Desire as production: is desire a lack to be interpreted, or a productive force to be liberated from Oedipal capture?

Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Desire is not lack (Plato, Hegel, Lacan) but production. Desire is the "real inorganization" of the unconscious — the molecular domain of desiring-machines that produce by means of immanent syntheses (connection, disjunction, conjunction). Lacan's "symbolic" — signifying chains operating via metaphor and metonymy — is itself a molar organization, like the organism; the inverse side, the unconscious as such, is the molecular field of "real inorganization" that Lacan's apparatus cannot reach. Schizoanalysis replaces psychoanalysis.1

The Oedipal triangle is not a universal structure of desire but a specific historical formation by which capitalism re-territorializes the decoded flows of desire it has itself unleashed.2 Libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same thing — same nature, different regime.3

Sources

  1. To trace back from images to the structure would have little significance and would not:Joa I ANTI-OEDIPUS rescue us from representation, if the structure did not have a reverse side that is like the real production of desire.
    Anti-Oedipus, p. 335
  2. 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.
    Anti-Oedipus, pp. 328–329
  3. 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.
    Anti-Oedipus, pp. 336–337

Where the argument is made

  • Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Félix Guattari), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975, with Félix Guattari), A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Félix Guattari, especially the plateaus on the body without organs and on becoming-X), Coldness and Cruelty (1967, the solo masochism essay), Dialogues (1977, revised 2007, with Claire Parnet, the chapter 'Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse')

How the argument was received

The central thesis of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and the basis of the entire Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The body without organs — adapted from Artaud — is the surface of recording on which desiring-machines inscribe their productions; the second synthesis (disjunction). Becoming-X (animal, woman, imperceptible, molecular) in A Thousand Plateaus extends the desiring-production apparatus into the analytic of subjectivity. Held by both of us throughout the collaboration; the position is genuinely co-authored.