Notes to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Chapters 1 and 2

Anti-Oedipus 1: Desiring-Machines
For every organ-machine, an energy machine (1).
Schizophrenia and the time before the man-nature dichotomy/split (1).
Nature lived as process of production (2).
Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines (3).
The schizophrenic experiences not nature, but nature as a process of production (3).
Production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation (4).
The recording process and consumption directly determine production, but within the production process itself (4).
Production as process:
Production of production—actions and passions
Production of recording processes—of the distribution and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference
Production of consumption—sensual pleasures, anxieties, and pain (4).
Man as the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe (4).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) does not distinguish between producer-product (5).
Desiring-machines are always binary machines (5). [Probably due to the co-existence of paranoic (repulsive) machines and miraculating (attractive) machines—in order to create the identifications of the celibate machine—more on this later.]
Productive or connective syntheses: and…and…and (5).
Flow-producing machines couple with organ-machines that interrupts the flow (5).
Desire couples flows, causes the currents to flow, flows itself, and breaks the flows (5).
The object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow causes the fragmentation of the object (6).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) also does not distinguish between product/producing (6).
Production is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product—desiring-production is the production of production (6).
Schizophrenic as universal producer (7).
Levi-Strauss’s bricolage and schizophrenia—the schizo shows an indifference to the tools at hand and the goal of the project; there is only the drive as anti-teleological principle of desire (7).
Bricolage works with whatever is at hand—a limited set of rules, and a finite and heterogeneous set of tools (7).
Product/producing unity allows for D+G to talk about “an enormous undifferentiated object” (7).
Nirvana and the view that it would be better if there had never been machines or connections (7).
The body suffers from being organized in a triangulated fashion (8).
The full BwO is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8).
Desiring-machines only work when they break down and work continually by breaking down (8).
BwO is nonproductive but is produced as the identity of producing-product in connective synth (8).
BwO is the body without an image (8).

Full BwO is the realm of antiproduction—the connective syntheses couple production w/ antiproduction (8).
2. The Body without Organs (BwO)
In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, the BwO sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid (9).
Repulsions of machines by the BwO (9).
Paranoic machine—BwO repels the machines that attempt to break in and persecute it (9).
BwO invests a counterinside or a counteroutside—paranoic machines occur when the BwO cannot tolerate the desiring-machine’s connections (9).
The socius as a full BwO that forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface (10).
Capital is the BwO of the capitalist being—it produces surplus value as it (seems to miraculously) reproduce itself (10).
Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their functioning seems miraculated by it (11).
Some kind of full body—either the earth, the body of the despot, or the body of capital (11).
BwO (as capital) now falls back on desiring-production (11).
Attraction or miraculating machines vs. repulsion and paranoic machines—these two coexist, but the paranoic machines attempt to de-miraculate the organs (11).
“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” (11-12).
There is a movement from libido (connective synthesis) to an energy of Numen (disjunctive synthesis) that has to do with the divine (miraculating) nature of disjunctive energy (13).
The full BwO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it (15).
The schizo has his own recording code that does not coincide with the social code (15).
Thus he scrambles all the codes, never recording the same event in the same way (15).
3. The Subject and Enjoyment
Production of recording is produced by the production of production (16).
Recording is followed by consumption, but the production of the consumption is produced in and through the production of recording (16).
There is a discerning of this (strange) subject on the recording surface (16).
There is everywhere a reward in the form of becoming or in the production of an avatar (16).
Libido (energy of production)àNumen (energy of recording)àVoluptas (energy of consumption) (16).
Let us term celibate machine that which forms a new alliance between the desiring-machine and the BwO so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism (17).
The subject is produced as a residuum or confuses himself with this third productive machine (conjunctive synthesis) and with the residual reconciliation that it brings about (17).
Critique of conjunctive synthesis (So it’s…!) (18).
Conjunctive synthesis as autoerotic or automatic pleasure (18).
Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation the really primary emotion (18).
Pure intensities come from repulsion and attraction and form the opposition of these forces (19).
All intensities are positive in relationship to the 0 intensity that constitutes the full BwO (19).
These oppositions of the forces of attraction and repulsion produce 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 numbed of stationary, metastable states through which the subject passes (19).
BwO is an egg…the development of the subject along particular trajectories and vectors (19).
Points of disjunction on the BwO form circles that converge on the desiring-machines (20).
The subject is forever decenteredàparanoic vs. miraculating = celibateà the subject (20).
Klossowski, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return (21).
Homo natura = Homo historia in the schizophrenic process (21).
4. A Materialist Psychiatry
Truly materialist psychiatry has a twofold task: introducing desire into mechanism, introducing production into desire (22).
Trinary schema of schizo—dissociation/autism/being-in-the-world—this indicates a false understanding of the schizophrenic process/phenomenon (22-23).
These three concepts reintroduce the ego through the body-image—the final avatar of the soul (23).
The schizo is past worrying about individualization and considers it a false problem (23).
Freud doesn’t like schizos—they are too much like philosophers—triangulation doesn’t stick (23).
Analytical relation between drives and symptoms—the symbol/symbolized (23).
Oedipus makes a classical theatre out of the unconscious as a factory (24).
Unconscious as representation or expression versus units of production and productive unconscious (24).
Product must be related to the process (24).
Nature = Industry, Nature = History (25).
Kant—the reality of the object is a psychic reality because it is produced by desire (25).
Kant (and psychoanalysis) reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, and so is content with exploiting to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as lack (26).
If desire produces, its product is real (26).
Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as unites of production (26).
Desire does not lack an object—it lacks a subject (or fixed subject) unless there is a repression (26).
The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself (26-27).
What is missing is the objectivity of man (27).
Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary (28).
Lack is created by society—footnote on Sartre’s use of scarcity as initial premise (28).
Social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions (29).
What needs to be explained is that the masses, at some level, wanted fascism (29).
Fantasy is always group fantasy (30).
Great socialist utopias as counterinvestments whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field (31).
Artist causes desiring-machines to undermine technical machines (32).
Technical machine not a cause but an index of a general form of social production (32).
The socius may be the Earth, the body of the Despot, or the body of Money (33).
Capitalism faced with decoding—born of the encounter of two flows—money and free labor (33).
Substituting money for the very notion of a code promotes an axiomatic of abstract quantities (33).
The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, the more the government reterritorializes to absorb surplus value (35).
Eschatology of materialist psychiatry (35).
5. The Machines
The hyle (flows of matter) as ideal continuity—machine of a machine (36).
The law of production of production links all machines back to other machines (36).
Every machine has a code (38).
Orchid’s surplus code allows for the wasp to tap into and works for the benefit of both species (39).
One vocation of the sign is to produce desire (39).
6. The Whole and Its Parts
Multiplicity is beyond the One and the Many (42).
We no longer believe in a primordial totality or a colorless dialectic of evolution (42).
Totality as the whole at the periphery that does not totalize, but is added as a separate part (42).
The Whole that does not totalize but establishes paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels (43).
BwO is a non-totalized totality (43).
Mechanism and vitalism both fail to address the key issue (43).
Partial objects and nonpersonal hyle (flow), and not global persons (ego formation) (44).
Jung + Freud on the psychoanalyst as father-figure or as magician-figure (46).
“It must be granted either that sexuality is sublimated or neutralized in an through social (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’” (46).
Child’s recording process and the process of feedback (from the child) (48).
The unconscious is an orphan (49).
Psychoanalysis perpetuates repression (interminable!) (50).

The Imperialism of Oedipus
Structural interpretation and Oedipus as universal, Catholic symbol (52).
Freud wants to get rid of Oedipus for biological realism (54).
Oedipus biunivocalizes (triangulates, forces an exclusive disjunctive synthesis) (54).
Expressive or productive unconscious? (54).
Psychoanalyst as theatre director and not engineer of the unconscious (54).
Three Texts of Freud
Freud reduces the group to individual—Freud affirms only an exclusive disjunction (54).
Resignation to Oedipus and castration (59).
The One of negative theology, exclusive series (60).
Castration of the unconscious—but the unconscious knows nothing of Oedipus or lack (61).
What are the operations that inject the unconscious with beliefs? (61).
Group fantasy—fucking the socius, wanting to be fucked by the socius (62).
Group = symbolic; individual = imaginary.
Learning to experience institutions themselves as mortal (63).
Group fantasy includes the disjunctions—everyone passes into the body of the other on the BwO (63).
Klossowski and the singular state vs. the gregarious state (63).
Formulation of a subject-group vs. a subjugated group (64) [This can be related properly to the concepts of the molar and molecular in D+G, but also with Sartre’s formulations of serialized groups vs. groups-in-fusion (Critique of Dialectical Reason)].
3 factors—castration/quantitative libido/nonlocalizable resistance (65).
The viscous vs. the liquid libido (does it stick or does it slip?) (65).
What must be distinguished are qualitative flows of libido (differences in kind!) (66).
Flows ooze, traverse the (Oedipal) triangle, breaking apart its vertices (67).
Criteria for an Oedipal cure? Contradictory results (67).
Falsification in order to produce the schizophrenic as identity (plagued with autism) (68).
Connective Syntheses
There are no contradictions in the unconscious (or BwO), only degrees of humor [black humor as that which allows contradictions to coexist and intensify rather than cancel out] (68).
In contrast to either/or exclusions, there is the either…or…or of the combinations and permutations where the differences amount to the same without ceasing to be differences (affirmative/inclusive disjunctive synthesis) (69-70).
Opposition between two types of connective syntheses—global and specific (ego formation, global ‘persons’) vs. partial and nonspecific (flows of desire on the BwO) (70).
Global persons (Oedipus) do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them (70).
The personal material of transgression and the person himself do not pre-exist prohibition (71). [Excursus: this is the only place I have located an instance of ‘transgression.’ Here it is perhaps necessary to distinguish between transcendence and transgression. In the former, the emphasis is placed on the teleological role that involves a relation between system formations (the triangulation that posits Oedipus as the alpha and omega)—(less crudely, transcendence goes beyond). However, there is no beyond to transgression—instead, transgression is created retroactively as the effect of the Oedipal ego formation that occurs due to a constituting law or prohibition. According to Paul, it is the sin in me that transgresses—I do that which I hate because the law designates that which constitutes transgression as such. Call me out if this is vague].
Prohibition displaces itself because it displaces desire (71).
Formation of global persons alters the synthesis of production (71).
Two steps of Oedipus: mother as the site of differentiation and sister as exchange: the logic of 3+1 where the sister serves as that which must be prohibited in order for the subject to constitute his own triangle outside the family (with its independent vertices) and the sister as that which must be kept open for exchange with the outside social field (allowing for the sibling to create her independent Oedipal triangle as well). Thus the +1 functions as that which allows for the triangular structure as such to be disseminated and transmitted across the socius (71).
Thus the point is to reproduce the triangular form, creating new triangles (71).
BwO and the dissolution of biunivocalization and triangulation (72).
Imposing an exclusive disjunction on the sexes (Lacanism) (72).
Phallus or law as transcendent, absent signifier (73).
Oedipusà3+1àthe One being the phallus (73).
Despotic signifier—money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of stocks and lacks (73).
Not to deny Oedipus, but to deny that Oedipus is produced by the unconscious (74).
Teleology of psychoanalysisàtranscendence of psychoanalysisàfirst paralogism (74).
Kant and the criteria immanent to understanding a Transcendental Unconscious [transcendental meaning against transcendence and asserting principles of immanent syntheses of the unconscious] (74-75).
Disjunctive Synthesis
Familial triangulation gives the co-ordinates of differentiation to the ego in regard to generation, sex and vital state (75).
Kant’s God as master of disjunctive synthesis (76).
Inclusive disjunction (schizo) vs. exclusive (Oed) (76).
The schizo is dead or alive but not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides (76).
The schizo is not neo-Hegelian (76).
Schizo as transsexual, trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild (77).
Schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion, even though they are related to the same (disjunctive) syllogism (77).
Affirm the distance and traverse the space between terms in an inclusive disjunction (77).
The schizo liberates a raw genealogical material (78).
God as the energy of recording—paranoic/miraculating (78).
Immanent and transcendent use of disjunctive synthesis (78).
Oedipus creates the differentiation and the undifferentiated (78-79).
Bateson (“Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behaviorial Science vol.1 1956), Russell and the double bind as oedipalizing force—second paralogism, double bind as the whole of Oedipus (80).
Psychoanalysis and policing—Marx and the Jewish question (81).
Oedipus and undecidability (in the mathematical sense) (81).
Schizoanalysis de-oedipalizes the unconscious (81).
Turning the analytical machine into a part of the revolutionary machine (81).
The true difference is between the real machinic element and the structural whole of the Imaginary-Symbolic (83).
Lacan, despotic signifier, problem of disciples following transcendent lack (83).
5. Conjunctive Synthesis
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 a field-gradient-threshold (84).
Intensive emotion as the common root and the principle of differentiation of delirium and hallucinations (84).
The first thing distributed on the BwO are races, cultures and their gods—the schizo participates in history—hallucinates and raves universal history—All delirium is racial but not necessarily racist (85).
Races and cultures designate zones of intensity, fields of potential—Phenomena of individuation and sexualization are produced within these fields—we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, departing becomes as easy as being born or dying (65).
Artaud—Nietzsche—every name in history is I (66).
Theory of proper names is not concerned with representation but with a 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 (66).
D+G:
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 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 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 paranoic tortures and 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 mis-en-scene of a machine to produce the real (87).
D+G again:

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. 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 I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me!’ But this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle (88).
D+G: “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 (90).
Stimuli are not organizers, but inductors (91).
Parental figures are indifferent inductors and the true organizer is elsewhere—on the side of what is induced, not on that of the inductor (92).
Foucault and the critique of psychoanalysis—healthy triangulation and perverted triangles (93).
If the psychotic escapes Oedipalization, this only means that he is doubly embedded and that there requires a differential calculus as such to analyze the organization of an extended familialism (93).
Bergson represents an opening up of the closed system and inscribing within that system a temporal dimension of duration that is irreducible and nonclosed (96).
Thus, Oedipus is open to a social field—not 3+1, but 4+n (96).
This leads to a poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle whose vertices are in danger of exploding—father and mother exist only as fragments and are never organized into a structure (96-97).
D+G:
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 of border shifts to the interior of Oedipus, between its two poles) (102).
The opposition between the Great Man and the Crowd—Hitler as oedipal subject or German crowd as oedipalized mass (102).
Oedipus is a means of integration into the group (103).
D+G again:
There is therefore a 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 [This notion corresponds to Zizek’s formulations of racism, insofar as, for Zizek and Lacan, what is always despised is the manner in which the Other enjoys differently from me—or it is because we are under the illusion that the Other has a more direct or original connection with the Thing or objet a] (103).
For Lacan, the segregative use of the conjunctive synthesis is a precondition for Oedipus (104).
D+G on ideology:
It is not a question of ideology. Thereis 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, 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 desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires (104).
D+G on the disintegration of Oedipus:
There again is the question of an intense potential for investment and counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its very conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to 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 (105-106).