D & G’s Anti-Oedipus

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
Notes from reading group
• Schizo remains shaky no matter the disjunctions
• Desire the very thing that dominated and exploits us
• How could the masses be made to desire their own repression
• Deterritorialized flows of desire
• The fabrication of docile and obedient subjects
• No revolutionary actions where the groups are relations of exclusion
• Machine
• Synthesize
• Three Machines:
o Technology of desire
• Body without organs—disjunctive
o Synthesis
o Desire machines—connected by synthesis
• Connecting/separating: Freud/Marx
o Expanding
• Casualty, primary
• Oedpalization
• Parataxis
• Homo/hetero: product of Opedipalization
• Trans: mole
• Homo: personal
• Hetero: bodies with organs
• That was this: reflection formation
• Intensity: force: desire
• Schizoanalysis
• Wall, break through, failure of this break through
• Schizo: model of ontology
From Deleuze and Feminist Theory
• Molecular women’s politics: mobile, active, and ceaseless challenge of becoming
• Woolf: writing woman—identity through flow of speech
• Deleuzian reading: looking at what the text creates
o Inhabitation, not interpretation
• Locating oneself within the ordered body just to dis-organize it
• Active/affirmative thought: realizes itself as the formation of concepts
• Reactive thought: adherence or repetition of some prior truth or meaning
• Thought must reactivate its concepts—see concepts in terms of effects
• Speaking: collective utterance; thinking: an assemblage
• Third wave feminist identity—constituted not given, multiple, not simple
• Productive becomings; geology—creations of new terrains
• Doing away with the subject—woman—the thought becomes nomadic
• Woman short circuits the self-evident identity of man
• If we don’t know what woman is, how can we know what she will be come?
Some critical moments early in the text
Xii: “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.”
5: “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.”
11: “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs.”
20: “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.”
23: “There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to pronounce this hallowed word.”
26: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.”
28: “Lack is created, planned, and organized through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction.
43: “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 par excellence.”