unlimited
expansion of a delirium or a drift.” The commentator is not entirely
correct: there are better and more complete desiring-machines. But as a
general rule, perverse machines have the advantage of presenting us with
a constant oscillation between a subjective adaptation, a diverting of a
technical social machine, and the objective setting up of a
desiring-machine—yet another effort, if you want to become
republicans\dots{}\footnote{The allusion here is to Sade’s perversely rational pamphlet of 1795, “Français, encore un effort si vous voulez etre republicains\dots{}” (incorporated in \emph{La Philosophie dans le boudoir}) in which he turns postenlightenment principles into an argument for the total eradication of the Church, a bare minimum of laws, an end to the bourgeois family, and a perpetual revolution in manners and morals.—Trans.} In one of the finest texts ever written on the subject
of masochism, Michel de M’Uzan shows that the perverse machines of the
masochist, which are machines in the strict sense of the term, cannot be
understood in terms of phantasy or imagination, just as they cannot be
explained in terms of Oedipus or castration, by means of a projection.
There is no phantasy, he says, but—and this is something totally
different—a \emph{programming} which is “essentially structured outside the
Oedipal problem complex” (at last a little fresh air in the house of
psychoanalysis, a little understanding for the perverse).\footnote{Michel de M’Uzan, in \emph{La Sexualité perverse}. Paris: Payot (1972), pp. 34–37. Translated in the “Polysexuality” issue of \emph{Semiotext(e)}. Vol. IV, no 1, 1981, Francois Peraldi, ed.}



\begin{quote}


2. The desiring-machine and the Oedipal apparatus: recurrence versus
repression regression.



\end{quote}


Desiring-machines constitute the non-Oedipal life of the
unconscious—Oedipus being the gadget or phantasy. By way of opposition,
Picabia called the machine “the daughter born without a mother.” Buster
Keaton introduced his house-machine, with all its rooms rolled into one,
as a house without a mother, and desiring-machines determine everything
that goes on inside, as in the bachelors’ meal (\emph{The Scarecrow}, 1920).
Are we to understand that the machine has but a father, and that it is
born like Athena fully armed from a virile brain? It takes a lot of
goodwill to believe, along with René Girard, that paternalism is enough
to lead us out of Oedipus, and that “mimetic rivalry” is really the
complex’s \emph{other}. Psychoanalysis has never ceased doing just that:
fragmenting Oedipus, or multiplying it, or on the other hand dividing
it, placing it at odds with itself, or sublimating it, making it
boundless, elevating it to the level of the signifier. We have witnessed
the discovery of the pre-Oedipal, the post-Oedipal, the symbolic
Oedipus, none of which helps us to escape from the family any more than
the squirrel from its turning cage. We are told: “But see here, Oedipus
has nothing to do with daddy-mommy, it is the signifier, it is the name,
it is culture, it is mortality, it is the essential lack which is life,
it is castration, it is violence personified\dots{}” All of which is enough
for a good laugh, at least, but it only carries on the ancient task, by
cutting all the connections of desire the better to map it back onto
sublime, imaginary, symbolic, linguistic, ontological, and
epistemological daddy-mommies. Actually, we haven’t said a fourth, or
even a hundredth of what needed to be said against psychoanalysis, its
**ressentiment* towards desire, its tyranny, and its bureaucracy.


What defines desiring-machines is precisely their capacity for an
unlimited number of connections, in every sense and in all directions.
It is for this very reason that they are machines, crossing through and
commanding several structures at the same time. For the machine
possesses two characteristics or powers: the power of the continuum, the
machinic phylum in which a given component connects with another, the
cylinder and the piston in the steam engine, or even, tracing a more
distant lineage, the pulley wheel in the locomotive; but also the
rupture in direction, the mutation such that each machine is an absolute
break in relation to the one it replaces, as, for example, the internal
combustion engine in relation to the steam engine. Two powers which are
really only one, since the machine in itself is the break-flow process,
the break being always adjacent to the continuity of a flow which it
separates from the others by assigning it a code, by causing it to
convey particular elements.\footnote{With regard to machinic continuity and discontinuity, cf. André Leroi Gourhan, \emph{Milieu et techniques}. Albin Michel (1945), pp. 366sp.} Hence the fact that the machine is
motherless does not speak for a cerebral father, but for a collective
**full body*, the machinic agency on which the machine sets up its
connections and produces its ruptures.


The machinic painters stressed the following: that they did not paint
machines as substitutes for still lifes or nudes; the machine is not a
represented object any more than its drawing is a representation. The
aim is to introduce an element of a machine, so that it combines with
something else on the full body of the canvas, be it with the painting
itself, with the result that it is precisely the ensemble of the
painting that functions as a desiring-machine. The induced machine is
always other than the one that appears to be represented. It will be
seen that the machine proceeds by means of an “uncoupling” of this
nature, and ensures the deterritorialization that is characteristic of
machines, the inductive, or rather the transductive quality of the
machine, which defines recurrence, as opposed to
representation-projection: \emph{machinic recurrence versus Oedipal
projection}. These opposing terms mark a struggle, or a disjunction, as
can be seen, for example, in \emph{Aeroplap(l)a}, or \emph{Automoma}, and again in
Victor Brauner’s \emph{Machine à connaître en forme Mère}.\footnote{It is again Róheim who clearly reveals the Oedipus projection-representation linkage.} In Picabia’s
work, the finished design connects up with the incongruous inscription,
with the result that it is obliged to function with \emph{this} code, with
**this* program, by inducing a machine that does not resemble it. With
Duchamp, the real machine element is directly introduced, either
standing on its own merits or set-off by its shadow, or, in other
instances, having its place in the ensemble determined by an aleatory
mechanism that induces the still-present representations to change roles
and statuses: \emph{Tu m’} for example. The machine stands apart from all
representation (although one can always represent it, copy it, in a
manner however that is completely devoid of interest), and it stands
apart because it is pure Abstraction; it is nonfigurative and
nonprojective. Léger demonstrated convincingly that the machine did not
represent anything, itself least of all, because it was in itself the
production of organized intensive states: neither form nor extension,
neither representation nor projection, but pure and recurrent
intensities. It sometimes happens, as in Picabia, that the discovery of
the abstract leads to the machinic elements, while at other times, as in
the example of many a Futurist, the opposite road is traveled. Consider
the old distinction drawn by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the
distinction between representative states and affective states that do
not represent anything. The machine is the affective state, and it is
false to say that modern machines possess a perceptive capacity or a
memory; machines themselves possess only affective states.


When we contrast desiring-machines and Oedipus, we do not mean to say
that the unconscious is mechanical (machines belong rather to
metamechanics), or that Oedipus counts for nothing. Too many forces and
too many people depend on Oedipus; there are too many interests at
stake. To begin with, there would be no narcissism without Oedipus.
Oedipus will prompt a great many moans and whimpers yet. It will inspire
research projects that are more and more unreal. It will continue to
nourish dreams and phantasies. Oedipus is a vector: 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 \dots{} Four
is the famous fourth symbolical term, 3 is the triangulation, 2 is the
dual images, 1 is narcissism, and 0 is the death instinct. \emph{Oedipus is
the entropy of the desiring-machine}, its tendency to external
abolition. It is the image or the representation slipped into the
machine, the stereotype that stops the connections, exhausts the flows,
puts death in desire, and substitutes a kind of plaster for the cracks;
it is the \emph{Interruptrice} (the psychoanalysts as the saboteurs of
desire). For the distinction between the manifest content and the latent
content, for the distinction between the repressing and the repressed,
we must substitute the two poles of the unconscious: the schizo-desiring
machine, and the paranoiac Oedipal apparatus, the connectors of desire,
and its repressors. Yes, in fact, you will find as much of Oedipus as
you wish to find, as much as you call forth in order to silence the
machines (necessarily so, since Oedipus is both the repressing and the
repressed, which is to say the stereotype-image that brings desire to a
standstill, and attends to it, representing it as being at a
standstill). An image is something that can only be \emph{seen} \dots{} It is the
compromise, but the compromise distorts both parties alike, namely, the
nature of the reactionary repressor and the nature of the revolutionary
desire. It is the compromise, but the compromise distorts both parties
alike, namely, the nature of the reactionary repressor and the nature of
the revolutionary desire. In the compromise, the two parties have gone
over the same side, as opposed to desire which remains on the other
side, beyond compromise.


In his two studies of Jules Verne, Moré came upon two themes, one after
the other, which he presented simply as being distinct from each other:
the Oedipal problem which Jules Verne lived both as father and as son,
and the problem of the machine as the destruction of Oedipus and a
substitute for women.\footnote{Marcel Moré, \emph{Le trés curieux Jules Verne}. Paris, Gallimard, 1960; and \emph{Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne}. Paris, Gallimard, 1963.} But the problem of the desiring-machine, in
its essentially erotic nature, is not in the least that of knowing
whether a machine will ever be capable of giving “the perfect illusion
of woman.” On the contrary, the problem is: in which machine to place
woman, in which machine does a woman put herself in order to become the
non-Oedipal object of desire, which is to say, nonhuman sex? In all the
desiring-machines, sexuality does not consist of an imaginary
woman-machine couple serving as a substitute for Oedipus, but of the
machine-desire couple as the real production of a daughter born without
a mother, a non-Oedipal woman (who would not be Oedipal neither for
herself, nor for others). Yet there is no indication that people are
growing tired of such entertaining narcissistic exercises as
psychocriticism, which ascribes an Oedipal origin to the novel in
general, bastards, foundlings. One must admit that the greatest authors
lend themselves to this kind of misunderstanding, precisely because
Oedipus is literature’s counterfeit currency, or, what amounts to the
same thing, its real exchange value. But, just when these writers appear
to be up to their teeth in Oedipus, in the eternal mommy-wail, the
eternal daddy-debate, in actual fact they are embarked upon a completely
different venture, an orphan undertaking; they are assembling an
infernal desiring-machine, putting desire in contact with a libidinal
world of connections and breaks, flows and schizes that constitute the
nonhuman element of sex, a world where each thing becomes a component of
“the motor, desire,” of a “lubric wheelwork,” crossing, mixing,
overturning structures and orders—mineral, vegetable, animal, juvenile,
social—each time shattering the ridiculous figures of Oedipus, always
pushing forward a process of deterritorialization. For not even
childhood is Oedipal; as a matter of fact, it does not have the least
possibility of being Oedipal. What is Oedipal is the abject childhood
memory, the screen memory. And finally, an author most effectively
reveals the inanity and the vacuity of Oedipus when he manages to inject
into his work veritable recurrent blocks of childhood which again start
up the desiring-machines, as opposed to old photos, to screen memories
which flood the machine and turn the child into a regressive phantasy
for little old people.


This can be seen clearly in the case of Kafka, a privileged example, the
Oedipal terrain \emph{par excellence}. The Oedipal pole that he (Kafka) waves
and brandishes under the reader’s nose masks a more subterranean
undertaking: the nonhuman establishment of a totally new literary
machine. Strictly speaking, it is a machine for literary practice and
for de-Oedipalizing all too-human love. Kafka’s machine plugs desire
into the premonition of a perverse bureaucratic and technocratic
machine, a machine that is already fascist, in which the names of the
family lose their consistency in order to open onto the motley Austrian
Empire of the machine-castle, onto the condition of Jews without
identity, onto Russia, America, China, continents situated well beyond
the persons and the names of familialism. One can see a parallel
undertaking in Proust: Kafka and Proust, the two great Oedipals, are
make-believe Oedipals, and those who take Oedipus seriously will always
be able to graft onto them their own mournful novels and commentaries.
Just consider for a moment what they are losing: the comedy of the
superhuman, the schizo laughter that shakes Proust or Kafka behind the
Oedipal grimace—the becoming-spider, or the becoming-beetle.


In a recent text, Roger Dadoun develops the theory of two poles of
dreams: the dream-program, the dream-machine or machinery-dream, the
factory-dream, in which the essential is desiring-production, machinic
operation, the establishment of connections, the vanishing points or
those of the deterritorialization of the libido being engulfed in the
nonhuman molecular element, the circulation of flows, the injection of
intensities—and, on the other hand, the Oedipal pole, the dream-theater,
the dream-screen, which is no longer anything but an object of molar
interpretation, and where the dream narrative has already prevailed over
the dream itself, the visual and verbal images over the informal or
material sequences.\footnote{Roger Dadoun, “Les ombilics du rêve,” in \emph{L’espace du rêve}. Paris: folio essais, Gallimard (1972).} Dadoun shows how Freud, with \emph{The
Interpretation of Dreams}, abandons a direction that was still possible
during the period in which he wrote the “Project for a Scientific
Psychology,” and that henceforth psychoanalysis is committed to
blind-alleys which it will set up as the very conditions of its own
practice. One already finds in Gherasim Luca and in Trost, authors whose
work goes strangely unrecognized, an anti-Oedipal conception of dreams
which strikes us as being very fine. Trost reproaches Freud with having
neglected the manifest content of dreams for the benefit of a unified
theory of Oedipus, with having failed to recognize the dream as a
machine for communication with the outside world, with having fused
dreams to memories rather than to deliriums, with having constructed a
theory of the compromise that robs dreams as well as symptoms of their
inherent revolutionary significance. He exposes the action of the
repressors or regressors in their role as representatives of “the
reactionary social elements” that insinuate themselves into dreams by
the help of associations originating in the preconscious and that of
screen memories originating in waking life. Now these associations do
not belong to dreams any more than do the memories; that is precisely
why the dream is forced to treat them symbolically. Let there be no
mistake, Oedipus exists, the associations are always Oedipal, but
precisely because the mechanism on which they depend is the same as for
Oedipus. Hence, in order to retrace the dream thought, which shares a
common lot with sleepwalking insofar as they both undergo the action of
distinct repressors, it is necessary to break up the associations. To
this end, Trost suggest a kind of à la Burroughs cut-up, which consists
in bringing a dream fragment into contact with \emph{any} passage from a
textbook of sexual pathology, an intervention that reinjects life into
the dream and intensifies it, instead of interpreting it, that provides
the machinic phylum of the dream with new connections. The risk is
negligible, since by virtue of our polymorphous perversity, the passage
**selected at random* will always combine with the dream fragment to form
a machine. And no doubt the associations re-form, close up between the
two components, but it will have been necessary to take advantage of the
moment, however brief, of dissociation to cause desire to emerge, in its
nonbiographical and nonmemorial nature, beyond as well as on this side
of its Oedipal predeterminations. And this is indeed the direction
indicated by Trost or Luca in several superb texts: bringing out an
unconscious alive with revolution, straining towards a being, a
non-Oedipal man and woman, the “freely mechanical being,” “the
projection of a human group still to be discovered,” whose mystery
resides in its function and not in its interpretation, the “wholly
secular intensity of desire” (there has never been such a thorough
denunciation of the authoritarian and pious nature of
psychoanalysis).\footnote{Dolfi Trost, \emph{Vision dans le cristal}. Bucharest: Les Éditions de l’Oubli (1945). \emph{Visible et invisible}. Éditions Arcanes (1953). \emph{Librement mécanique}. Le Minotaure (1955). Gherasim Luca, \emph{Le Vampire passif}. Bucharest: Les Éditions de l’Oubli (1945).} In this sense, wouldn’t the highest aim of the
MLFI\footnote{Mouvement pour la Libération de la Femme, one of the groups active in the women’s liberation movement in France.—Trans.} be the machinic and revolutionary construction of the
non-Oedipal woman, instead of the confused exaltation of mothering and
castration?


Let us return to the necessity of breaking up associations: dissociation
not merely as a characteristic of schizophrenia but as a principle of
schizoanalysis. The greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, the
impossibility of establishing associations, is on the contrary, the very
condition of schizoanalysis—that is to say, the sign that we have
finally reached elements that enter into a functional ensemble of the
unconscious as a desiring-machine. It is not surprising that the method
called free association invariably brings us back to Oedipus; that such
is its function. Far from testifying to a spontaneity, it presupposes an
application, a mapping back that forces a preordained ensemble to
associate with a final artificial or memorial ensemble, predetermined
symbolically as being Oedipal. In reality, we still have not
accomplished anything so long as we have not reached elements that are
not associable, or so long as we have not grasped the elements in a form
in which they are no longer associable. Serge Leclaire takes a decisive
step when he sets the terms of a problem which, in his words,
“everything impels us not to consider straight in the face \dots{} What is
involved, in brief, is the conception of a system whose elements are
bound together precisely by the absence of any tie, and I mean by that,
the absence of any natural, logical, or significant tie,” “a set of pure
singularities.”\footnote{Serge Leclaire, “La réalité du désir,” in \emph{Sexualité humaine}. Aubier (1971).} But, mindful of the need to remain within the
narrow bounds of psychoanalysis, he takes the same step backwards: he
presents the unbound ensemble as a fiction, its manifestations as
epiphanies, which must be inscribed in a new restructured ensemble, if
only through the unity of the phallus as the \emph{signifier} of absence. Yet
here indeed was the emergence of the desiring-machine, that which
distinguishes it both from the psychic bonds of the Oedipal apparatus,
and from the mechanical or structural bonds of the social and technical
machines: a set of really distinct parts that operate in combination \emph{as
being really distinct} (bound together by the absence of any tie). Such
approximations of desiring-machines are not furnished by surrealist
objects, theatrical epiphanies, or Oedipal gadgets, which function only
by reintroducing associations—in point of fact, Surrealism was a vast
enterprise of Oedipalization of the movements that preceded it. But they
will be found rather in certain Dadaist machines, in the drawings of
Julius Goldberg, or, more recently, in the machines of Tinguely. How
does one obtain a functional ensemble, while shattering all the
associations? (What is meant by “bound by the absence of any tie”?).


In Tinguely, the art of real distinction is obtained by means of a kind
of uncoupling used as a method of recurrence. A machine brings into play
several simultaneous structures which it pervades. The first structure
includes at least one element that is not operational in relation to it,
but only in relation to a second structure. It is this interplay, which
Tinguely presents as being essentially joyful, that ensures the process
of deterritorialization of the machine, as well as the position of the
mechanic as the most deterritorialized part of the machine. The
grandmother who pedals inside the automobile under the wonderstruck gaze
of the child—a non-Oedipal child whose eye is itself a part of the
machine—does not cause the car to move forward, but, through her
pedaling, activates a second structure, which is sawing wood. Other
methods of recurrence can be put into play or added-on, as, for example,
the envelopment of the parts within a multiplicity (thus the
city-machine, a city where all the houses are in one, or Buster Keaton’s
house-machine, where all the rooms are in one). Or again, the recurrence
can be realized in a series that places the machine in an essential
relationship with scraps and residua, where, for example, the machine
destroys its own object, as in Tinguely’s Rotozazas, or the machine
itself taps lost intensities or energies as in Duchamp’s Transformer
project, or it is itself made up of scraps as in Stankiewicz’s Junk Art,
or in the Merz and the house-machine of Schwitters, or, finally, where
it sabotages or destroys itself, where “its construction and the
beginning of its destruction are indistinguishable.” In all these
examples (to which should be added narcotics functioning as a
desiring-machine, the junky machine) there appears a properly machinic
death drive that stands in opposition to the Oedipal regressive death,
to psychoanalytic euthanasia. And there is really not one of these
desiring-machines that is not profoundly de-Oedipalizing.


Moreover, it is chance relations that ensure this, without, between
elements which are really distinct as such, or the unconnective
connection of their autonomous structures, following a vector that goes
from mechanical disorder towards the less probable, and which we call
the “mad vector.” The importance here of Vendryes’ theories becomes
evident, for they make it possible to define desiring-machines by the
presence of such chance relations within the machine itself, and by its
production of Brownoid movements of the sort observed in the stroll or
the sexual prowl.\footnote{With regard to the aleatory, the “mad vector,” and their political applications, cf. Pierre Vendryes’s books, \emph{Vie et probabilité}, Paris: Albin Michel (1945); \emph{La probabilité en histoire}, Paris: Albin Michel (1952), and \emph{Determinisme et autonomie}, Paris: Armand Colin (1956). Regarding a “prowl machine” of the Brownoid type, cf. Guy Hocquenghem, \emph{Le Désir homosexuel}. Ed. Universitaires (1972).} And, in the case of Goldberg’s drawings as well,
it is through the realization of chance relations that the functionality
of really distinct elements is ensured, with the same joy that is
present in Tinguely, the schizo-laughter. What is involved is the
substitution of an ensemble functioning as a desiring-machine positioned
on a mad vector, for a simple memorial circuit or for a social circuit
(in the first example, \emph{You Sap, Mail that Letter}, the desiring-machine
pervades and programs the three automated structures of sport,
gardening, and the birdcage; in the second example, \emph{Simple Reducing
Machine}, the Volga boatman’s exertion, the decompression of the stomach
of the millionaire eating dinner, the fall of the boxer onto the ring,
and the jump of the rabbit are programmed by the record insofar as it
defines the less probable or the simultaneity of the points of departure
and arrival).


All these machines are real machines. Hocquenghem is right in saying,
“Where desire is active, there is no longer any place for the
Imaginary,” nor for the Symbolic. All these machines are already there;
we are continually producing them, manufacturing them, setting them in
motion, for they are desire, desire just as it is—although it takes
artists to bring about their autonomous presentation. Desiring-machines
are not in our heads, in our imagination, they are \emph{inside the social
and technical machines themselves}. Our relationship with machines is
not a relationship of invention or of imitation; we are not the cerebral
fathers nor the disciplined sons of the machine. It is a relationship of
peopling: we populate the social technical machines with
desiring-machines, and we have no alternative. We are obliged to say at
the same time: social technical machines are only conglomerates of
desiring-machines under molar conditions that are historically
determined; desiring-machines are social and technical machines restored
to their determinant molecular conditions. Schwitters’ Merz is the last
syllable of Komerz. It is futile to examine the usefulness or
uselessness, the possibility or impossibility of these
desiring-machines. Their impossibility and their uselessness become
visible only in the autonomous artistic presentation, and there very
rarely. Don’t you see that they are possible because they are; they are
there in every way, and we function with them. They are eminently
useful, since they constitute the two directions of the relationship
between the machine and man, the \emph{communication} of the two. At the very
moment you say, “this machine is impossible,” you fail to see that you
are making it possible, by being yourself one of its parts, the very
part that you seemed to be missing in order for it to be already
working, the dancer-danger. You argue about the possibility or the
usefulness, but you are already inside the machine, you are a part of
it, you have put a finger inside, or an eye, your anus, or your liver
(the modern version of “You are in the same boat\dots{}”).


It almost appears as though the difference between social technical
machines and desiring-machines were primarily a question of size, or one
of adaptation, desiring-machines being small machines, or large machines
suited to small groups. It is by no means a problem of gadgets. The
current technological trend, which replaces the thermodynamic priority
with a certain priority of information, is logically accompanied by a
reduction in the size of machines. In another very joyful text, Ivan
Illich shows the following: that heavy machines imply capitalist or
despotic relations of production, involving the dependence, the
exploitation, and the powerlessness of men reduced to the condition of
consumers or servants. \emph{The collective ownership of the means of
production} does not alter anything in this state of affairs, and merely
sustains a Stalinist despotic organization. Accordingly, Illich puts
forward the alternative of \emph{everyone’s right to make use of the means of
production}, in a “convivial society,” which is to say, a desiring and
non-Oedipal society. This would mean the most extensive utilization of
machines by the greatest possible number of people, the proliferation of
small machines and the adaptation of the large machines to small units,
the exclusive sale of machinic components which would have to be
assembled by the users-producers themselves, and the destruction of the
specialization of knowledge and of the professional monopoly. It is
quite obvious that things as different as the monopoly or the
specialization of most areas of medical knowledge, the complicated
nature of the automobile engine, and the monstrous size of machines do
not comply with any technological necessity, but solely with economic
and political imperatives whose aim is to concentrate power or control
in the hands of a ruling class. It is not a dream of a return to nature
when one points out the extreme machinic uselessness of automobiles in
cities, their archaic character in spite of the gadgets attached to them
for show, and the potentially modern character of the bicycle, in our
cities as well as in the Vietnam War. And it is not even on behalf of
relatively simple and small machines that the desiring “convivial
revolution” has to be made, but on behalf of machinic innovation itself,
which capitalist or communist societies do everything in their economic
and political power to repress.\footnote{Ivan Illich, “Retooling Society,” \emph{Le Nouvel Observateur}, Sept. 11, 1972 (regarding largeness and smallness in the machine, cf. Gilbert Simondon, \emph{Du mode d’existence des objets techniques}, Méot (1958), pp. 132–133).}


One of the greatest artists of desiring-machines, Buster Keaton was able
to pose the problem of an adaptation of the mass machine to individual
ends, or to those of a couple or small group, in \emph{The Navigator}, where
the two protagonists “have to deal with housekeeping equipment generally
used by hundreds of people (the galley is a forest of levers, pulleys,
and wires).”\footnote{David Robinson, “Buster Keaton,” \emph{Revue du Cinéma} (this book contains a study of Keaton’s machines).} It is true that the themes of reduction or adaptation
of machines are not sufficient by themselves, and stand for something
else. This is shown by the demand that everyone be able to make use of
them and control them. For the true difference between social technical
machines and desiring-machines obviously is not in the size, nor even in
the ends they serve, but in the regime that decides on the size and the
ends. \emph{They are the same machines, but it is not the same regime}. This
is not to say, by any means, that we should counter the present regime,
which submits technology to the aims of an economy and a politics of
oppression, with the notion of a regime in which technology presumably
would be liberated and liberating. Technology presupposes social
machines and desiring-machines, each within the other, and, by itself,
has no power to decide which will be the engineering agency, desire or
the oppression of desire. Every time technology claims to be acting on
its own, it takes on a fascist hue, as in the techno-structure, because
it implies not only economic and political investments, but libidinal
investments as well, and they are turned entirely towards the oppression
of desire. The distinction between the two regimes, as the regime of
antidesire and that of desire, does not come down to the distinction
between the collectivity and the individual, but to two types of mass
organization, in which the individual and the collective do not enter
into the same relationship. There exists the same difference between
them as between the microphysical and the macrophysical—it being
understood that the microphysical agency is not the machine-electron,
but molecular machinizing desire, just as the macrophysical agency is
not the molar technical object, but the antidesiring, antiproductive,
molarizing social structure that currently conditions the use, the
control and the possession of technical objects. In our present social
order, the desiring-machine is tolerated only in its perverse forms,
which is to say, on the fringes of the serious utilization of machines,
and as a secondary benefit that cannot be avowed by the users,
producers, or antiproducers (the sexual enjoyment experienced by the
judge in judging, by the bureaucrat in stroking his files\dots{}). But the
desiring-machine’s regime is not a generalized perversion, it is rather
the opposite, a general and productive schizophrenia that has finally
become happy. What Tinguely says of one of his own works applies to
desiring-machines: \emph{a truly joyous machine, by joyous I mean free}.



\begin{quote}


3. The Machine and the full body: the investments of the Machine.



\end{quote}


Nothing is more obscure, as soon as one considers the details, than
Marx’s propositions concerning productive forces and relations of
production. The broad outline is clear enough: from tools to machines,
the human means of production imply social relations of production,
which however are external to these means and are merely their “index.”
But what is the meaning of “index”? Why does Marx project an abstract
evolutive line meant to represent the isolated relationship of man and
nature, where the machine is apprehended starting from the tool, and the
tool in terms of the organism and its needs? It then necessarily follows
that social relations appear external to the tool or to the machine, and
impose on them from the outside another biological schema while breaking
up the evolutive line according to heterogeneous social
organizations\footnote{With regard to this other biological schema based on the types of organization, cf. “Afterword” to the Second German Edition of \emph{Capital} (International Publishers, pp. 17–19).} (it is among other factors, this interplay between
productive forces and relations of production that explains the strange
idea that the bourgeoisie was revolutionary at a given moment). It seems
to us on the contrary that the machine has to be directly conceived in
relation to a social body, and not in relation to a human biological
organism. If such is the case, one cannot regard the machine as a new
segment that succeeds that of the tool, along a line that would have its
starting point in abstract man. For man and the tool \emph{are already}
components of a machine constituted by a full body acting as an
engineering agency, and by men and tools that are engineered
(\emph{machinés}) insofar as they are distributed on this body. For example,
there is a full body of the steppe which engineers man-horse-bow, a full
body of the Greek city-state which engineers men and weapons, a full
body of the factory which engineers men and machines \dots{} Of the two
definitions of a manufacture given by Ure, and cited by Marx, the first
relates machines to the men who tend them, while the second relates the
machines \emph{and} the men, “mechanical and intellectual organs,” to the
manufacture as the full body that engineers them. It is in fact the
second definition that is literal and concrete.


It is not through metaphors nor by extension that we consider public
places and community facilities (\emph{les lieux}, \emph{les equipements
collectifs}) the means of communication, and the social bodies as
machines or machine components. On the contrary, it is by virtue of a
restriction and a derivation that the machine will cease to designate
anything but a technical reality but precisely under the conditions of a
quite specific full body, the body of money-Capital, insofar as it gives
the tool the form of fixed capital, which is to say, distributes the
tools on the surface of an autonomous mechanical representative, and
gives man the form of variable capital, which is to say, distributes men
on an abstract representative of labor in general. An interlocking of
full bodies all belonging to the same series: the full body of capital,
that of the factory, that of mechanisms \dots{} (Or indeed the full body of
the Greek city-State, that of the phalange, that of the two-handed
shield). The question we ought to ask is not how the technical machine
follows after simple tools, but how the social machine, and which social
machine, instead of being content to engineer men and machines, makes
the emergence of technical machines both possible and necessary. (There
were many technical machines before the advent of capitalism, but the
machinic phylum did not pass through them, precisely because it was
content to engineer men and tools. In the same way, there are tools in
every social formation which are not engineered, because the phylum does
not pass through them while the same tools are engineered in other
social formations: hoplite weapons, for example).


The machine understood in this manner is defined as a desiring-machine:
the ensemble composed of a full body that engineers, and men and tools
engineered on it. Several consequences follow from this view of the
machine, but we can only plot them here in a programmatic way.


Firstly, desiring-machines are indeed the same as technical and social
machines, but they are their unconscious, as it were: they manifest and
mobilize the investments of desire that “correspond” to the conscious or
preconscious investments of interest, the politics, and the technology
of a specific social field. To correspond does not at all mean to
resemble; what is at stake is another distribution, another “map,” that
no longer concerns the interests established in a society, nor the
apportionment of the possible and the impossible, of freedoms and
constraints, all that constitutes a society’s \emph{reasons}. But, beneath
these reasons, there are the unwanted forms of a desire that invests the
flows as such, and the breaks in these flows, a desire that continually
reproduces the aleatory factors, the less probable figures, and the
encounters between independent series that are at the base of this
society, a desire that elicits a love “for its own sake,” a love of
capital for its own sake, a love of bureaucracy for its own sake, a love
of repression for its own sake, all sorts of strange things such as
“What does a capitalist desire from the bottom of his heart?” and “How
is it possible that men desire repression not only for others but for
themselves?” and so on.


Secondly, the fact that desiring-machines are the internal limit, as it
were, of the technical social machines is more easily understood if one
bears in mind that the full body of a society, its engineering agency,
is never given as such, but must always be inferred from terms and
relations coming into play in that society. The full body of capital as
a proliferating body, Money that produces more Money, is never given in
itself. It implies a movement to the limit, where the terms are reduced
to their simple forms taken in an absolute sense, and where the
relations are “positively” replaced by an absence of ties. Consider the
capitalist desiring-machine, for example, the encounter between capital
and labor force, capital as deterritorialized wealth and labor capacity
as the deterritorialized worker, two independent series or simple forms
whose chance meeting is continually reproduced in capitalism. How can
the absence of ties be positive? One meets again with Leclaire’s
question stating the paradox of desire: how can elements be \emph{bound
together} by the absence of any ties? In a certain sense, it can be said
that Cartesianism, in Spinoza and Leibniz, has not ceased to reply to
this question. It is the theory of real distinction, insofar as it
implies a specific logic. It is because they are really distinct, and
completely independent of each other, that ultimate elements or simple
forms belong to the same being or to the same substance. It is in this
sense, in fact, that a substantial full body does not function at all as
an organism. And the desiring-machine is nothing other than a
multiplicity of distinct elements or simple forms that are bound
together on the full body of a society, precisely to the extent that
they are “on” this body, or to the extent that they are really distinct.
The desiring-machine as a movement to the limit: the inference of the
full body, the eliciting of simple forms, the assigning of absences of
ties. The method employed in Marx’s \emph{Capital} takes this direction, but
its dialectical presuppositions prevent it from reaching desire as a
part of the infrastructure.


Thirdly, the relations of production that remain outside the technical
machine are, on the contrary, internal to the desiring-machine.
Admittedly, they no longer exist as relations, but as parts of the
machine, some being elements of production, and others elements of
antiproduction.\footnote{“Every rupture produced by the intrusion of a machine phenomenon will be found to be conjoined to what we shall call a system of antiproduction, a specific representative mode of the structure \dots{} Antiproduction will be, among other things, what has been entered in the register of relations of production.”} J.J. Lebel cites the example of certain sequences
of Genet’s film that form a desiring-machine of the prison: two
prisoners locked in adjoining cells, one of whom blows smoke into the
other’s mouth through a straw that passes through a little hole in the
wall, while a guard masturbates as he watches. The guard is both an
element of antiproduction and a voyeur component of the machine: desire
is transmitted through all the parts. This means that desiring-machines
are not pacified; they contain dominations and servitudes,
death-carrying elements, sadistic parts and masochistic parts that are
juxtaposed. Precisely in the desiring-machines, these parts assume, as
do all the others, their strictly sexual dimensions. This is not to say,
as psychoanalysis would have it, that sexuality has at its disposal an
Oedipal code that would supplement the social formations, or even
preside over their mental genesis and organization (money and anality,
fascism and sadism, and so forth). There is no sexual symbolism, and
sexuality does not designate another “economy,” another “politics,” but
rather the libidinal unconscious of political economy as such. The
libido, the energy of the desiring-machine, invests every social
difference as being a sexual difference, including class differences,
racial differences and so on, either in order to guard the wall of
sexual differentiation in the unconscious, or, on the contrary, in order
to blow this wall to pieces, to abolish it on behalf of nonhuman sex. In
its very violence, the desiring-machine is a trial of the whole social
field by desire, a test whose outcome can just as well be desire’s
triumph as its oppression. The test consists in the following: given a
desiring-machine, how does it make a relation of production or a social
difference into one of its component parts, and what is the position of
this part? What about the millionaire’s stomach in Goldberg’s drawing,
or the masturbating guard in Genet’s film image? Isn’t a captive factory
boss a component of a factory desiring-machine, a way of responding to
the test?


Fourthly, if sexuality as an energy of the unconscious is the investment
of the social field by the desiring-machines, it becomes apparent that a
social attitude vis-à-vis machines in general in no way expresses mere
ideology, but the position of desire in the infrastructure itself, the
mutations of desire in terms of the breaks and the flows that pervade
this field. That is why the theme of the machine has a content that is
so emphatically, so openly sexual. The epoch of the First World War was
the meeting ground of the four great attitudes centering around the
machine: the great molar exaltation of Italian Futurism, which counts on
the machine to develop the national productive forces and to produce a
new national man, without calling in question the relations of
production; that of Russian Futurism and Constructivism, which conceive
the machine in terms of new relations of production defined by
collective appropriation (the tower-machine of Tatlin, or that of
Moholy-Nagy, expressing the famous party organization as a democratic
centralism, a spiral model, with a summit, a driving belt, and a base;
the relations of production continue to be external to the machine,
which functions as an “index”); the Dadaist molecular machinery, which,
for its part, brings about a reversal in the form of a revolution of
desire, because it submits the relations of production to the trial of
the parts of the desiring-machine, and elicits from the latter joyous
movements of deterritorialization that overcome all the territorialities
of nation and party; and lastly, a humanist antimachinism, which wants
to rescue imaginary or symbolic desire, to turn it back against the
machine, standing ready to level it onto an Oedipal apparatus
(Surrealism versus Dadaism, or Chaplin versus the Dadaist Buster
Keaton).\footnote{Regarding the role of machines in Futurism and Dadaism, cf. Noémi Blumenkranz, \emph{L’Esthétique de la machine} (Société d’esthétique), “La Spirale” (\emph{Revue d’esthétique}, 1971).}


And precisely because it is not a matter of ideology, but of a
machination that brings into play an entire group unconscious
characterizing a historical epoch, the tie between these attitudes and
the social and political field is complex, although it is not
indeterminate. Italian Futurism clearly sets forth the conditions and
the organizational forms of a fascist desiring-machine, with all the
equivocations of a nationalist and war-hungry “left.” Russian Futurists
attempt to slip their anarchist elements into a party machine that
crushes them. Politics is not the strong point of the Dadaists. Humanism
effects a withdrawal of the investment of desiring-machines which
nonetheless continue to operate inside it. But the problem of desire
itself was posed in the confrontation of these attitudes, the problem of
the position of desire, i.e., that of the relationship of respective
immanence between desiring-machines and social technical machines,
between those two extreme poles where desire invests paranoiac fascist
formations, or, on the contrary, revolutionary schizoid flows. The
paradox of desire is that it always requires such a long analysis, an
entire analysis of the unconscious, in order to disentangle the poles
and draw out the nature of the revolutionary group trials—for
desiring-machines.









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The Anarchist Library



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Deleuze \& Guattari

Anti-Oedipus

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

1972


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