4-5-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 1 & 2

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Parts 1 & 2)

Summary: Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenia to demonstrate that the Oedipus complex cannot be used as a structuring trope in psychoanalysis because it causes a tendency to blame everything on mommy and daddy; moreover, the subject cannot be divided into social realities and desire and fantasy because there is only the social.

“But group fantasy no longer has anything but the drives themselves as subject, and the desiring-machines formed by them with the revolutionary institutions.” (63)

These two sentences follow a passage in which D&G separate out individual fantasy from group fantasy.  Individual fantasy takes the ego as its subject, whereas group fantasy, as this sentence indicates, only has the drives as subject.  In that sentence, “them” refers back to the drives, so the drives are what form the desiring-machines.  I think this sentence is rather confusing, though, as its structure throws off meaning just a bit in two ways: the comma is used incorrectly, and the “with” right next to “by them” (passive voice) obfuscates what exactly is forming the desiring-machines.

First of all, the comma with the coordinating conjunction is used incorrectly, as the clause that follows it is dependent.  Without the “and,” the comma would perform a repetitive function, where “the desiring-machines” would rename the drives.  Without the comma, “the desiring-machines…institutions” would be another phrase parallel to “the drives themselves as subject.”  Both of these phrases would then be two things that the group fantasy no longer has anything but.  The former makes the two phrases closer to each other in meaning, as it performs a repetitive function.  The latter makes the two phrases parallel, where they are two different components of the same sentence subject.  Because both of these operations happen here, the structure is both repetitive and parallel. Whether or not this comma is a typo, intentional, or a result of translation, its presence along with the coordinating conjunction gives the structure of this sentence several layers that are at once conflicting and strangely similar.  I say strangely similar because, either way, the second phrase eventually finds its way back to “drives” as parallel to it (mirroring its shape and direction) or a repetition of it (a loop or a renaming).  In this way, drives acts as a sort of misplaced referent.  It’s not a very strong referent because of the comma mistake, but it’s not entirely misplaced, either.  I’m tempted to say that this sentence is schizophrenic.

Additionally, the structure of this sentence is just awkward.  The sentence says that the drives are the subject of group fantasy, but they’re not the subject of this sentence.  Group fantasy is.  The verb “has” indicates that group fantasy possesses the drives, and in that case, it doesn’t seem like drives has much subjectivity anymore.  Why don’t D&G say that drives are no longer the subject of group fantasy?  What’s more, this sentence refers back to a process of loss, as indicated by “no longer.”  Looking back through the text, this process began when D&G began mapping group fantasy onto the socius rather than the mother and father (62).  As a result of this remapping, group fantasy lost everything else that was attached to it, leaving only the drives as subject.  Whatever those other things were, they’re gone now.  This could have potentially been a violent loss, a ripping away (or maybe not), but the sentence doesn’t really tell us how that happened.  It's a reference to temporality without a view of what happened in between, like a before and after shot.  Group fantasy had more than the drives, but we looked away for a second, and when we looked back, it didn’t.  The structure of the sentence skirts around the process of loss by only naming what group fantasy has now.  There’s a trace of the before, but there’s mostly the after.  What’s more, the “as” makes it feel like the drives are just posing as the subject.  Is it just that group fantasy only as itself as subject, as the structure of the sentence would seem to indicate?  Even if this question doesn’t really take us anywhere, there’s another tricky part to this sentence.  Above, I talked about how the second part of the sentence either repeats or adds to the first part.  If group fantasy only has drives and nothing else, then why is there this repetition/addition tacked on to the end of it?

If the first part of the sentence was awkward, then I think the second part is even worse.  The passive-voiced “formed by them” is probably referring back to the drives, but the passive structure makes that connection rather weak.  When the “with the revolutionary machines” is added, it gets worse.  Are the desiring-machines formed with (using) the revolutionary revolutionary institutions, or are the desiring-machines formed with (along with) the revolutionary institutions?  Additionally, when I read this sentence, I want something to be after “institutions”.  Because of the comma before the coordinating conjunction, I’m expecting the sentence to be finished out with a predicate.  “Formed” doesn’t really act as a verb here.

I picked these two sentences because they seem to describe the process of moving away from ego psychology, which focuses on the individual subject.  Since Deleuze and Guattari are all about process, it’s important to choose a passage for close reading that examines this process more closely.  What is striking about this sentence, though, is that I feel like I’m even farther away from a description of the process than I was before I started close reading this sentence.