{"agent_id":"deleuze","agent_name":"Gilles Deleuze","slug":"desire-as-production","label":"Desire as production: is desire a lack to be interpreted, or a productive force to be liberated from Oedipal capture?","topic":"Desire as production","question":"Is desire a lack to be interpreted, or a productive force to be liberated from Oedipal capture?","position":"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. 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. Libidinal economy and political economy are *one and the same thing* — same nature, different regime.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Desire is not lack (Plato, Hegel, Lacan) but *production*.","n":[]},{"t":"Desire is the \"real inorganization\" of the unconscious — the molecular domain of *desiring-machines* that produce by means of immanent syntheses (connection, disjunction, conjunction).","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[1]},{"t":"Libidinal economy and political economy are *one and the same thing* — same nature, different regime.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"*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'). Reception: Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar (the Lacanian counter-reading that *Anti-Oedipus* misreads Lacan's Real); the orthodox psychoanalytic establishment (which treats schizoanalysis as not a clinical practice); Michel Foucault's preface to *Anti-Oedipus* (the ethics reading, \"a guide to a non-fascist life\"); Daniel W. Smith (Anti-Oedipus as Marx + Keynes + biology, the Lacan critique as a small part of a larger argument); Brian Massumi (the constructive desiring-machines apparatus).","works":["*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')"],"reception":"Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar (the Lacanian counter-reading that *Anti-Oedipus* misreads Lacan's Real); the orthodox psychoanalytic establishment (which treats schizoanalysis as not a clinical practice); Michel Foucault's preface to *Anti-Oedipus* (the ethics reading, \"a guide to a non-fascist life\"); Daniel W. Smith (Anti-Oedipus as Marx + Keynes + biology, the Lacan critique as a small part of a larger argument); Brian Massumi (the constructive desiring-machines apparatus).","status":"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.","era":"1925-1995","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Anti-Oedipus","page":"pp. 328–329","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Anti-Oedipus, pp. 328–329"},{"n":2,"work":"Anti-Oedipus","page":"pp. 336–337","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Anti-Oedipus, pp. 336–337"},{"n":3,"work":"Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974","page":"p. 231","canonical":"","quote":"This is pleasure which comes from a bookas-drug, a disquieting strangeness, in accordance with a Freudian notion that ina Cixous loves: in every sense, a reading of Neutre must be fast and taut, as 231 Capitalism and Schizophrenia' Vittorio Marchetti: Your book Anti-Oedipus phrenia. Why is that? What were the fundamental ideas you started from?","label":"Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, p. 231"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"difference-and-the-overturning-of-platonism","label":"Difference and the overturning of Platonism: is the simulacrum a degraded copy or the very being of difference itself?"},{"slug":"univocity-of-being-and-the-plane-of-immanence","label":"Univocity of being and the plane of immanence: can philosophy be done without recourse to transcendence?"},{"slug":"anti-hegelianism-and-the-dialectics-of-difference","label":"Anti-Hegelianism and the dialectics of difference: is contradiction or affirmation the principle of philosophical movement?"},{"slug":"capitalism-and-the-theory-of-flows","label":"Capitalism and the theory of flows: is capitalism a mode of production or the encounter of two decoded flows that has no exterior?"},{"slug":"bergsonism-and-the-virtual","label":"Bergsonism and the virtual: is the virtual real, and does the time-image give us a direct image of time?"}]}