Anti-Œdipus

CHAPTER 1 - machines of desire

SECTION 1

1It functions everywhere, sometimes without stopping, sometimes discontinuously. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits, it fucks. What an error to have said the it. Everywhere these are machines, not at all metaphorically: machines of machines, with their couplings, their connections. A machine-organ is connected to a source-machine: one emits a flux, which the other cuts. The breast, a machine that produces milk; the mouth, a machine coupled to that one. The mouth of the anorexic hesitates between an eating machine, an anal machine, a speaking machine, a breathing machine (asthma attack). It is thus that we are all 'bricoleurs'; each with their little machines. A machine-organ for a machine-energy, always flux and cuts. Judge Schreber has the rays of heaven in his ass. Solar anus. And be sure that it works; Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and can theorize about it. Something is produced: effects of machines, and not metaphors.

2The schizophrenic's walk: it is a better model than the neurotic lying on the couch. A bit of fresh air, a relation with the outside. For example the walk of Lenz reconstructed by Büchner.{1} It is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself at his good pastor's place, who forces him to orient himself socially, in relation to the God of religion, in relation to the father, the mother. There on the contrary, he is in the mountains, under the snow, with other gods or without god at all, without family, without father or mother, with nature. "What does my father want? Can he give me better? Impossible. Leave me in peace." Everything functions as machine. Celestial machines, the stars or the rainbow, alpine machines, which couple with those of his body. Uninterrupted noise of machines. "He thought that it must be a feeling of infinite beatitude to be touched by the deep life of all form, to have a soul for stones, metals, water and plants, to welcome in himself all objects of nature, dreamily, as flowers absorb air with the growth and decay of the moon." To be a chlorophyllous machine, or photosynthesis, at least to slip one's body like a piece into such machines. Lenz placed himself before the distinction man-nature, before all the orientations that this distinction conditions. He does not live nature as nature, but as production process. There is no longer man or nature, but only process that produces one in the other and couples machines. Everywhere producing or desiring machines, the schizophrenic machines, all generic life: me and non-me, exterior and interior no longer want to mean anything.

3Continuation of the schizo's walk, when Beckett's characters decide to go out. One must first see how their varied movements are themselves a meticulous machine. And then the bicycle: in what relationship is the bicycle-horn machine with the mother-anus machine? "Speaking of bicycles and horns, what a rest. Unfortunately that is not what it is about but the one who gave me the day, through the hole of her garlic if I have good memory." One often believes that Oedipus is easy, it is given. But it is not so: Oedipus supposes a fantastic repression of machines of desire. And why, for what purpose? Is it truly necessary or desirable to submit to it? And with what? What to put in the oedipal triangle, with what to form it? The bicycle horn and my mother's ass, does that do the job? Are there not more important questions? Given an effect, what machine could well produce it? and a machine being given, what can it serve? For example, guess from the geometric description of a knife-holder what its use is. Or indeed, before a complete machine formed of six stones in the right pocket of my coat (pocket that dispenses), five in the right pocket of my pants, five in the left pocket of my pants (transmission pockets), the last pocket of the coat receiving the stones used as the others advance, what is the effect of this distribution circuit where the mouth inserts itself as a machine for sucking stones? What is here the production of voluptas? At the end of Malone Dies, Mrs. Pedal takes the schizophrenics on a walk, in a charabanc, in a boat, on a picnic in nature: an infernal machine is preparing itself.

4The body beneath the skin is an overheated factory,

5We do not claim to establish a naturalist pole of schizophrenia. What the schizophrenic lives specifically, generically, is not at all a specific pole of nature, but nature as process of production. What does process mean here? It is probable that, at a certain level, nature distinguishes itself from industry: in one respect industry opposes nature, in another it draws materials from it, in another it returns its waste to it, etc. This distinctive rapport man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature, conditions even within society the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that will be called "production," "distribution," "consumption." But this level of distinctions in general, considered in its formally developed structure, presupposes (as Marx showed) not only capital and the division of labor, but the false consciousness that capitalist being necessarily takes of itself and of the frozen elements of an overall procedure. For in truth—the striking and black truth that lies in delirium—there are no spheres or circuits relatively independent: production is immediately consumption and recording, recording and consumption directly determine production, but determine it within production itself. So that everything is production: productions of productions, of actions and passions; productions of recordings, of distributions and markings; productions of consumptions, of voluptà, of anguishes and pains. Everything is so much production that recordings are immediately consumed, consumed, and consumptions directly reproduced. Such is the first sense of process: to carry recording and consumption within production itself, to make them productions of the same procedure.

6In the second place, there is no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man identify themselves in nature as production or industry, that is to say equally in the generic life of man. Industry is no longer taken in an extrinsic relation of utility, but in its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.{4} Not man as king of creation, but rather he who is touched by the profound life of all forms or all genera, who is charged with the stars and animals themselves, and who ceases not to connect a machine-organ to a machine-energy, a tree in his body, a breast in the mouth, the sun in the ass: eternal attendant to the machines of the universe. This is the second sense of process; man and nature are not like two terms one opposite the other, even taken in a relation of causation, of comprehension or of expression (cause-effect, subject-object, etc.), but a single and same essential reality of producer and product. Production as process overflows all ideal categories and forms a cycle which relates to desire as immanent principle. This is why desiring production is the effective category of a materialist psychiatry, which posits and treats the schizo as Homo natura. On one condition however, which constitutes the third sense of process: it must not be taken for a goal, an end, nor must it be confused with its own continuation to infinity. The end of the process, or its continuation to infinity which is strictly the same thing as its abrupt and premature arrest, is the causation of the artificial schizophrenic, such as one sees in the hospital, autistic wreck produced as entity. Lawrence says of love: "From a process we have made an end; the end of all process is not its own continuation to infinity, but its accomplishment… The process must tend toward its accomplishment, not toward some horrible intensification, toward some horrible extremity where soul and body end by perishing".{5} It is with schizophrenia as with love: there is no specificity nor schizophrenic entity, schizophrenia is the universe of machines of desire producing and reproducing, the universal primary production as "essential reality of man and of nature".

7Machines of desire are binary machines, with binary rule or associative régime; always one machine coupled with another. Productive synthesis, the production of production, has a connective form: "and," "and then"… It is that there is always a machine producing a flux, and another connected to it, operating a cut, an extraction of flux (the breast — the mouth). And as the first is in turn connected to another with respect to which it behaves as cut or extraction, the binary series is linear in all directions. Desire ceases not to effect the coupling of continuous flux and partial objects essentially fragmentary and fragmented. Desire makes flow, flows and cuts. "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flux that carries off unfertilized eggs…," says Miller in his song of desire{6}. Pocket of waters and calculations of the kidney; flux of hair, flux of saliva, flux of sperm, of shit or of urine that are produced by partial objects, constantly cut by other partial objects, which produce other flux, recut by other partial objects. Every "object" supposes the continuity of a flux, every flux, the fragmentation of the object. No doubt each machine-organ interprets the entire world according to its own flux, according to the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything in terms of seeing — the speaking, the hearing, the shitting, the kissing… But always a connection is established with another machine, in a transversal where the first cuts the flux of the other or "sees" its flux cut by the other.

8The coupling of connective synthesis, partial object-flux, thus also has another form, product-producing. There is always producing grafted onto the product, which is why desiring production is production of production, like any machine, machine of machine. One cannot be content with the idealist category of expression. One cannot, one should not think to describe the schizophrenic object without connecting it to the process of production. The Notebooks of Art Brut are its living demonstration (and thereby deny that there is an entity of the schizophrenic). Or else Henri Michaux describes a schizophrenic table in terms of a procedure of production which is that of desire: "As soon as it had been noticed, it continued to occupy the mind. It continued even I don't know what, its own affair no doubt… What struck one was that, not being simple, it was not truly complex either, complex from the outset or by intention or from a complicated plan. Rather desimplified as it was worked… As it was it was a table with add-ons, as were certain drawings of schizophrenics said to be stuffed, and if it was finished, it was insofar as there was no longer any way to add anything to it, table which had become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table… It was appropriate to no use, to nothing that one expects of a table. Heavy, cumbersome, it was barely transportable. One did not know how to take it (neither mentally nor manually). The top, the useful part of the table, progressively reduced, disappeared, being so little in relation to the cumbersome structure, that one no longer thought of the whole as a table, but as a piece of furniture apart, an unknown instrument of which one would have had no use. Dehumanized table, which had no ease, which was not bourgeois, not rustic, not country, not kitchen, not work. Which lent itself to nothing, which resisted, refused service and communication. In it something dismayed, petrified. It could have recalled a stopped motor".{7} The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no occasion to distinguish here the producing and its product. At least the produced object carries it here into a new producing. The table continues its "own affair". The top is eaten by the structure. The non-termination of the table is an imperative of production. When Lévi-Strauss defines tinkering, he proposes a set of well-linked characteristics: the possession of a stock or of a multiple, heteroclite and nonetheless limited code; the capacity to make fragments enter into always new fragmentations; whence follows an indifference of producing and product, of the instrumental ensemble and of the ensemble to be realized{8}. The satisfaction of the tinkerer when he connects something onto an electrical conduit, when he diverts a water conduit, would be poorly explained by a game of "papa-maman" or by a pleasure of transgression. The rule of always producing producing, of grafting producing onto the product, is the character of machines of desire or of primary production: production of production. A painting by Richard Lindner, Boy with Machine, shows an enormous and turgid child, having grafted, making function one of his little machines of desire onto a big technical social machine (for, we shall see, this is already true of the child).

9From producing, a product, a product-producing identity… It is this identity that forms a third term in the linear series: enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops for a moment, everything freezes (then everything will start again). In a certain sense, it would be better if nothing worked, nothing functioned. Not to be born, to exit the wheel of births, no mouth to suckle, no anus to shit. Will the machines be broken down enough, their parts detached enough to render themselves and us to nothing? It seems the energy fluxes are still too bound, the partial objects still too organic. But a pure fluid in the free state and without cuts, sliding across a full body. The machines of desire make us an organism; but within this production, in its very production, the body suffers from being thus organized, from not having another organization, or no organization at all. "An incomprehensible station and quite straight" in the middle of the process, as a third time: "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No stomach. No belly. No anus." The automata stop and let the unorganized mass they articulated rise. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the ungenerated, the unconsummable. Antonin Artaud discovered it, there where it was, without form and without figure. Death instinct, such is its name, and death is not without model. For desire also desires that, death, because the full body of death is its immobile motor, as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. One will not ask how it works together: this question itself is the product of abstraction. The machines of desire work only broken down, in breaking down ceaselessly. President Schreber "lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, the esophagus torn, without bladder, the ribs crushed; he had sometimes partially eaten his own larynx, and so on." The body without organs is the unproductive; and yet it is produced in its place and in its hour in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and product (the schizophrenic table is a body without organs). The body without organs is not the witness to an originary nothingness, no more than the remainder of a lost totality. It is above all not a projection; nothing to do with the proper body, or with an image of the body. It is the body without image. It, the unproductive, it exists there where it is produced, at the third time of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinjected into production. The catatonic body is produced in the bath water. The full body without organs is anti-production; but it is still a character of the connective or productive synthesis, to couple production to anti-production, to an element of anti-production.

10Between the machines of desire and the full body there rises an apparent conflict. Each connection of machines, each production of machine, each noise of machine has become unbearable to the full body. Beneath the organs it senses larvae and repugnant worms, and the action of a God who fucks it up or strangles it by organizing it. "The body is the body / it is alone / and has no need of organs / the body is never an organism / organisms are the enemies of the body".{9} So many nails in its flesh, so many tortures. To the machine-organs, the full body opposes its slippery surface, opaque and stretched. To the fluxes bound, connected and recut, it opposes its amorphous undifferentiated fluid. To phonetic words, it opposes breaths and cries that are so many inarticulated blocks. We believe that originary repression has no other meaning: not a "counter-investment," but this repulsion of the machines of desire by the full body. And this is precisely what the paranoiac machine signifies, the action of breaching of the machines of desire upon the full body, and the repulsive reaction of the full body which experiences them globally as an apparatus of persecution. Thus we cannot follow Tausk when he sees in the paranoiac machine a simple projection of the "proper body" and of the genital organs.{10} The genesis of the machine takes place on site, in the opposition of the production process of the machines of desire and the unproductive station of the full body. The anonymous character of the machine and the undifferentiation of its surface testify to this. Projection intervenes only secondarily, as does counter-investment, insofar as the full body invests a counter-inside or a counter-outside, in the form of a persecuting organ or an external agent of persecution. But in itself the paranoiac machine is an avatar of the machines of desire: it results from the relation of the machines of desire to the full body, insofar as it can no longer bear them.

11But if we want to have an idea of the later forces of the body without organs in the uninterrupted process, we must pass through a parallel between desiring production and social production. Such a parallel is only phenomenological; it prejudges nothing about the nature and rapport of the two productions, nor even the question of whether there are effectively two productions. Simply, the forms of social production also imply an ungenerated improductive station, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body determined as socius. It may be the body of the earth, or the despotic body, or capital. It is of him that Marx says: it is not the product of labor, but it appears as its natural or divine presupposed. It does not content itself in effect with opposing the productive forces in themselves. It folds back onto all production, constitutes a surface where the forces and agents of production are distributed, so that it appropriates the surplus product and attributes to itself the ensemble and the parts of the process which now seem to emanate from it as from a quasi-cause. Forces and agents become its power under a miraculous form, they seem miraculed by it. In short, the socius as full body forms a surface where all production is registered and seems to emanate from the surface of registration. Society constructs its own delirium by registering the process of production; but it is not a delirium of consciousness, or rather the false consciousness is true consciousness of a false movement, true perception of an apparent objective movement, true perception of the movement which produces itself on the surface of registration. Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, it will give to the sterility of money the form under which that one produces money. It produces surplus-value, as the body without organs reproduces itself, buds and extends to the limits of the universe. It charges the machine with fabricating a relative surplus-value, all the while incarnating itself in it as fixed capital. And on capital the machines and agents cling, to the point that their very functioning is miraculed by it. Everything seems (objectively) produced by capital as quasi-cause. As Marx says, in the beginning capitalists necessarily have consciousness of the opposition of labor and capital, and of the usage of capital as means of extorting surplus-labor. But there quickly establishes itself a perverse bewitched world, at the same time that capital plays the role of surface of registration which folds back onto all production (to furnish surplus-value, or to realize it, such is the right of registration). "To the extent that relative surplus-value develops in the specifically capitalist system and that the social productivity of labor increases, the productive forces and the social connexions of labor seem to detach themselves from the productive process and pass from labor to capital. Capital thus becomes a most mysterious being, for all the productive forces seem to be born within its breast and to belong to it." {11} And what is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the usage of capital as full body to form the surface of inscription or of registration. But any full body whatsoever, body of the earth or of the despot, a surface of registration, an apparent objective movement, a perverse bewitched fetishist world belong to all types of society as constant of social reproduction.

12The full body without organs bends back upon desiring production, and attracts it, appropriates it for itself. Organ-machines hook onto it like onto a fencer's vest, or like medals on the jersey of a wrestler advancing while making them bounce. A machine of attraction can succeed, may thus succeed the repulsive machine: a miraculating machine after the paranoiac machine. But what does "after" mean? The two coexist, and black humor is charged not with resolving the contradictions, but with ensuring there are none, that there never were any. The full body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsummable, serves as surface for the registration of the entire process of production of desire, so that the machines of desire seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that reports them back to it. The organs are regenerated, miraculated on the body of President Schreber who attracts to himself the rays of God. Doubtless the old paranoiac machine subsists in the form of mocking voices that seek to "demiraculaте" the organs and notably the anus of the President. But the essential is the establishment of an enchanted surface of inscription or registration that attributes to itself all productive forces and organs of production, and which acts as quasi-cause in communicating to them the apparent movement (the fetish). So true is it that the schizo does political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy.

13Only production is not recorded in the same manner that it is produced. Or rather it is not reproduced in the apparent objective movement in the same manner that it was produced in the process of constitution. It is that we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of production of recording, whose law is not the same as the production of production. The law of the latter was the connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from the machines to the full body (as from labor to capital), it is as if they enter under another law which expresses a distribution with respect to the nonproductive element as "natural or divine presupposed" (the disjunctions of capital). On the full body, the machines attach themselves like so many points of disjunction between which an entire network of new syntheses is woven, and which grid the surface. The schizophrenic "either... or" takes over from the "and then": whatever two organs are considered, the manner in which they are attached on the full body must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two amount to the same on the slipping surface. While the "or" claims to mark decisive choices between impermutable terms (alternative), the "either" designates the system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same in shifting, in slipping. Thus for the speaking mouth and the walking feet: "It happened to him to stop without saying anything. Either that ultimately he had nothing to say. Either that while having something to say he ultimately renounced it... Other main cases present themselves to the mind. Continuous immediate communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart. Delayed continuous communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart".{12} It is thus that the schizophrenic, possessor of the leanest and most moving capital, such as Malone's properties, writes on his body the litany of disjunctions, and constructs for himself a world of parades where the tiniest permutation is supposed to answer to the new situation or to the indiscreet interpellator. The disjunctive synthesis of recording thus comes to cover the connective syntheses of production. The process as process of production extends itself into procedure as procedure of inscription. Or rather, if one calls libido the connective "labor" of desiring production, one must say that a part of this energy transforms itself into energy of disjunctive inscription (Numen). Energetic transformation. But why call divine, or Numen, the new form of energy despite all the equivocations raised by a problem of the unconscious that is religious only in appearance? The full body is not God, quite the contrary. But divine is the energy that traverses it, when it attracts all production and serves it as an enchanted miraculous surface, inscribing it in all its disjunctions. Hence the strange relations that President Schreber maintains with God. To whoever asks: do you believe in God? we must answer in a strictly Kantian or Schreberian manner: of course, but only as in the master of the disjunctive syllogism, as in the a priori principle of this syllogism (God defines the Omnitudo realitatis from which all derived realities issue forth by division).

14Divine, then, is only the character of an energy of disjunction. Schreber's divine is inseparable from the disjunctions in which it divides itself: anterior empires, posterior empires; posterior empires of a superior God, and of an inferior God. Freud forcefully marks the importance of these disjunctive syntheses in Schreber's delirium in particular, but also in delirium in general. "Such a division is quite characteristic of paranoiac psychoses. These divide while hysteria condenses. Or rather these psychoses resolve anew into their elements the condensations and identifications realized in the unconscious imagination." But why does Freud add thus that, upon reflection, hysterical neurosis is primary and that disjunctions are obtained only by projection of a primordial condensate? No doubt it is a way of maintaining the rights of Oedipus in the God of delirium and in schizo-paranoiac registration. This is why we must pose the most general question in this regard: does the registration of desire pass through Oedipal terms? Disjunctions are the form of desiring genealogy; but is this genealogy Oedipal, does it inscribe itself in the triangulation of Oedipus? Or is Oedipus not an exigency or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as it proposes to domesticate a genealogical matter and form that escapes it from all sides? For it is certain that the schizo is interpellated, never ceases to be. Precisely because his rapport with nature is not a specific pole, he is interpellated in the terms of the current social code: your name, your father, your mother? In the course of his exercises of desiring production, Molloy is interpellated by a policeman: "Your name is Molloy, said the commissioner. Yes, I said, it comes back to me this instant. And your mama? said the commissioner. I did not grasp. Is her name Molloy also? said the commissioner. Is her name Molloy? I said. Yes, said the commissioner. I reflected. Your name is Molloy, said the commissioner. Yes, I said. And your mama, said the commissioner, is her name Molloy also? I reflected." One cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this regard: it continues to pose its questions and to develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle, at the moment when it nonetheless senses how much the phenomena called psychosis overflow this frame of reference. The psychoanalyst says one must discover the papa beneath Schreber's superior God, and why not the elder brother beneath the inferior God. Sometimes the schizophrenic becomes impatient and asks to be left alone. Sometimes he enters into the game, he even exaggerates, only to reintroduce his own landmarks into the model proposed to him and which he makes burst from within (yes, it is my mother, but my mother, that is precisely the Virgin). One imagines President Schreber responding to Freud: but yes, yes, yes, the speaking birds are young girls, and the superior God, that is papa, and the inferior God, my brother. But softly, he re-impregnates the young girls with all the speaking birds, and his father with the superior God, and his brother, with the inferior God, all divine forms that complicate themselves or rather "de-simplify themselves" as they pierce beneath the terms and functions too simple of the Oedipal triangle.

15Desiring production forms a linear-binary system. The full body introduces itself as a third term in the series, but without breaking its character: 2, 1, 2, 1… The series is entirely resistant to a transcription that would make it pass over and mold it into a specifically ternary and triangular figure like that of Oedipus. The full body without organs is produced as Anti-production, that is to say intervenes as such only to refuse any attempt at triangulation implying parental production. How would you have it produced by parents, it who bears witness to its auto-production, to its engendering by itself? And it is upon it, there where it is, that the Numen distributes itself and that the disjunctions establish themselves independently of all projection. Yes, I have been my father and I have been my son. "Me, Antonin Artaud, I am my son, my father, my mother, and myself." The schizo has modes of orientation peculiar to itself, because it has first a particular code of registration that does not coincide with the social code or coincides with it only to make a parody of it. The delirious, or desiring, code presents an extraordinary fluidity. One would say that the schizophrenic passes from one code to another, that it muddies all codes, in rapid slippage, following the questions posed to it, giving not from one day to the next the same explanation, not invoking the same genealogy, not registering in the same manner the same event, even accepting, when it is imposed upon it and it is not irritated, the banal Oedipal code, only to re-stuff it with all the disjunctions that this code was made to exclude. The drawings of Adolf Wölfli put on stage clocks, turbines, dynamos, sky-machines, house-machines, etc. And their production takes place in a connective manner, going from the edge to the center by successive layers or sectors. But the "explanations" he joins to them, and which he changes following his mood, appeal to genealogical series that constitute the registration of the drawing. More than that, the registration folds back onto the drawing itself, in the form of lines of "catastrophe" or "fall" that are so many disjunctions surrounded by spirals. The schizo lands back on its feet always wavering, for the simple reason that it is the same thing on all sides, in all disjunctions. It is because the machine-organs may well cling to the body without organs, the latter nonetheless remains without organs and does not become an organism again in the usual sense of the word. It keeps its fluid and slippery character. Similarly the agents of production position themselves on Schreber's body, suspend themselves from this body, like the rays of heaven that he attracts and which contain thousands of tiny spermatozoa. Rays, birds, voices, nerves enter into permutable relations of complex genealogy with God and the divided forms of God. But it is upon the body without organs that everything takes place and registers itself, even the copulations of the agents, even the divisions of God, even the gridded genealogies and their permutations. Everything is upon this uncreated body like lice in the lion's mane.

16Following the sense of the word "process," registration folds back onto production, but the production of registration is itself produced by the production of production. Similarly, consumption follows on from registration, but the production of consumption is produced by and in the production of registration. It is that on the surface of inscription something allows itself to be detected which is of the order of a subject. It is a strange subject, without fixed identity, wandering on the full body, always beside the machines of desire, defined by the share it takes in the product, gathering everywhere the premium of a becoming or an avatar, born of the states it consumes and reborn at each state. "So it is me, so it is mine…" Even suffering, as Marx says, is enjoying oneself. No doubt all desiring production is already immediately consumption and consumation, therefore "Voluptas." But it is not yet so for a subject, which can only be detected through the disjunctions of a surface of inscription, in the remainders of each division. President Schreber, always him, is most vividly aware of it: there is a constant rate of cosmic enjoyment, so that God requires to find voluptuousness in Schreber, even at the cost of a transformation of Schreber into woman. But this voluptuousness, the president experiences only a residual part of it, like the wage of his pains or the premium of his becoming-woman. "It is my duty to offer this enjoyment to God; and if, in doing so, a little sensual pleasure comes to fall to me, I feel justified in accepting it, in the title of a slight compensation for the excess of sufferings and privations which have been my lot for so many years." Just as a part of the libido as energy of production has transformed itself into energy of registration (Numen), a part of it transforms itself into energy of consumption (Voluptas). It is this residual energy that animates the third synthesis of the unconscious, the conjunctive synthesis of "so it is…" or production of consumption.

17We must consider how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced. We were starting from the opposition between machines of desire and the full body. Their repulsion, as it appeared in the paranoiac machine of originary repression, gave way to an attraction in the miraculating machine. But between attraction and repulsion the opposition persists. It seems that effective reconciliation can only take place at the level of a new machine, which functions as "return of the repressed." That such a reconciliation exists or can exist, everything testifies to it. Of Robert Gie, the excellent draftsman of electric paranoiac machines, we are told without further precision: "It seems quite clear that, failing to free himself from these currents that tormented him, he finally took their strong part, exalting himself in depicting them in their total victory, in their triumph."{15} Freud more precisely emphasizes the importance of the turning point of the illness in President Schreber, when he reconciles himself with his becoming-woman and engages in a process of self-healing that brings him back to the identity Nature = Production (production of a new humanity). Schreber indeed finds himself sealed in an attitude and an apparatus of cross-dressing, at a moment when he is practically healed and has recovered all his faculties: "I sometimes find myself installed before a mirror or elsewhere, the torso half-naked, and adorned like a woman with ribbons, false necklaces, etc.; this moreover only occurs when I am alone…" Let us borrow the name "bachelor machine" to designate this machine that succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between machines of desire and the full body for the birth of a new humanity or a glorious organism. It amounts to the same thing to say that the subject is produced as a remainder, beside the machines of desire, or that it itself coincides with this third productive machine and the residual reconciliation that it operates: conjunctive synthesis of consumption in the marveling form of "So that's what it was!"

18Michel Carrouges isolated, under the name of "bachelor machines," a certain number of fantastic machines that he discovered in literature. The examples he invokes are highly varied, and do not seem at first glance to be able to fall into the same category: Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare…, the machine in Kafka's Penal Colony, the machines of Raymond Roussel, those of Jarry's Supermale, certain machines of Edgar Poe, Villiers's Future Eve, etc.{16} Yet the traits that found the unity, of variable importance according to the example considered, are the following: first, the bachelor machine testifies to an ancient paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its shadows, its ancient Law. It is not itself, however, a paranoiac machine. Everything distinguishes it from this, its gears, chariot, scissors, needles, magnets, rays. Even in the tortures or death that it gives, it manifests something new, a solar power. Second, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the miraculous character that the machine owes to the inscription it contains, although it effectively does contain the highest inscriptions (cf. the recording that Edison placed in the Future Eve). There is an actual consumption of the new machine, a pleasure that one can qualify as auto-erotic or rather as automatic where the nuptials of a new alliance are knotted, new birth, dazzling ecstasy as if mechanical eroticism liberated other unlimited powers.

19The question becomes: what does the bachelor machine produce, what is produced through it? The answer seems to be: intensive quantities. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in the pure state, at an almost unbearable point — a misery and a bachelor glory experienced at the highest degree, like a clamor suspended between life and death, a feeling of intense passage, states of pure and raw intensity stripped of their figure and their form. One often speaks of hallucinations and delirium; but the hallucinatory datum (I see, I hear) and the delirious datum (I think…) presuppose a deeper I feel, which gives hallucinations their object and delirious thought its content. A "I feel that I am becoming woman," "that I am becoming god," etc., which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory, but which will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the truly primary emotion which experiences first only intensities, becomings, passages.{17} Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of these two forces. Not that intensities are themselves in opposition with one another and balance themselves around a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive starting from intensity = 0 which designates the full body without organs. And they form relative falls or rises according to their complex relation and the proportion of attraction and repulsion that enters into their cause. In short, the opposition of forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all positive, which never express the final equilibrium of a system, but an unlimited number of metastable stationary states through which a subject passes. Profoundly schizoidal is the Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill matter without void at diverse degrees. Following the doctrine of President Schreber, attraction and repulsion produce intense states of nerve which fill the full body without organs at diverse degrees, and through which the subject-Schreber passes, becoming woman, becoming many other things still according to a circle of eternal return. The breasts on the naked chest of the President are neither delirious nor hallucinatory, they designate first a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his full body without organs. The full body without organs is an egg: it is traversed by axes and thresholds, by latitudes, longitudes, geodesics, it is traversed by gradients which mark the becomings and passages, the destinations of the one who develops there. Nothing here is representational, but everything is life and lived: the lived emotion of the breasts does not resemble breasts, does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ which will be induced there. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds and gradients. A harrowing experience, too moving, by which the schizo is closest to matter, to an intense and living center of matter: "this emotion situated outside the particular point where the spirit seeks it… this emotion which returns to the spirit the shattering sound of matter, the whole soul flows there and passes into its ardent fire".{18}

20How could the schizo be figured as that autistic wreck, separated from the real and cut off from life? Worse: how could psychiatry have practically made him that wreck, reduced him to that state of a body without organs become dead — he who installed himself at that point so unbearable where spirit touches matter and lives each intensity of it, consumes it? And should not this question be put in relation with another, apparently very different: how psychoanalysis (in order to reduce, this time the neurotic, to a poor creature who eternally consumes papa-mamma, and nothing else? How could one reduce the conjunctive synthesis of "So that's what it was!", "So that's me!" to the eternal and dreary discovery of Oedipus, "So that's my father, so that's my mother..." We cannot yet answer these questions. We see only to what point the consumption of pure intensities is foreign to familial figures, and how much the conjunctive tissue of "So that's..." is foreign to the Oedipal tissue. How to sum up all this vital movement? According to a first path (short way): the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles of convergence around machines of desire; then the subject, produced as residue beside the machine, appendage or adjacent piece to the machine, passes through all the states of the circle and passes from one circle to another. It is not itself at the center, occupied by the machine, but on the edge, without fixed identity, always decentered, concluded from the states through which it passes. Thus the loops traced by the unnameable, "now abrupt and brief, like waltzes, now with the breadth of a parabola," with for states Murphy, Watt, Mercier, etc., without the family having anything to do with it. Or else another more complex path, but which amounts to the same through the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the proportions of repulsion and attraction on the body without organs produce in the bachelor machine a series of states from 0; and the subject is born from each state of the series, always reborn from the following state that determines it in a moment, consuming all these states that make it be born and reborn (the lived state is primary in relation to the subject that lives it).

21This is what Klossowski admirably demonstrated in his commentary on Nietzsche: the presence of Stimmung as material emotion, constitutive of the highest thought and the most acute perception.{19} "Centrifugal forces do not flee the center forever, but draw near to it again only to distance themselves anew: such are the vehement oscillations that convulse an individual as long as he seeks only his own center and does not see the circle of which he himself is part; for if the oscillations convulse him, it is because each responds to an individual other than what he believes himself to be, from the point of view of the undiscoverable center. Hence an identity is essentially fortuitous and a series of individualities must be traversed by each, so that the fortuity of this one or that one renders them all necessary." Forces of attraction and repulsion, of ascent and decline, produce a series of intensive states from intensity = 0 which designates the body without organs ("but what is singular is that even here a new influx is necessary, merely to signify this absence"). There is not the I-Nietzsche, philology professor, who suddenly loses reason, and who would identify himself with strange personages; there is the subject-nietzschean who passes through a series of states, and who identifies the names of history with these states: all the names of history, that is me. The subject spreads out over the circumference of the circle from which the I has deserted the center. At the center there is the machine of desire, the bachelor machine of eternal return. Residual subject of the machine, the subject-nietzschean draws an euphoric bonus (Voluptas) from everything it makes turn, and which the reader had believed to be only the fragmentary work of Nietzsche: "Nietzsche believes he pursues henceforth, not the realization of a system, but the application of a program… under the form of the residues of nietzschean discourse, become in some sort the repertory of his histrionicism." Not to identify oneself with persons, but to identify the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time the subject cries "It is me, it is therefore me!" Never has one made history as much as the schizo, and in the manner in which he makes it. He consumes in one stroke universal history. We began by defining him as Homo natura, and here he is at last Homo historia. From one to the other, this long path that goes from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, and which precipitates itself ("Euphoria could not be prolonged in Nietzsche as long as the contemplative alienation of Hölderlin… The vision of the world granted to Nietzsche does not inaugurate a more or less regular succession of landscapes or still lifes, which extends over some forty years; it is the commemorative parody of an event: a single actor to mime it in one solemn day — because everything pronounces itself and disappears in a single day — were it to have lasted from December 31st to January 6th — beyond reasonable calendar.")

SECTION 2

22The famous thesis of psychiatrist Clérambault seems well founded: delirium, with its global systematic character, is secondary with respect to phenomena of parcellar and local automatism. Indeed, delirium qualifies the recording that collects the process of production of machines of desire; and although it has its own syntheses and affections, as one sees in paranoia and even in the paranoid forms of schizophrenia, it does not constitute an autonomous sphere, but is secondary with respect to the functioning and the breakdowns of machines of desire. However, Clérambault used the term "automatism (mental)" to designate only athematic phenomena of echo, sonorization, explosion, non-sense, in which he saw the mechanical effect of infections or intoxications. He explained a good part of delirium in turn as an effect of automatism; as for the other part, "personal," it was reactional in nature and referred back to "character," whose manifestations could moreover precede automatism (for example, paranoid character).{20} Thus in automatism Clérambault saw only a neurological mechanism in the most general sense of the word, and not a process of economic production putting machines of desire into play; and, for history, he was content to invoke innate or acquired character. Clérambault is the Feuerbach of psychiatry, in the sense that Marx says: "Insofar as Feuerbach is materialist, history is not encountered in him, and insofar as he takes history into consideration, he is not materialist." A truly materialist psychiatry defines itself on the contrary by a double operation: introduce desire into the mechanism, introduce production into desire.

23There is no profound difference between false materialism and the typical forms of idealism. The theory of schizophrenia is marked by three concepts that constitute its trinitarian formula: dissociation (Kraepelin), autism (Bleuler), space-time or being in the world (Binswanger). One is an explanatory concept that claims to indicate the specific disorder or primary deficit. The other is a comprehensive concept indicating the specificity of the effect: delirium itself or the cut, "the detachment from reality accompanied by a relative or absolute predominance of inner life". The third is an expressive concept, which discovers or rediscovers the delirious man in his specific world. The three concepts have in common the fact of relating the problem of schizophrenia to the 'me', by way of "the image of the body" (last avatar of the soul, where the exigencies of spiritualism and positivism become confused). Yet the 'me', it is like papa-mama, the schizo has long since stopped believing in it. He is beyond it, he is behind, below, elsewhere, but not in those problems. And where he is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable impoverishments, but why want to bring him back to what he has come out of, put him back in these problems that are no longer his, trample on his truth to which one has believed sufficiently in paying homage by giving it an ideal tip of the hat? One will say that the schizo can no longer say 'me', and that this sacred function of enunciation must be restored to him. This is what he sums up in saying: they are re-screwing me. "I will no longer say 'me', I will never say it again, it is too stupid. I will put in its place, each time I hear it, the third person, if I think of it. If it amuses them. It will change nothing." And if he says 'me' again, that changes nothing either. So far removed from these problems, so far beyond. Even Freud does not escape this narrow point of view of the 'me'. And what prevented him was his own trinitarian formula—the Oedipal, the neurotic: papa-mama-me. One must ask whether the analytical imperialism of the Oedipus complex did not lead Freud to rediscover, and to guarantee with his authority, the unfortunate concept of autism applied to schizophrenia. For finally, one must hide nothing, Freud does not like schizophrenics, he does not like their resistance to Oedipalization, he rather tends to treat them like beasts: they take words for things, he says, they are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from the real, incapable of transference, they resemble philosophers, "undesirable resemblance". One has often asked oneself about the way of conceiving analytically the relation of drives and symptoms, of symbol and symbolized. Is it a causal relation, or one of understanding, or of expression? The question is posed too theoretically. For, in fact, as soon as one places us in Oedipus, as soon as one measures us against Oedipus, the trick is done, and one has eliminated the only authentic relation which was of production. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of desiring production, of the productions of the unconscious. But, with Oedipus, this discovery was quickly occluded by a new idealism: to the unconscious as factory, one substituted an ancient theater; to the units of production of the unconscious, one substituted representation; to the productive unconscious, one substituted an unconscious that could only express itself (myth, tragedy, dream…).

24Each time the problem of the schizophrenic is brought back to the ego, one can only "taste" a supposed essence or specificity of the schizo, be it with love and pity, or to spit it back out with disgust. Once as ego dissociated, another time as ego cut, another time, the most coquettish, as ego that had not ceased to be, that was-there specifically, but in its world, and that lets itself be found again by a clever psychiatrist, a comprehensive super-observer, in short a phenomenologist. Here again let us recall Marx's warning: one does not guess from the taste of wheat who cultivated it, one does not guess from the product the régime and the relations of production. The product appears all the more specific, inexpressibly specific, as one relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension or expression, but not to the real process of production on which it depends. The schizophrenic appears all the more specific and personified as one halts the process, or makes it an end, or makes it play in the void to infinity, in such a way as to provoke this "horrible extremity where the soul and body end by perishing" (the Autistic). Kraepelin's famous terminal state… As soon as one assigns instead the material process of production, the specificity of the product tends to vanish, at the same time as there appears the possibility of another "accomplishment." Before being the affection of the artificialized schizophrenic, personified in autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and machines of desire. How does one pass from one to the other, and is this passage inevitable? remains the important question. On this point as on others, Jaspers gave the most precious indications, because his "idealism" was singularly atypical. Opposing the concept of process to those of reaction or development of personality, he thinks the process as rupture, intrusion, out of a fictive relation with the ego to substitute for it a relation with the "demonic" in nature. It was only lacking for him to conceive the process as economic material reality, as process of production in the identity Nature = Industry, Nature = History.

25In a certain way, the logic of desire misses its object from the very first step: the first step of the Platonic division that makes us choose between production and acquisition. As soon as we place desire on the side of acquisition, we give ourselves an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception of desire that determines it in the first place as lack, lack of object, lack of the real object. It is true that the other side, the "production" side, is not ignored. It even falls to Kant to have operated in the theory of desire a critical revolution, by defining it as "the faculty of being by its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations." But it is not by chance that, to illustrate this definition, Kant invokes superstitious beliefs, hallucinations and fantasms: we well know that the real object can be produced only by an external causality and mechanisms, but this knowledge does not prevent us from believing in the interior power of desire to engender its object, were it even under an unreal, hallucinatory or fantasmed form, and from representing this causality in desire itself. The reality of the object insofar as produced by desire is therefore psychic reality. Then one can say that the critical revolution changes nothing essential: this manner of conceiving productivity does not call into question the classical conception of desire as lack, but rests upon it, is propped up by it and contents itself with deepening it. Indeed, if desire is lack of the real object, its very reality is in an "essence of lack" that produces the fantasmed object. Desire thus conceived as production, but production of fantasms, has been perfectly exposed by psychoanalysis. At the lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object of which desire lacks refers on its part to an extrinsic natural or social production, while desire produces intrinsically an imaginary that comes to double reality, as if there were "a dreamed object behind each real object" or a mental production behind real productions. And certainly psychoanalysis is not forced to issue forth thus into a study of gadgets and markets, under the most wretched form of a psychoanalysis of the object (psychoanalysis of the pasta packet, the automobile or the "thing"). But even when the phantasm is interpreted in all its extension, no longer as an object, but as a specific machine that stages desire, this machine is only theatrical, and lets subsist the complementarity of what it separates: it is then need that is defined by the relative and determined lack of its own object, while desire appears as what produces the phantasm and produces itself by detaching itself from the object, but also by redoubling the lack, by raising it to the absolute, by making of it an "incurable insufficiency of being," a "lack-to-be that is life." Whence the presentation of desire as propped up on needs, the productivity of desire continuing to make itself on the basis of needs, and of their relation of lack to the object (theory of propping-up). In short, when one reduces desiring production to a production of phantasm, one contents oneself with drawing all the consequences of the idealistic principle that defines desire as a lack, and not as production, "industrial" production. Clément Rosset says it very well each time one insists on a lack of which desire would lack to define its object, "the world sees itself doubled by another world whatever it may be, by favor of the itinerary following: the object lacks to desire; therefore the world does not contain all objects, at least one is lacking from it, that of desire; therefore there exists an elsewhere that contains the key to desire (of which the world lacks)."

26If desire produces, it produces the real. If desire is productive, it can only be so in reality, and of reality. Desire is this ensemble of passive syntheses that machine partial objects, fluxes and bodies, and which function as units of production. The real follows from it, it is the result of the passive syntheses of desire as auto-production of the unconscious. Desire lacks nothing, it does not lack its object. Rather, it is the subject that lacks desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is a fixed subject only through repression. Desire and its object are one, it is the machine, insofar as it is machine of machine. Desire is machine, the object of desire is still connected machine, so that the product is extracted from producing, and something detaches itself from producing into the product, which will give a remainder to the nomadic and vagabond subject. The objective being of desire is the Real in itself. There is no particular form of existence that one could call psychic reality. As Marx says, there is no lack, there is passion as "being natural and sensible object." It is not desire that leans on needs, it is the contrary, it is needs that derive from desire: they are counter-products in the real that desire produces. Lack is a counter-effect of desire, it is deposited, arranged, vacuolized in natural and social reality. Desire always holds close to the conditions of objective existence, it espouses them and follows them, does not survive them, displaces itself with them, which is why it is so easily desire to die, whereas need measures the distance of a subject that has lost desire by losing the passive synthesis of these conditions. Need as practice of the void has no other sense: to go seek, capture, parasitize the passive syntheses where they remain. We may well say: we are not herbs, we lost the chlorophyllian synthesis long ago, we must eat… Desire becomes then this abject fear of lacking. But precisely, this phrase—it is not the poor or the dispossessed who pronounce it. They, on the contrary, know that they are close to the herb, and that desire has "need" of few things, not those things left to them, but these very things of which one ceases to dispossess them, and which did not constitute a lack in the heart of the subject, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man for whom to desire is to produce, to produce in reality. The real is not impossible, in the real on the contrary everything is possible, everything becomes possible. It is not desire that expresses a molar lack in the subject, it is molar organization that destitutes desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists and seers are content to be objective, nothing but objective: they know that desire embraces life with a productive power, and reproduces it in a manner all the more intense as it has little need. And too bad for those who believe it is easy to say, or that it is an idea in books. "From the few readings I had done, I drew this conclusion that the men who were most steeped in life, who molded it, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, possessed few goods, if they had any. They maintained no illusions in matters of duty, of procreation, for the limited ends of perpetuating the family or defending the State… The world of fantasms is the one we have not finished conquering. It is a world of the past, not of the future. To go forward clinging to the past is to drag with oneself the shackles of the convict." The living seer is Spinoza under the garb of the Neapolitan revolutionary. We know well where lack comes from—and its subjective correlate, the fantasm. Lack is arranged, organized in social production. It is counter-produced by the instance of antiproduction which folds back on the productive forces and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized in function of a prior lack, it is lack that comes to lodge itself, vacuolize itself, propagate itself according to the organization of a prior production. It is the art of a dominant class, this practice of the void as market economy: to organize lack in the abundance of production, to overturn all desire into the great fear of lacking, to make the object depend on a real production one supposes exterior to desire (the exigencies of rationality), while the production of desire passes into fantasm (nothing other than fantasm).

27There is not on the one hand a social production of reality, and on the other hand a desiring production of fantasy. Between these two productions only secondary links of introjection and projection would be established, as if social practices were doubled by internalized mental practices, or as if mental practices were projected into social systems, without the ones ever affecting the others. So long as we content ourselves with placing in parallel, on the one hand money, gold, capital and the capitalist triangle, on the other hand libido, the anus, the phallus and the familial triangle, we engage in a pleasant pastime, but the mechanisms of money remain entirely indifferent to the anal projections of those who handle it. The Marx-Freud parallelism remains entirely sterile and indifferent, staging terms that internalize or project themselves into one another without ceasing to be foreign, as in that famous equation money = shit. In truth, social production is uniquely the desiring production itself under determined conditions. We say that the social field is immediately traversed by desire, that it is the historically determined product of it, and that libido has need of no mediation nor sublimation, no psychic operation, no transformation, in order to invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. Even the most repressive and most mortiferous forms of social reproduction are produced by desire, in the organization that flows from it under such or such condition as we shall have to analyze. This is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy remains that which Spinoza knew how to pose (and which Reich rediscovered): "Why do men fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?" How does one come to cry out: still more taxes! less bread! As Reich says, what is striking is not that some people steal, that others strike, but rather that the starving do not always steal and that the exploited do not always strike: why have men endured for centuries exploitation, humiliation, slavery, to the point of wanting it not only for others, but for themselves? Never is Reich a greater thinker than when he refuses to invoke a misunderstanding or an illusion of the masses to explain fascism, and demands an explanation by desire, in terms of desire: no, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism at such a moment, in such circumstances, and it is this that must be explained, this perversion of gregarious desire. Yet Reich does not arrive at a sufficient answer, because he restores in his turn what he was in the process of bringing down, by distinguishing rationality as it is or should be in the process of social production, and the irrational in desire, only the second being subject to psychoanalysis. He then reserves for psychoanalysis alone the explanation of the "negative," the "subjective" and the "inhibited" in the social field. He necessarily returns to a dualism between the real object rationally produced, and irrational fantasmatic production. He renounces discovering the common measure or the coextension of the social field and desire. This is because, in order to truly ground a materialist psychiatry, he lacked the category of desiring production, to which the real would be subject under its so-called rational forms as much as irrational ones.

28The massive existence of social repression bearing on desiring production affects in no way our principle: desire produces the real, or desiring production is nothing other than social production. It is not a question of reserving for desire a particular form of existence, a mental or psychic reality that would oppose itself to the material reality of social production. Machines of desire are not phantasmatic or oneiric machines, which would distinguish themselves from technical and social machines, and would come to double them. Fantasms are rather secondary expressions, which derive from the identity of the two sorts of machines in a given milieu. Thus the fantasm is never individual; it is group fantasm, as institutional analysis has known how to show. And if there are two sorts of group fantasms, it is because identity can be read in two senses, according to whether machines of desire are grasped in the great gregarious masses that they form, or according to whether social machines are referred back to the elementary forces of desire that form them. It can thus happen, in group fantasm, that libido invest the existing social field, including in its most repressive forms; or conversely that it proceed to a counter-investment that connects to the existing social field the revolutionary desire (for example, the great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, not as ideal models, but as group fantasms, that is to say as agents of the real productivity of desire that make possible a disinvestment or a "deinstitution" of the present social field, to the profit of a revolutionary institution of desire itself). But, between the two, between machines of desire and technical social machines, there is never a difference of nature. There is certainly a distinction, but only a distinction of régime, according to relations of magnitude. They are the same machines, with the difference of régime alone; and it is this that group fantasms show.

29When we previously sketched a parallel between social production and desiring production, to show in both cases the presence of an anti-production instance prompt to fall back on productive forms and appropriate them for itself, this parallelism prejudged nothing about the rapport between the two productions. We could only specify certain aspects concerning the distinction of régime. First, technical machines obviously function only on the condition of not being broken down; their proper limit is wear, not breakdown. Marx can base himself on this simple principle to show that the régime of technical machines is that of a firm distinction between means of production and product, by virtue of which the machine transmits to the product the value, and only the value it loses in wearing away. Machines of desire on the contrary never cease to break down in running, run only broken down: always some producing grafts itself onto the product, and the pieces of the machine are equally combustible. Art often uses this property in creating veritable group fantasies that short-circuit social production with desiring production, and introduce a function of breakdown into the reproduction of technical machines. Such as Arman's burned violins, César's compressed cars. More generally Dalí's method of critical paranoia assures the explosion of a machine of desire in an object of social production. But already Ravel preferred breakdown to wear, and substituted for slowdown or gradual extinction sudden stops, hesitations, vibrations, misfirings, breakages{28}. The artist is the master of objects; he integrates into his art broken, burned, broken-down objects to return them to the régime of machines of desire whose breakdown is part of the very functioning; he presents paranoiac, miraculous, bachelor machines as so many technical machines, all while mining technical machines with machines of desire. More than that, the work of art is itself a machine of desire. The artist amasses his treasure for a near explosion, and that is why he finds that destructions, truly, do not come fast enough.

30A second difference of régime follows from this: it is through themselves that machines of desire produce anti-production, whereas the anti-production proper to technical machines is only produced in the extrinsic conditions of the reproduction of the procedure (although these conditions do not come "afterwards"). This is why technical machines are not an economic category, and always refer back to a socius or social machine that does not coincide with them, and which conditions this reproduction. A technical machine is therefore not cause, but only index of a general form of social production: thus manual machines and primitive societies, the hydraulic machine and the Asiatic form, the industrial machine and capitalism. When therefore we posited the socius as the analogue of a full body without organs, there was nonetheless an important difference. For machines of desire are the fundamental category of the economy of desire, produce through themselves a body without organs and do not distinguish the agents from their own pieces, nor the relations of production from their own relations, nor sociality from technicity. Machines of desire are at once technical and social. It is precisely in this sense that desire production is the place of an originary repression, whereas social production is the place of repression, and that, from the latter to the former, there is exercised something that resembles secondary repression "properly speaking": everything depends here on the situation of the body without organs, or its equivalent, according to whether it is internal result or extrinsic condition (notably changes the role of the death drive).

31Yet these are the same machines, under two different régimes — although it is a strange adventure for desire, to desire repression. There is only one production, which is that of the real. And no doubt we can express this identity in two ways, but these two ways constitute the auto-production of the unconscious as cycle. We can say that all social production flows from desiring production under determined conditions: first Homo natura. But we must say equally well, and more exactly, that desiring production is first social, and tends to liberate itself only in the end (first Homo historia). It is that the body without organs is not given for itself in an origin, then projected into the different sorts of socius, as if a great paranoiac, chief of the primitive horde, was at the base of social organization. The social machine or socius can be the body of the Earth, the body of the Despot, the body of Money. It is never a projection of the body without organs. It is rather the body without organs which is the ultimate residue of a deterritorialized socius. The problem of the socius has always been this: to code the flux of desire, to inscribe them, to register them, to ensure that no flux flows that is not stamped, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine no longer sufficed, the despotic machine instituted a sort of overcoding. But the capitalist machine, insofar as it establishes itself on the more or less distant ruins of a despotic State, finds itself in an entirely new situation: the decoding and deterritorialization of flux. This situation, capitalism does not confront from without, since it lives from it, finds in it both its condition and its matter, and imposes it with all its violence. Its production and its sovereign repression can only exercise themselves at this price. It is born indeed from the encounter between two sorts of flux, decoded flux of production in the form of capital-money, decoded flux of labor in the form of the "free worker." Thus, contrary to previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of furnishing a code that covers the ensemble of the social field. To the very idea of code, it has substituted in money an axiomatic of abstract quantities that goes always further in the movement of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that undoes the socius to the profit of a body without organs, and which, on this body, liberates the flux of desire in a deterritorialized field. Is it exact to say in this sense that schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, as hysteria is the product of the territorial machine?

32The decoding of flux, the deterritorialization of the socius thus form the most essential tendency of capitalism. It ceases not to approach its limit, which is a properly schizophrenic limit. It tends with all its forces to produce the schizo as the subject of decoded flux on the full body — more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian than the proletarian. Always go further in the tendency, to the point where capitalism would send itself to the moon with all its flux in truth we have seen nothing yet. When one says that schizophrenia is our sickness, the sickness of our epoch, one must not wish to say only that modern life drives one mad. It is not a question of mode of life, but of process of production. It is not either a simple parallelism, although parallelism is already more exact, from the point of view of the bankruptcy of codes, for example between phenomena of slippage of meaning in schizophrenics and mechanisms of growing discordance at every level of industrial society. In fact, we wish to say that capitalism, in its process of production, produces a formidable schizophrenic charge upon which it bears all the weight of its repression, but which ceases not to reproduce itself as the limit of the procedure. For capitalism ceases not to thwart, to inhibit its tendency at the same time that it hurls itself into it; it ceases not to push back its limit at the same time that it tends toward it. Capitalism establishes or restores all sorts of residual and factitious territorialities, imaginary or symbolic, upon which it attempts, more or less, to recode, to buffer the persons derived from abstract quantities. Everything passes through again or returns, States, homelands, families. This is what makes capitalism, in its ideology, "the motley painting of all that has been believed." The real is not impossible, it is increasingly artificial. Marx called law of the thwarted tendency the double movement of the tendential fall of the rate of profit and the increase of the absolute mass of surplus-value. As corollary of this law, there is the double movement of decoding or of deterritorialization of flux, and of their violent and factitious re-territorialization. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flux in order to extract surplus-value from it, the more its annexed apparatuses, bureaucratic and police, re-territorialize with all their might while absorbing a growing share of surplus-value.

33It is certainly not in relation to pulsions that one can give sufficiently current definitions of the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic; for pulsions are only the machines of desire themselves. It is in relation to modern territorialities. The neurotic remains installed in the residual or factitious territorialities of our society, and collapses all of them onto Oedipus as ultimate territoriality that reconstitutes itself in the analyst's office, on the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, the boss is the father, and the head of state too, and you as well, doctor…). The pervert is the one who takes artifice at its word: you want some, you'll have some, infinitely more artificial territorialities still than those society proposes to us, new infinitely artificial families, secret and lunar societies. As for the schizo, with his vacillating step that ceases not to migrate, to wander, to stumble, he sinks always further into deterritorialization, on his own body without organs at the infinity of the decomposition of the socius, and perhaps it is his manner of finding the earth again, the schizo's stroll. The schizophrenic holds himself at the limit of capitalism: he is its developed tendency, the overproduct, the proletarian and the exterminating angel. He scrambles all codes, and bears the decoded flux of desire. The real flows. The two aspects of the process meet up: the metaphysical process that puts us in contact with the "demonic" in nature or in the heart of the earth, the historical process of social production that restores to machines of desire an autonomy in relation to the deterritorialized social machine. Schizophrenia is desiring production as limit of social production. Desiring production, and its difference of régime with social production, are thus at the end, not at the beginning. From one to the other there is only a becoming that is the becoming of reality. And if materialist psychiatry defines itself by the introduction of the concept of production into desire, it cannot avoid posing in eschatological terms the problem of the final relation between the analytical machine, the revolutionary machine, and machines of desire.

SECTION 3

34In what way are machines of desire truly machines, independent of any metaphor? A machine is defined as a system of cuts. This is in no way the cut considered as separation with reality; cuts operate in variable dimensions depending on the character considered. Every machine, in the first place, is in relation with a continuous material flux (hylè) in which it cuts. It functions as a machine to cut ham: cuts perform extractions on the associative flux. Thus the anus and the flux of shit that it cuts; the mouth and the flux of milk, but also the flux of air, and the sonic flux; the penis and the flux of urine, but also the flux of sperm. Each associative flux must be considered as ideal, infinite flux of an immense pork thigh. The hylè designates in effect the pure continuity that a matter possesses in idea. When Jaulin describes the pellets and snuff powders of initiation, he shows that they are produced each year as an ensemble of extraction on "an infinite sequence having theoretically only a single origin," unique pellet extended to the bounds of the universe.{30} Far from the cut opposing continuity, it conditions it, it implies or defines what it cuts as ideal continuity. This is because, as we have seen, every machine is machine of machine. The machine produces a cut of flux only insofar as it is connected to another machine supposed to produce the flux. And no doubt this other machine is in turn in reality a cut. But it is so only in relation with a third machine that produces ideally, that is to say relatively, an infinite continuous flux. Thus the machine-anus and the machine-intestine, the machine-intestine and the machine-stomach, the machine-stomach and the machine-mouth, the machine-mouth and the flux of the herd ("and then, and then, and then…"). In short, every machine is cut of flux with respect to that to which it is connected, but flux itself or production of flux with respect to that which is connected to it. Such is the law of production of production. This is why, at the limit of transversal or transfinite connections, the partial object and the continuous flux, the cut and the connection merge into one — everywhere cuts-flux from which desire wells up, and which are its productivity, always operating the graft of producing onto the product (it is most curious that Melanie Klein, in her profound discovery of partial objects, neglects in this regard the study of fluxes and declares them without importance: she thus short-circuits all the connections).{31}

35Connecticut, Connect - I - cut, cries little Joey. Bettelheim draws the picture of this child who lives, eats, defecates or sleeps only by connecting to machines furnished with motors, wires, lamps, carburetors, propellers and wheels: electrical eating machine, auto-machine for breathing, luminous anal machine. Few examples manifest so well the régime of desiring production, and the manner in which breaking forms part of the very functioning, or the cut, of machinic connections. No doubt one will say that this mechanical life, schizophrenic, expresses the absence and destruction of desire rather than desire, and supposes certain parental attitudes of extreme negation to which the child reacts by making itself machine. But even Bettelheim, favorable to an oedipal or pre-oedipal causality, recognizes that this can only intervene in response to autonomous aspects of the child's productivity or activity, even if it must subsequently determine in the child a nonproductive stasis or an attitude of absolute withdrawal. There is therefore first an "autonomous reaction to the total experience of life of which the mother is only a part." {32} Thus one must not believe that it is the machines themselves that testify to the loss or repression of desire (what Bettelheim translates in terms of autism). We always find the same problem: how has the process of production of desire, how have the machines of desire of the child set themselves to turning in the void infinitely, in such a manner as to produce the child-machine? how has the process transformed itself into an end? or rather how has it been victim of a premature interruption, or of a horrible exasperation? It is only in relation to the full body (eyes closed, nose pinched, ears stopped up) that something is produced, counter-produced, which diverts or exasperates all the production of which it nonetheless forms a part. But the machine remains desire, position of desire which pursues its history through originary repression and the return of the repressed, in the succession of paranoiac machines, miraculating machines and celibate machines through which Joey passes, as Bettelheim's therapeutics progresses.

36Every machine comprises in the second place a sort of code that is machined, stockpiled in it. This code is inseparable not only from its recording and transmission in the different regions of the body, but from the recording of each of the regions in its relations with the others. An organ can be associated with multiple flux according to different connections; it can hesitate between several régimes, and even take on itself the régime of another organ (the anorexic mouth). All sorts of functional questions arise: which flux to cut? where to cut? how and in what mode? What place to leave for other producers or anti-producers (the place of the little brother)? Must one, or must one not suffocate with what one eats, swallow air, shit with one's mouth? Everywhere the recordings, the information, the transmissions form a grid of disjunctions, of another type than the preceding connections. It falls to Lacan to have discovered this rich domain of a code of the unconscious, winding around the chain or chains of the signifying; and to have thus transformed analysis (the basic text in this regard is the Purloined Letter). But how strange this domain is by virtue of its multiplicity, to the point that one can scarcely speak of a chain or even of a desiring code. The chains are said to be signifying because they are made of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles less a language than a jargon, an open and polyvocal formation. The signs there are of any nature whatsoever, indifferent to their support (or is it not the support that is indifferent to them? The support is the full body). They have no plan, work at all levels and in all connections; each speaks its own language, and establishes with others syntheses all the more direct in transversal as they remain indirect in the dimension of elements. The disjunctions proper to these chains do not yet imply any exclusion, exclusions being able to arise only through a play of inhibitors and repressors that come to determine the support and fix a specific and personal subject. No chain is homogeneous, but resembles a procession of letters of different alphabets, and where there would suddenly surge an ideogram, a pictogram, the small image of an elephant passing or a sun rising. All of a sudden in the chain which mixes (without composing them) phonemes, morphemes, etc., there appear papa's mustache, mama's raised arm, a ribbon, a little girl, a cop, a shoe. Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it draws a surplus-value, as the orchid's code "draws" the figure of a wasp: phenomenon of surplus-value of code. It is an entire system of switchings and drawings of lots that form partially dependent random phenomena, close to a Markov chain. The recordings and transmissions coming from internal codes, from the external milieu, from one region to another of the organism, cross following the perpetually ramifying paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If there is writing there, it is a writing at the level of the Real, strangely polyvocal and never bi-univocized, linearized, a transcursive writing and never discursive: the entire domain of the "real disorganization" of passive syntheses, where one would seek in vain something one could call the Signifier, and which ceases not to compose and decompose the chains into signs that have no vocation to be signifying. To produce desire, such is the only vocation of the sign, in all the senses in which it is machined.

37These chains are ceaselessly the site of detachments in all directions, everywhere schizes that are valid for themselves and which must above all not be filled in. Such then is the second character of the machine: cuts-detachments, which are not confused with cuts-extractions. The latter bear on continuous flux, and refer back to partial objects. The former concern heterogeneous chains, and proceed by detachable segments, mobile stocks, like blocks or flying bricks. One must conceive each brick emitted at a distance, and itself composed of heterogeneous elements: not only enclosing an inscription with signs of different alphabets, but also figures, and then one or several straws, and perhaps a corpse. The extraction of flux implies the detachment of chain; and the partial objects of production suppose the stocks or the bricks of registration, in the coexistence and interaction of all the syntheses. How could there be partial extraction on a flux, without fragmentary detachment in a code that comes to inform the flux? If we said just now that the schizo is at the limit of the decoded flux of desire, it had to be understood of the social codes where a despotic Signifier crushes all the chains, linearizes them, bi-univocizes them, and makes use of the bricks as so many immobile elements for an imperial Chinese wall. But always the schizo detaches them, unseals them, carries them off in all directions to recover a new polyvocity which is the code of desire. Every composition, and also every decomposition is done by mobile bricks. Diaschisis and diaspasis, Monakow said: either a lesion extends following fibers that connect it to other regions and provokes at a distance incomprehensible phenomena from a purely mechanistic point of view (but not machinic); or a disorder of the humoral life entails a diversion of nervous energy and the institution of broken, fragmented directions in the sphere of instincts. The bricks are the essential pieces of machines of desire from the point of view of the procedure of registration: at once component parts and products of decomposition that are localized spatially only at such or such a moment, in relation to the great chronogenous machine that is the nervous system (melodic machine of the "music box" type, with non-spatial localization).{34} What makes the unequaled character of the book by Monakow and Mourgue, that by which it infinitely surpasses all the Jacksonism from which it draws inspiration, is the theory of bricks, of their detachment and their fragmentation, but it is above all what such a theory supposes — to have introduced desire into neurology.

38The third cut of the machine of desire is the residual-cut or residue, which produces a subject beside the machine, a piece adjacent to the machine. And if this subject has no specific or personal identity, if it traverses the full body without breaking its indifference, it is because it is not only a part beside the machine, but a part itself shared, to which there return parts corresponding to the detachments of chain and to the extractions of flux operated by the machine. Thus it consumes the states through which it passes, and is born from these states, always concluded from these states as a part made of parts, each of which fills at a moment the full body. Which permits Lacan to develop a machinic game more than etymological, parere — to procure, separare — to separate, se parere — to engender oneself — by marking the intensive character of such a game: the part has nothing to do with the whole, "it plays its part all alone. Here it is from its partition that the subject proceeds to its parturition…, which is why the subject can procure for itself what here concerns it, a state that we shall qualify as civil. Nothing in the life of anyone unleashes more persistence in arriving there. To be pars, it would readily sacrifice a great part of its interests"…{35} No more than the other cuts, the subjective cut designates a lack, but on the contrary a part that returns to the subject as share, a revenue that returns to the subject as remainder (there again, how much the oedipal model of castration is a bad model!). It is that the cuts are not the fact of an analysis, they are themselves syntheses. It is the syntheses that produce the divisions. That one consider the example of the return of milk in the child's belch; it is at once restitution of extraction on the associative flux, reproduction of detachment on the signifying chain, residue that returns to the subject for its own share. The machine of desire is not a metaphor; it is what cuts and is cut according to these three modes. The first mode refers to connective synthesis, and mobilizes libido as the energy of extraction. The second, to disjunctive synthesis, and mobilizes Numen as the energy of detachment. The third, to conjunctive synthesis, and Voluptas as residual energy. It is under these three aspects that the process of desiring production is simultaneously production of production, production of recording, production of consumption. To extract, to detach, to "remain", it is to produce, and it is to effectuate the real operations of desire.

39In machines of desire everything functions at the same time, but in the hiatuses and the cuts, the breakdowns and the misfirings, the intermittences and the short-circuits, the distances and the fragmentations, in a sum that never reunites its parts into a whole. It is that the cuts are there productive, and are themselves reunions. The disjunctions, as disjunctions, are inclusive. The consumptions themselves are passages, becomings and returns. It is Maurice Blanchot who knew how to pose the problem in all its rigor, at the level of a literary machine: how to produce, and think, fragments that have among themselves relations of difference as such, that have for relations among themselves their own difference, without reference to an original totality even lost, nor to a resultant totality even to come? Only the category of multiplicity, employed as substantive and surpassing the multiple no less than the One, surpassing the predicative relation of the One and the multiple, is capable of accounting for desiring production: desiring production is pure multiplicity, that is, affirmation irreducible to unity. We are at the age of partial objects, of bricks and remains. We no longer believe in these false fragments which, like the pieces of the antique statue, await being completed and reglued to compose a unity which is equally the unity of origin. We no longer believe in an original totality nor in a totality of destination. We no longer believe in the greyness of a bland evolutionary dialectic, which claims to pacify the pieces because it rounds their edges. We believe in totalites only to the side. And if we encounter such a totality to the side of parts, it is a whole of these parts, but which does not totalize them, a unity of all these parts, but which does not unify them, and which adds itself to them as a new part composed apart. "It surges forth, but applying itself this time to the ensemble, as such a piece composed apart, born of an inspiration"—says Proust of the unity of Balzac's work, but equally of his own. And it is striking, in the literary machine of In Search of Lost Time, to what extent all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sides, broken erections, closed boxes, non-communicating vessels, partitionings, where even contiguities are distances, and distances affirmations, puzzle pieces that do not come from the same, but from different puzzles, violently inserted into one another, always local and never specific, and their discordant edges always forced, profaned, imbricated into one another, always with remains. It is the schizoid work par excellence: one would say that guilt, declarations of guilt are there only to laugh. (In Kleinian terms, one would say that the depressive position is only a cover for a deeper schizoid position). For the rigors of the law express only apparently the protestation of the One, and find on the contrary their true object in the absolution of fragmented universes, where the law reunites nothing in Whole, but on the contrary measures and distributes the gaps, the dispersions, the bursts of that which draws its innocence from madness—it is why, to the apparent theme of guilt, there is intertwined in Proust a wholly other theme that denies it, that of vegetable ingenuity in the partitioning of sexes, in the encounters of Charlus as in the sleeps of Albertine, there where flowers reign and the innocence of madness reveals itself, proven madness of Charlus or supposed madness of Albertine.

40So Proust said that the whole is produced, that it is itself produced as a part beside the parts, that it neither unifies nor totalizes, but which applies itself to them by instituting only aberrant communications between non-communicating vessels, transversal unities between elements that keep all their difference in their own dimensions. Thus, in the railway journey, there is never totality of what one sees nor unity of points of view, but only in the transversal that the traveler dazed traces from one window to the other, "to bring together, to re-canvas the intermittent and opposite fragments." To bring together, to re-canvas, this is what Joyce called "re-embody." The full body is produced as a whole, but in its place, in the process of production, beside the parts it neither unifies nor totalizes. And when it applies itself to them, folds back on them, it induces transversal communications, transfmite summations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions, on its own surface where the functional cuts of partial objects cease to be recut by the cuts of signifying chains and those of a subject that orients itself there. The whole not only coexists with the parts, it is contiguous to them, itself produced apart, and applying itself to them: geneticists show it in their way by saying that "amino-acids are assimilated individually in the cell, then are arranged in the suitable order by a mechanism analogous to a mold in which the characteristic lateral chain of each acid places itself in its own position." As a general rule, the problem of part-whole relations remains as badly posed by mechanism and by classical vitalism, so long as one considers the whole as totality derived from the parts, or as originary totality from which the parts emanate, or as dialectical totalization. Mechanism, no more than vitalism, grasped the nature of machines of desire, and the double necessity of introducing production into desire as much as desire into mechanics.

41There is no evolution of the drives that would make them progress, with their objects, toward a totality of integration, any more than there is a primitive totality from which they would derive. Melanie Klein made the marvelous discovery of partial objects, this world of explosions, rotations, vibrations. But how to explain that she nonetheless misses the logic of these objects? It is because, first, she thinks them as fantasies, and judges them from the point of view of consumption, not of a real production. She assigns mechanisms of causation (thus introjection and projection), of effectuation (gratification and frustration), of expression (the good and the bad) which impose upon her an idealistic conception of the partial object. She does not attach it to a veritable process of production which would be that of machines of desire. Second, she does not rid herself of the idea that the schizo-paranoid partial objects refer back to a whole, either originary in a primitive phase, or to come in the later depressive position (the complete Object). The partial objects thus appear to her extracted from global persons; not only will they enter into totalities of integration concerning the ego, the object and the drives, but they already constitute the first type of object relation between the ego, the mother and the father. Now it is precisely here that everything is decided in the final account. It is certain that the partial objects have in themselves a sufficient charge to blow up Oedipus, and to destitute it of its foolish pretension to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to capture all desiring production. The question that poses itself here is not at all that of a relative importance of what one can call pre-oedipal in relation to Oedipus (for "pre-oedipal" is still in evolutionary or structural reference with Oedipus). The question is that of the Absolutely anœdipal character of desiring production. But because Melanie Klein preserves the point of view of the whole, of global persons and complete objects — and perhaps also because she holds to avoiding the worst with the International Psychoanalytic Association which has written on its door "none enters here who is not oedipal" — she does not use the partial objects to blow up the framework of Oedipus, on the contrary she uses them or feigns to use them to dilute Oedipus, to miniaturize it, to multiply it, to extend it to early ages.

42And if we choose the example of the least oedipianizing of psychoanalysts, it is precisely to show what forcing she must do to measure desiring production against Oedipus. All the more so for ordinary psychoanalysts who no longer even have consciousness of the "movement." This is not suggestion, this is terrorism. Melanie Klein writes: "The first time Dick came to me, he manifested no emotion when his nurse entrusted him to me. When I showed him the toys I had prepared, he looked at them without the slightest interest. I took a large train that I placed next to a smaller train and I designated them by the name of 'daddy train' and 'Dick train.' He thereupon took the train I had called 'Dick,' made it roll to the window and said 'Station.' I explained to him that the 'station, that's mommy; Dick enters into mommy.' He let go of the train, ran to position himself between the inner door and the outer door of the room, locked himself in saying 'black' and ran back out immediately. He repeated this maneuver several times. I explained to him that 'it's black inside mommy; Dick is in mommy's blackness'… When his analysis had progressed… Dick also discovered that the washbasin symbolized the maternal body, and he manifested an extraordinary fear of getting wet with water."{38} Say it's Oedipus, or else you'll get a slap. So the psychoanalyst no longer even asks: "What are your machines of desire?" but cries out: "Answer daddy-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein… So all desiring production is crushed, folded back onto parental images, aligned with the pre-oedipal stages, totalized in Oedipus: the logic of partial objects is thus reduced to nothing. Oedipus becomes therefore for us now the touchstone of logic. For, as we sensed at the beginning, partial objects are only apparently extracted from global persons; they are really produced by extraction from a flux or a non-personal hylè, with which they communicate by connecting to other partial objects. The unconscious ignores persons. Partial objects are not representatives of parental characters nor supports of family relations; they are pieces in machines of desire, referring to a process and to relations of production irreducible and primary with respect to what allows itself to be recorded in the figure of Oedipus.

43When one speaks of the Freud-Jung rupture, one forgets too often the modest and practical point of departure: Jung remarked that the psychoanalyst in the transference appeared often as a devil, a god, a sorcerer, and that his roles overflowed singularly the parental images. Everything went badly afterward, but the point of departure was good. It is the same with children's play. A child does not play only at papa-mama. He also plays at sorcerer, at cowboy, at cop and robber, at train and at little cars. The train is not necessarily papa, nor the station mama. The problem does not bear on the sexual character of machines of desire, but on the familial character of this sexuality. One admits that, grown up, the child finds himself seized in social relations that are no longer familial. But since these relations are supposed to occur afterward, there are only two possible paths: either one admits that sexuality sublimes or neutralizes itself in social (and metaphysical) relations, in the form of an analytical "afterward," or else that these relations bring into play a non-sexual energy, that sexuality was content in its turn to symbolize as an anagogic "beyond." It is there that things go badly between Freud and Jung. At least they have in common the belief that the libido cannot without mediation invest a social or metaphysical field. It is not thus. Consider a child who plays, or, crawling, who explores the rooms of the house. He contemplates an electrical outlet, he machines his body, he uses a leg as an oar, he enters into the kitchen, into the office, he manipulates little cars. It is evident that the presence of the parents is constant, and that the child has nothing without them. But that is not the question. The question is whether all that he touches is lived as representing the parents. From birth, the cradle, the breast, the nipple, the excrement are machines of desire in connection with the parts of his body. It seems to us contradictory to say at once that the child lives among partial objects, and that what he grasps in partial objects are the parental persons themselves even in pieces. That the breast be extracted from the body of the mother, this is not true in all rigor, for it exists as piece of a machine of desire, in connection with the mouth, and extracted from a flux of non-personal milk, rare or dense. A machine of desire, a partial object represents nothing: it is not representative. It is indeed support of relations and distributor of agents; but these agents are not persons, no more than these relations are intersubjective. These are relations of production as such, agents of production and anti-production. Bradbury shows it well when he describes the nursery as site of desiring production and group fantasy, which combines only partial objects and agents. The small child is ceaselessly in family; but in family and from the beginning, he conducts immediately a tremendous non-familial experience that psychoanalysis lets escape. The painting by Lindner.

44It is not a matter of denying the vital and loving importance of parents. It is a matter of knowing what their place and function are in desiring production, instead of doing the inverse and reducing all the play of machines of desire to the restricted code of Oedipus. How are places and functions formed that parents will occupy as special agents, in relation with other agents? For Oedipus exists from the beginning only open to the four corners of a social field, a field of production directly invested by libido. It seems evident that parents supervene on the surface of recording of desiring production. But it is precisely the entire problem of Oedipus: under the action of what forces does the oedipal triangulation close itself? under what conditions does it come to channel desire onto a surface that did not comprise it by itself? how does it form a type of inscription for experiences and machinations that exceed it from all sides? It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the child refers the breast as a partial object to the person of the mother, and ceases not to consult the maternal face. "Refer" does not designate here a natural productive relation, but a report, an inscription in inscription, in the Numen. The child from its youngest age has an entire desiring life, an entire set of non-familial relations with objects and machines of desire, which does not relate to parents from the point of view of immediate production, but which is referred to them (with love or hate) from the point of view of the recording of the process, and under such very particular conditions of this recording, even if these react upon the process itself (feed-back).

45It is among partial objects and in the non-familial relations of desiring production that the child experiences its life and asks itself what it is to live, even if the question must be "referred" to the parents and can receive only a provisional answer in familial relations. "I remember from the age of eight years, and even before, always having asked myself who I was, what I was and why live, I remember at the age of six years in a house on the boulevard de la Blancarde in Marseille (no. 59 exactly) having asked myself at snack time, chocolate bread that a certain woman named mother gave me, having asked myself what it was, to be and to live, what it was to see oneself breathing, and having wanted to breathe myself in order to experience the fact of living and to see if it suited me and in what it suited me."¹ This is the essential: a question poses itself to the child, which will perhaps be "referred" to the woman named mama, but which is not produced in function of her, which is produced in the play of machines of desire, for example at the level of the mouth-air machine or the tasting machine—what is it to live? what is it to breathe? what is me? what is the machine to breathe on my body without organs? The child is a metaphysical being. As for the Cartesian cogito, the parents are not in these questions. And one is wrong to confuse the fact that the question is referred to the parents (in the sense of recounted, expressed) with the idea that it relates to them (in the sense of a natural relation with them). By framing the life of the child in Oedipus, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, one condemns oneself to misrecognize the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that bear raw upon the unconscious, notably all the play of originary repression, of machines of desire and of the body without organs. For the unconscious is orphaned, and produces itself in the identity of nature and man. The auto-production of the unconscious surges up at the very point where the subject of the Cartesian cogito discovered itself without parents, there also where the socialist thinker discovered in production the unity of man and nature, there where the cycle discovers its independence with regard to indefinite parental régression.

46I cannot translate "Ja na pas" as it does not appear to be French. Could you please verify the text or provide the correct French phrase?

47to mommy-daddy

48We have seen how the two senses of "process" became confused: the process as metaphysical production of the demonic in nature, and the process as social production of machines of desire in history. Social relations and metaphysical relations do not constitute a par-après or a beyond. These relations must be recognized in all psycho-pathological instances, and their importance will be all the greater when one is dealing with psychotic syndromes presenting themselves under the most stupefying and most desocialized aspects. Now it is already in the life of the child, from the most elementary behaviors of the infant, that these relations are woven with partial objects, agents of production, factors of anti-production, following the laws of desiring production as a whole. Failing to see from the start what is the nature of this desiring production, and how, under what conditions, under what pressures the oedipal triangulation intervenes in the recording of the process, we find ourselves caught in the snares of a diffuse and generalized oedipalism that radically disfigures the child's life and its aftermath, the neurotic and psychotic problems of the adult, and the entirety of sexuality. Let us remind ourselves, let us not forget Lawrence's reaction to psychoanalysis. He, at least, his reticence did not come from a fear before the discovery of sexuality. But he had the impression, pure impression, that psychoanalysis was in the process of enclosing sexuality in a bizarre box with bourgeois ornaments, in a sort of artificial triangle rather disgusting, which suffocated all sexuality as production of desire, only to remake it in a new mode a "dirty little secret," the little family secret, an intimate theater instead of the fantastic factory, Nature and Production. He had the impression that sexuality had more force or potentiality. And perhaps psychoanalysis succeeded in "disinfecting the dirty little secret," but it was not better for that, poor and dirty secret of modern Oedipus-tyrant. Is it possible that psychoanalysis thus takes up an old attempt to lower, to debase, and to make us guilty? Michel Foucault was able to remark to what point the relation of madness with the family was founded on a development affecting the entirety of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, and entrusting to the family functions through which the responsibility of its members and their eventual guilt were evaluated. Now, insofar as psychoanalysis envelops madness in a "parental complex," and rediscovers the confession of guilt in the figures of self-punishment that result from Oedipus, it does not innovate, but completes what nineteenth-century psychiatry had begun: to raise a family and moralized discourse of mental pathology, to link madness "to the half-real half-imaginary dialectic of the Family," to decipher in it "the incessant assault against the father," "the mute obstinacy of instincts against the solidity of the family institution and against its most archaic symbols." Then, instead of participating in an enterprise of effective liberation, psychoanalysis takes part in the most general work of bourgeois repression, that which consisted in maintaining European humanity under the yoke of mama-papa, and in not finishing with this problem.

CHAPTER 2 - Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family

SECTION 1

49Restricted Oedipus is the figure of the papa-mama-me triangle, the family constellation in person. But when psychoanalysis makes it its dogma, it does not ignore the existence of so-called pre-oedipal relations in the child, exo-oedipal relations in the psychotic, para-oedipal relations among other peoples. The function of Oedipus as dogma, or "nuclear complex," is inseparable from a forcing by which the psychoanalytic theorist elevates himself to the conception of a generalized Oedipus. On the one hand, he accounts, for each subject of one sex or the other, for an intensive series of drives, affects and relations that unite the normal and positive form of the complex to its inverse or negative form: serial Oedipus, as Freud presents it in the Ego and the It, and which permits if needed to attach the pre-oedipal phases to the negative complex. On the other hand, he accounts for the coexistence in extension of the subjects themselves, and their multiple interactions: group Oedipus, which unites collaterals, descendants and ascendants (it is thus that the visible resistance of the schizophrenic to oedipianization, the evident absence of the oedipal link, can be drowned in a grandparental constellation, either by estimating necessary an accumulation of three generations to make a psychotic, or by discovering a mechanism of still more direct intervention of grandparents in psychosis, and by thus forming Oedipuses of Oedipus squared: neurosis, that is father-mother, but granny, that is psychosis). Finally, the distinction of the imaginary and the symbolic permits disengaging an oedipal structure as a system of places and functions that do not confound themselves with the variable figure of those who come to occupy them in such a social or pathological formation: structure Oedipus (3 + 1), which does not confound itself with a triangle but operates all possible triangulations by distributing in a determined domain desire, its object and the law.

50It is certain that the two preceding modes of generalization find their true scope only in structural interpretation. It is this that makes Oedipus a kind of universal Catholic symbol, beyond all imaginative modalities. It makes Oedipus a reference axis as much for pre-oedipal phases, for para-oedipal varieties, for exo-oedipal phenomena: the notion of "foreclosure," for example, seems to indicate a properly structural lacuna, by means of which the schizophrenic is naturally relocated on the oedipal axis, put back on the oedipal orbit, in the perspective of three generations for example, where the mother was unable to posit her desire vis-à-vis her own father, nor the son, consequently, vis-à-vis the mother. A disciple of Lacan can write: we are going to consider "the ways in which oedipal organization plays a role in psychoses; next, what are the forms of psychotic pregenitality and how they can maintain the oedipal reference." Our preceding critique of Oedipus thus risks being judged entirely superficial and petty, as if it applied only to an imaginary Oedipus and concerned the role of parental figures, without touching the structure and its order of places and symbolic functions. Yet the problem for us is to know whether it is truly there that the difference lies. Would not the true difference be between Oedipus, structural as well as imaginary, and something else, which all Oedipuses crush and repress—that is, desirous production—the machines of desire which allow themselves to be reduced neither to structure nor to persons, and which constitute the Real in itself, beyond or beneath the symbolic as well as the imaginary? We in no way claim to resume an attempt like Malinowski's, showing that figures vary according to the social form considered. We even believe what we are told when Oedipus is presented as a kind of invariant. But the question is entirely elsewhere: is there adequation between the productions of the unconscious and this invariant (between machines of desire and oedipal structure)? Or does the invariant express only the history of a long error, through all its variations and modalities, the effort of an unending repression? What we put in question is the frenzied oedipianization to which psychoanalysis devotes itself, practically and theoretically, with the combined resources of image and structure. And despite fine books written recently by certain disciples of Lacan, we ask whether Lacan's thought goes in this direction. Is it only a matter of oedipianizing even the schizo? Or is it not something else, and even the contrary? Schizophrenizing, schizophrenizing the field of the unconscious, and also the field of historical social, so as to blast open the straitjacket of Oedipus and recover everywhere the force of desirous productions, reestablish at the level of the Real the link of the analytic machine, of desire and of production? For the unconscious itself is neither structural nor personal, it symbolizes no more than it imagines or figures: it machines, it is machinic. Neither imaginary nor symbolic, it is the Real in itself, "the impossible real" and its production.

51But what is this long history, if we consider it only within the period of psychoanalysis? It does not proceed without doubts, detours and repentances. Laplanche and Pontalis remark that Freud "discovers" the Oedipus complex in 1897 in his self-analysis; but that he gives it a first generalized theoretical formulation only in 1923, in The Ego and the It; and that, between the two, Oedipus leads rather a marginal existence, "confined for example to a separate chapter on object choice at puberty (Three Essays) or on typical dreams (The Interpretation of Dreams)". It is that, they say, a certain abandonment by Freud of the theory of trauma and seduction does not open onto a univocal determination of Oedipus, but equally to the description of a spontaneous infantile sexuality of endogenous character. Now everything happens as if "Freud did not manage to articulate one to the other Oedipus and infantile sexuality", the latter referring to a biological reality of development, the former to a psychic reality of fantasy: Oedipus is what nearly was lost "to the benefit of a biological realism".{43}

52But is it accurate to present things in this way? Did Oedipus's imperialism require only the renunciation of biological realism? Or was something else, and infinitely more powerful, not sacrificed to Oedipus? For what Freud and the first analysts discover is the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible, endless connections, disjunctions without exclusivity, conjunctions without specificity, partial objects and flux. The machines of desire rumble, buzz at the bottom of the unconscious, Irma's injection, the tick-tock of the Wolf Man, Anna's coughing machine, and also all the explanatory apparatuses mounted by Freud, all these neurobiologico-desiring machines. And this discovery of productive unconscious has as it were two correlates: on the one hand the direct confrontation between this desiring production and social production, between symptomatological formations and collective formations, both their identity of nature and their difference of régime; on the other hand the repression that the social machine exerts on the machines of desire, and the relation of refoulement with this repression. It is all of this that will be lost, at least singularly compromised, with the institution of sovereign Oedipus. Free association, instead of opening onto polyvocal connections, closes itself in an impasse of univocity. All the chains of the unconscious are bi-univocized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. All desiring production is crushed, subjected to the exigencies of representation, to the dreary games of the representant and the represented in representation. And that is the essential point: the reproduction of desire yields place to a simple representation, in the process of the cure as well as in theory. The productive unconscious gives way to an unconscious that knows only how to express itself — to express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream. But who tells us that dream, tragedy, myth are adequate to the formations of the unconscious, even accounting for the work of transformation? Groddeck more than Freud remained faithful to an auto-production of the unconscious in the coextension of man and Nature. As if Freud had recoiled before this world of savage production and explosive desire, and wanted at all costs to bring some order to it, an order that became classical from the old Greek theatre. For what does it mean: Freud discovers Oedipus in his auto-analysis? Is it in his auto-analysis, or rather in his Goethean classical culture? In his auto-analysis he discovers something of which he says to himself: look, that resembles Oedipus! And this something, he at first considers as a variant of the "family romance," paranoiac registration through which desire precisely shatters the determinations of family. It is only little by little that he makes of the family romance, on the contrary, a simple dependence of Oedipus, and that he neuroticizes everything in the unconscious at the same time as he oedipianizes, as he closes the family triangle over all the unconscious. The schizo, there is the enemy. Desiring production is personalized, or rather personologized, imaginarized, structuralized (we have seen that the true difference or the frontier does not pass between these terms, which are perhaps complementary). Production is no longer anything but production of fantasy, production of expression. The unconscious ceases to be what it is, a factory, a workshop, to become a theatre, scene and staging. And not even an avant-garde theatre, as there were in Freud's time (Wedekind), but classical theatre, the classical order of representation. The psychoanalyst becomes director for a private theatre — instead of being the engineer or the mechanic who mounts units of production, who fights with collective agents of production and anti-production.

53Psychoanalysis is like the Russian revolution—one never knows when it starts going wrong. One must always go back further. With the Americans? with the First International? with the Secret Committee? with the first ruptures that mark renunciations by Freud as much as betrayals by those who break with him? with Freud himself, from the very "discovery" of Oedipus? Oedipus is the idealist turning point. Yet one cannot say that psychoanalysis began to ignore desiring production. The fundamental notions of the economy of desire, work and investment, retain their importance, but subordinated to the forms of an expressive unconscious and no longer to the formations of productive unconscious. The anœdipal nature of the production of desire remains present, but flattened onto the coordinates of Oedipus which translate it into "pre-œdipal," into "para-œdipal," into "quasi-œdipal," etc. The machines of desire are still there, but they no longer function except behind the wall of the cabinet. Behind the wall or in the wings, such is the place that originary fantasy concedes to the machines of desire, when it flattens everything onto the œdipal scene. They nonetheless continue to make a hellish noise. The psychoanalyst himself cannot ignore it. So his attitude is rather one of disavowal: all that is well true, but it is still just mommy-daddy. One writes above the entrance to the cabinet: leave your machines of desire at the door, abandon your orphan and solitary machines, your tape recorder and your little bicycle, enter and let yourself be œdipalised. Everything flows from it, beginning with the unspeakable character of the cure, its interminable character highly contractual, flux of words against flux of money. Then it takes only what is called a psychotic episode: a flash of schizophrenia, we bring one day our tape recorder into the analyst's cabinet, stop, intrusion of a machine of desire, and everything is overturned, we have broken the contract, we have not been faithful to the great principle of the exclusion of the third, we have introduced the third, the machine of desire in person. Yet each psychoanalyst should know that, under Oedipus, through Oedipus, behind Oedipus, it is with machines of desire that he has to do. At the beginning, psychoanalysts could not but be conscious of the forcing operated to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the entire unconscious. Then Oedipus flattened itself, it appropriated desiring production as if all the productive forces of desire emanated from it. The psychoanalyst became the coat rack of Oedipus, the great agent of anti-production in desire. The same history as that of Capital, and of its enchanted, miracled world (at the beginning too, said Marx, the first capitalists could not but be conscious…).

SECTION 2

54That the problem is first practical, that it concerns above all the practice of the cure, one sees easily. For the process of frenzied oedipianization is drawn precisely at the moment when Oedipus has not yet received its full theoretical formulation as "nuclear complex" and leads a marginal existence. That the analysis of Schreber is not in vivo takes nothing from its exemplary value from the point of view of practice. Now it is in this text (1911) that Freud encounters the most formidable question: how dare one reduce to the paternal theme a delirium as rich, as differentiated, as "divine" as the delirium of the President — once it is said that the President in his Memoirs grants only very brief references to the memory of the father? On several occasions, Freud's text marks to what extent he experiences the difficulty: first it appears difficult to assign as cause, be it only occasional, of the illness a "surge of homosexual libido" on the person of the physician Flechsig; but, when we replace the physician with the father, and charge the father with explaining the God of the delirium, we ourselves have difficulty following this ascension, we take rights that can only be justified by their advantages from the point of view of our understanding of the delirium (296, 298). Yet, the more Freud states such scruples, the more he repels them, the more he sweeps them away in an assured response. And this response is double: it is not my fault if psychoanalysis testifies to a great monotony, and finds the father everywhere, in Flechsig, in God, in the sun; it is the fault of sexuality and its obstinate symbolism (301). On the other hand, it is not surprising that the father returns constantly in present-day deliriums under the least recognizable and most hidden forms, since he returns well everywhere and in a more visible manner in ancient myths and religions, which express forces or mechanisms acting eternally in the unconscious (298, 323). One must establish that President Schreber knew not only the destiny of being sodomized in his lifetime by the rays of heaven, but that, posthumous, of being oedipianized by Freud. Of the enormous political, social and historical content of Schreber's delirium, not a word is retained, as if libido did not occupy itself with these things. Only are invoked a sexual argument, which consists in effecting the fusion of sexuality and the family complex, and a mythological argument, which consists in positing the adequation of the productive power of the unconscious and the "edifying forces of myths and religions."

55This last argument is very important, and it is not by chance that Freud, here, declares his agreement with Jung. In a certain manner this agreement subsists after their rupture. For, if one considers that the unconscious expresses itself adequately in myths and religions (always taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequacy, but these two ways have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against the myth, and which, from the outset, has substituted simple expressive forms for the productive formations. The fundamental question: why return to the myth? why take it as model? is ignored, pushed aside. Then the supposed adequacy can be interpreted in what is called an anagogic manner, toward the "high." Or else, inversely, in an analytic manner, toward the "low," by referring the myth back to the drives—but, as the drives are traced from the myth, deducted from the myth taking into account transformations… We want to say that it is from the same postulate that Jung is led to restore the most diffuse religiosity, the most spiritualized, and that Freud finds himself confirmed in his most rigorous atheism. Freud has no less need to deny the existence of God than Jung has need to affirm the essence of the divine, to interpret the adequacy commonly postulated. But to render religion unconscious or to render the unconscious religious, it is always to inject the religious into the unconscious (and what would Freudian analysis be without the famous sentiments of guilt one attributes to the unconscious?). And what happened in the history of psychoanalysis? Freud held to his atheism in the manner of a hero. But, around him, increasingly, he was allowed to speak respectfully, the old man was allowed to speak, only to prepare behind his back the reconciliation of the churches and psychoanalysis, the moment when the Church would form its own psychoanalysts, and when one could write in the history of the movement: in which we too, we are still pious! Let us recall Marx's great declaration: he who denies God does only a "secondary thing," for he denies God to posit the existence of man, to put man in the place of God (taking into account the transformation). But he who knows that the place of man is entirely elsewhere, in the coextensivity of man and nature, he does not even allow to subsist the possibility of a question bearing "on a foreign being, a being placed above nature and man": he no longer has need of this mediation, the myth, he no longer has need to pass through this mediation, the negation of the existence of God, for he has attained those regions of a self-production of the unconscious, where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphaned, immediately orphaned, immediately atheist. And doubtless the examination of the first argument would lead us to a similar conclusion. For, in welding sexuality to the family complex, in making Oedipus the criterion of sexuality in analysis, the test of orthodoxy par excellence, Freud himself posited the ensemble of social and metaphysical relations as an after or a beyond, that desire was incapable of investing immediately. It becomes then quite indifferent whether this beyond derives from the family complex by analytic transformation of desire or is signified by it in an anagogic symbolization.

56Consider another, later text by Freud, where Oedipus is already designated as the "nuclear complex": A Child is Being Beaten (1919). The reader cannot help but feel an impression of uncanny strangeness. Never has the paternal theme been less visible, and yet never has it been affirmed with such passion, such determination: the imperialism of Oedipus founds itself here on absence. For finally, of the three times of the fantasy supposed in the girl, the first is such that the father does not yet appear in it, the third, the father no longer appears in it: there remains then the second where the father shines with all his light, "distinctly unequivocally" — but precisely "this second phase never has real existence; remained unconscious, it can never for that reason be evoked by memory and is only an analytical reconstitution, but a necessary reconstitution." What is actually at stake in this fantasy? Boys are beaten by someone, the schoolmaster for example, before the eyes of little girls. We witness from the outset a double Freudian reduction, which is in no way imposed by the fantasy, but required by Freud in the manner of a presupposition. On the one hand Freud wants deliberately to reduce the group character of the fantasy to a purely individual dimension: it is necessary that the beaten children be in a certain way the ego ("substitutes of the subject itself") and that the beater be the father ("substitute of the father"). On the other hand it is necessary that the variations of the fantasy organize themselves in disjunctions whose usage must be strictly exclusive: thus there will be a girl-series and a boy-series, but asymmetrical, the feminine fantasy having three times of which the last is "boys are beaten by the schoolmaster," the masculine fantasy having only two times of which the last is "my mother beats me." The only common time (the second of the girls and the first of the boys) affirms without equivocation the prevalence of the father in both cases, but it is the famous nonexistent time. And it is always thus in Freud. Something common to both sexes must exist, but so as to be lacking in one as in the other, to distribute the lack to two non-symmetrical series, and to found the exclusive usage of disjunctions: you are girl or boy! It is thus with Oedipus and its "resolution," different in the boy and the girl. It is thus with castration, and its relation with Oedipus in both cases. Castration is at once the common lot, that is to say the prevailing and transcendent Phallus, and the exclusive distribution which presents itself in girls as desire for the penis, and in boys as fear of losing it or refusal of passive attitude. This something common must found the exclusive usage of the disjunctions of the unconscious — and teach us resignation: resignation to Oedipus, resignation to castration, renunciation for girls of the desire for the penis, renunciation for boys of male protest, in short "assumption of sex." This something common, the great Phallus, the Lack with its two non-superimposable faces, is purely mythic: it is like the One of negative theology, it introduces lack into desire, and makes emanate the exclusive series to which it fixes an aim, an origin and a resigned course.

57One should say the contrary: at once there is nothing in common between the two sexes, and they never cease communicating with one another, on a transversal mode where each subject possesses both, but partitioned, and communicates with one or the other of another subject. Such is the law of partial objects. Nothing is lacking, nothing can be defined as a lack; and the disjunctions in the unconscious are never exclusive, but are the object of a properly inclusive usage that we will have to analyze. And to say this contrary, Freud had at his disposal a concept, that of bisexuality; but it is not by chance that he never could, or would, give this concept the position and analytical extension that it demanded. Without even going that far, a lively controversy arose when certain analysts, following Melanie Klein, attempted to define the unconscious forces of the feminine sexual organ by positive characteristics in function of partial objects and fluxes: this slight shift which did not suppress mythic castration, but made it depend secondarily on the organ instead of the organ being supposed to depend on it, encountered great opposition in Freud. Freud maintained that the organ, from the point of view of the unconscious, could only be understood starting from a lack or original privation, and not the inverse. There is here a paralogism properly analytical (which will be found at a high degree in the theory of the signifier) and which consists in passing from the detachable partial object to the position of a complete object as detached (phallus). This passage implies a subject determined as fixed ego under one or another sex, who necessarily lives as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete object. It may be otherwise when the partial object is posited for itself on the full body, with for sole subject, not an "ego," but the drive which forms with it the machine of desire, and which enters into relations of connection, disjunction, conjunction with other partial objects, within the corresponding multiplicity of which each element can only be defined positively. One must speak of "castration" in the same sense as of oedipianization, and it is the crowning of it: it designates the operation by which psychoanalysis castrates the unconscious, injects castration into the unconscious. Castration as practical operation on the unconscious is obtained when the thousand cuts-fluxes of machines of desire, all positive, all productive, are projected into one same mythic place, the unary trait of the signifier. We have not finished singing the litany of the unconscious's ignorances; it ignores castration no less than Oedipus, as it ignores parents, gods, law, lack… The movements of women's liberation are right to say: we are not castrated, fuck you. And far from being able to get out of it by means of the miserable trick which would consist for men in answering that this is precisely proof that they are — or even to console them by saying that men are also, while rejoicing that they are under the other face, the one that is not superposable — one must recognize that the movements of feminine liberation carry to a more or less ambiguous state what belongs to every demand for liberation: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment of the social field by desire, the disinvestment of repressive structures. And one will not say either that the question is not whether women are castrated or not, but only whether the unconscious itself "believes in it," for all the ambiguity is there: what does belief applied to the unconscious signify, what is an unconscious that does nothing but "believe" instead of producing, what are the operations, the artifices that inject into the unconscious "beliefs" — not even irrational, but on the contrary too reasonable and conforming to the established order?

58Let us return to the fantasy "one beats a child, children are beaten": it is typically a group fantasy, where desire invests the social field and its repressive forms themselves. If there is staging, it is the staging of a social-desiring machine whose products we must not consider abstractly, by separating the case of the girl and the boy, as if each were a little self conducting its own affair with its daddy and mommy. We must on the contrary consider the ensemble and the complementarity girl-boy, parents-agents of production and anti-production, at once in each individual and in the socius that presides over the organization of the group fantasy. It is at the same time that boys get themselves beaten-initiated by the schoolteacher on the erotic scene of the little girl (seeing-machine) and get themselves jouir masochistically on the mommy (anal machine). So that they can only see by becoming little girls, and girls can only experience the pleasure of punishment by becoming boys. It is a whole chorus, a montage: returning to the village after an expedition to Vietnam, in the presence of grief-stricken sisters, the Marine scoundrels get themselves beaten by the instructor, on whose knees sits mommy, and get themselves jouir from having been so wicked, from having tortured so well. How wrong it is, but how good it is! One perhaps recalls a sequence from the film The Seventeenth Parallel: one sees there Colonel Patton, the general's son, declare that his guys are tremendous, that they love their father, their mother and their fatherland, that they cry at religious service for their dead comrades, fine guys—then the colonel's face changes, grimaces, reveals a great paranoiac in uniform who cries out finally: and with that, they are real killers… It is evident that, when traditional psychoanalysis explains that the instructor is the father, and the colonel too is the father, and the mother herself also is still the father, it reduces all desire to a familial determination that no longer has anything to do with the social field really invested by libido. Of course there is always something of the father or the mother that is caught in the signifying chain, the father's mustache, the mother's raised arm, but arriving at such a furtive place among collective agents. The terms of Oedipus do not form a triangle, but exist scattered at all corners of the social field, the mother on the schoolteacher's knees, the father next to the colonel. The group fantasy is connected to, machined on the socius. Being sodomized by the socius, desiring to be sodomized by the socius, does not derive from the father and the mother, although the father and the mother have their role there as subaltern agents of transmission or execution.

59When the notion of group fantasy was elaborated in the perspective of institutional analysis (in the work of the La Borde team, around Jean Oury), the first task was to mark its difference in nature with individual fantasy. It appeared that group fantasy was inseparable from the "symbolic" articulations that define a social field as real, whereas individual fantasy reduced the whole of this field to "imaginary" data. If one extends this first distinction, one sees that individual fantasy is itself connected to the existing social field, but grasps it under imaginary qualities that confer upon it a sort of transcendence or immortality behind the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo-destiny: what does it matter that I die, says the general, since the Army is immortal. The imaginary dimension of individual fantasy has decisive importance on the death drive, insofar as the immortality conferred upon the existing social order drags into the ego all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of "superego-ization" and of castration, all the resignations-desires (becoming general, becoming small, middle or large executive), including the resignation of dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our place!). The revolutionary pole of group fantasy appears on the contrary in the power of experiencing institutions themselves as mortal, of destroying them or changing them according to the articulations of desire and the social field by making of the death drive a veritable institutional creativity. For this is indeed the criterion, at least formal, between revolutionary institution and the enormous inertia that law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says, churches, armies, States, which of all these dogs wants to die? There follows a third difference between group fantasy and so-called individual fantasy: it is that the latter has for its subject the ego as determined by the legal and legalized institutions in which it "imagines" itself, to the point that, even in its perversions, the ego conforms to the exclusive use of the disjunctions imposed by law (Oedipal homosexuality, for example). But group fantasy no longer has for its subject anything but the drives themselves, and the machines of desire that they form with the revolutionary institution. Group fantasy includes the disjunctions, in the sense that each one, divested of personal identity, but not of singularities, enters into relation with the other according to the communication proper to partial objects: each one passes into the body of the other on the body without organs. Klossowski has well shown in this regard the inverse relation that tears fantasy in two directions, according to whether the established economic law establishes perversion in "psychic exchanges," or whether psychic exchanges on the contrary promote a subversion of law: "Anachronistic, relatively to the institutional level of gregariousness, the singular state can according to its more or less strong intensity effectuate a deactualization of the institution itself and denounce it as anachronistic in turn". The two types of fantasy, or rather the two régimes, thus distinguish themselves according to whether the social production of "goods" imposes its rule on desire through the intermediary of an ego whose fictive unity is guaranteed by the goods themselves, or according to whether the desiring production of affects imposes its rule on institutions whose elements are no longer anything but drives. If one must still speak of utopia in this latter sense, in Fourier's manner, it is certainly not as ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. And, in his recent works, Klossowski indicates to us the only means of surpassing the sterile parallelism in which we struggle between Freud and Marx: by discovering the way in which social production and relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives are part of the infrastructure itself. For they are part of it, they are present there in all ways by creating within economic forms their own repression as well as the means of breaking this repression.

60The development of distinctions between group fantasy and individual fantasy shows clearly enough, ultimately, that there is no individual fantasy. There are rather two sorts of groups, subject-groups and subjected groups — Oedipus and castration forming the imaginary structure under which the members of the subjected group are determined to live or fantasize individually their belonging to the group. Still one must say that the two sorts of groups are in perpetual slippage, a subject-group being always threatened with subjection, a subjected group being able in certain cases to be forced to assume a revolutionary role. It is all the more disquieting to see how much Freudian analysis retains of fantasy only its lines of exclusive disjunction, and crushes it on its individual or pseudo-individual dimensions which report it by nature to subjected groups, instead of performing the inverse operation, and disengaging in fantasy the underlying element of a revolutionary potentiality of group. When one learns that the instructor, the schoolteacher, it's the daddy, and the colonel too, and the mother too, when one thus folds back all the agents of production and of social anti-production onto the figures of familial reproduction, one understands that the maddened libido no longer risks getting out of Oedipus, and internalizes it. It internalizes it in the form of a castrating duality between subject of the statement and subject of the enunciation, characteristic of the pseudo-individual fantasy ("Me, as man, I understand you, but as judge, as boss, as colonel or general, that is to say as father, I condemn you.") But this duality is artificial, derived, and supposes a direct relation of the statement to collective agents of enunciation in the group fantasy.

61Between the repressive asylum, the legalistic hospital on one hand, and on the other hand contractual psychoanalysis, institutional analysis tries to trace its difficult path. From the beginning, the psychoanalytic relation molded itself onto the contractual relation of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned exclusion of the third party, the hypocritical role of money to which psychoanalysis brought new buffoonish justifications, the supposed limitation in time which belies itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by feeding an inexhaustible transference, by constantly nourishing new "conflicts." One is astonished to hear it said that a terminated analysis is by that very fact a failed analysis, even if this proposition is accompanied by a fine smile of the analyst. One is astonished to hear a wary analyst mention, in passing, that one of his "patients" still dreams of being invited to have a taste or an aperitif at his place, after several years of analysis, as if there were not there the minuscule sign of an abject dependence to which analysis reduces patients. How to avert in the cure this abject desire to be loved, the hysterical and whimpering desire that makes us bend our knees, lays us on the divan and keeps us there? Let us consider a third and final text of Freud, Terminated Analysis and Interminable Analysis (1937). We must not follow a recent suggestion according to which it would be better to translate "Finite Analysis, Infinite Analysis." For finite-infinite, that is almost mathematics or logic, for a singularly practical and concrete problem: does this story have an end, can one finish with an analysis, can the process of the cure terminate, yes or no, can it be accomplished or is it condemned to a continuation to infinity? As Freud says, can one exhaust a "conflict" currently given, can one protect the patient against ulterior conflicts, can one even awaken new conflicts for a preventive purpose? A great beauty animates this text of Freud: one knows not what of the desperate, the disenchanted, the weary, and at the same time a serenity, a certainty of the accomplished work. It is Freud's testament. He will die, and knows it. He knows that something is not going right in psychoanalysis: the cure tends increasingly to be interminable! He knows that he will no longer be there soon to see how it turns out. So he makes the census of obstacles to the cure, with the serenity of one who feels what is the treasure of his work, but already the poisons that have slipped into it. All would go well if the economic problem of desire were only quantitative; it would be a matter of reinforcing the ego against the pulsions. The famous strong and matured ego, the "contract," the "pact" between an ego all the same normal and the analyst… Only, there are qualitative factors in the economy of desire, which precisely make obstacle to the cure and of which Freud reproaches himself for not having sufficiently taken account.

62The first of these factors is the "rock" of castration, the rock with its two non-symmetrical slopes, which introduces in us an incurable alveolus and upon which analysis comes to founder. The second is a qualitative aptitude for conflict, which means that the quantity of libido is not divided into two variable forces corresponding to heterosexuality and homosexuality, but creates in most people irreducible oppositions between the two forces. The third finally, of such economic importance that it relegates dynamic and topical considerations, concerns a genre of non-localizable resistances: one would say that certain subjects have a libido so viscous, or on the contrary so liquid, that nothing manages to "take" on them. One would be wrong to see in this remark of Freud only a detailed observation, an anecdote. It is in fact the most essential in the phenomenon of desire, namely the qualitative flux of libido. André Green, in beautiful pages, has recently taken up the question again by drawing a picture of three types of "sessions," of which the first two present contra-indication, the third alone constituting the ideal session in analysis{51}. According to type I (viscosity, hysteric form resistance), "the session is dominated by a heavy, marshy climate. The silences are leaden, discourse is dominated by current events, … is uniform, it is a descriptive account where no reference to the past is discernible, it unfolds according to a continuous thread, unable to permit itself any rupture… Dreams are recited, … the enigma that the dream is is caught in secondary elaboration which makes the dream as account and as event take priority over the dream as work on thoughts.. Transfer glued… ". According to type II (liquidity, obsessional form resistance), "the session is dominated by an extreme mobility of representations of all sorts, … language is loosened, rapid, nearly torrential, … everything passes through it, … the patient could just as well say the opposite of everything he advances without that changing anything fundamental in the analytical situation… All of this is without consequence, because analysis glides on the couch like water on a duck's feathers. There is no hooking by the unconscious, no anchoring in the transference. Transference is volatile… ". There remains then only the third type, whose characters define a good analysis: the patient "speaks in order to constitute the process of a chain of signifiers. Signification is not attached to the signified to which each of the signifiers uttered refers, but is constituted by the process, the suture, the concatenation of the chained elements… Any interpretation furnished by (the patient) can present itself as an already-signified awaiting its signification. As such interpretation is always retrospective, like the signification perceived. So that was what this meant to say… ".

63What is serious is that Freud never questions the process of the cure itself. No doubt it is too late for him, but afterwards…? These things, he interprets them as obstacles to the cure, and not as insufficiencies of the cure itself, or as effects, counter-effects of its procedure. For castration as analysable state (or unanalysable, ultimate rock) is rather the effect of castration as psychoanalytic act. And oedipal homosexuality (qualitative aptitude for conflict) is rather the effect of oedipianization, which the cure does not invent without doubt, but which it precipitates and accentuates in the artificial conditions of its exercise (transference). And, inversely, when fluxes of libido resist the practice of the cure, rather than a resistance of the ego, it is the immense clamor of all desiring production. We already knew that the pervert lets himself be oedipianized poorly: why would he let himself be made so, since he has invented for himself other territorialities, more artificial still and more lunar than that of Oedipus? We knew that the schizo is not oedipianizable, because he is outside territoriality, because he has carried his fluxes all the way into the desert. But what remains, when we learn that "resistances" of hysterical or obsessional form testify to the anœdipal quality of fluxes of desire on the very earth of Oedipus? It is precisely this that qualitative economy shows: fluxes ooze, pass through the triangle, disjoin its vertices. The oedipal tampon does not take on these fluxes, no more than in jam or on water. Against the walls of the triangle, toward the outside, they exercise the irresistible pressure of lava or the invincible oozing of water. What are the good conditions of the cure, one says? A flux that lets itself be tamponned by Oedipus; partial objects that let themselves be subsumed under a complete object even absent, phallus of castration; flux-cuts that let themselves be projected into a mythic place; polyvocal chains that let themselves be bi-univocalized, linearized, suspended from a signifier; an unconscious that lets itself be expressed; connective syntheses that let themselves be taken in a global and specific usage; disjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in an exclusive, limitative usage; conjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in a personal and segregative usage… For what does it mean "so that was what this meant"? Crushing of the "so" onto Oedipus and castration. Sigh of relief: you see, the colonel, the instructor, the schoolteacher, the boss, all this meant that, Oedipus and castration, "all history in a new version"… We do not say that Oedipus and castration are nothing: we are oedipianized, we are castrated, and it is not psychoanalysis that invented these operations to which it merely lends the resources and new procedures of its genius. But is it sufficient to silence this clamor of desiring production: we are all schizos! we are all perverts! we are all libido too viscous or too fluid… and not by taste, but where the deterritorialized fluxes have carried us… What somewhat serious neurotic is not supported on the rock of schizophrenia, a rock this time mobile, aerolite? Who does not haunt perverse territorialities, beyond the kindergartens of Oedipus? Who does not feel in the fluxes of his desire both the lava and the water? And above all what are we ill from? From schizophrenia itself as process? Or rather from the frenzied neurotization to which we are delivered, and for which psychoanalysis has invented new means, Oedipus and castration? Are we ill from schizophrenia as process — or rather from the continuation of the process to infinity, in the void, horrible exasperation (the production of the schizophrenic-entity), or again from the confusion of the process with an aim (the production of the pervert-artifice), or again from the premature interruption of the process (the production of the neurotic-analysis)? We are confronted by force with Oedipus and castration, we are folded back onto them: either to measure ourselves against this cross, or to observe that we are not measurable by it. But in any case the harm is done, the cure has chosen the path of oedipianization, all strewn with waste, against the schizophrenization that must cure us of the cure.

SECTION 3

64Given the syntheses of the unconscious, the practical problem is that of their use, legitimate or not, and the conditions that define a use of synthesis as legitimate or illegitimate. Take the example of homosexuality (but it is quite something other than an example). We remarked how, in Proust, the famous pages of Sodom and Gomorrah interlaced two openly contradictory themes, one on the fundamental guilt of the "accursed races," the other on the radical innocence of flowers. One quickly applies to Proust the diagnosis of an oedipal homosexuality, by fixation to the mother, with depressive dominance and sadomasochistic guilt. In a more general manner, one has too quickly made in the phenomena of reading the discovery of contradictions, either to declare them irreducible, or to resolve them or show that they are only apparent, following tastes. In truth, there are never contradictions, apparent or real, but only degrees of humor. And, as reading itself has its degrees of humor, from black to white, with which it evaluates the coexisting degrees of what it reads, the sole problem is always that of a distribution on a scale of intensities that assigns the place and use of each thing, each being or each scene: there is this and then that, and let us manage with it, too bad if it does not please us. It may be in this regard that the rogue warning of Charlus is prophetic: "We don't give a damn about his old grandmother, eh, little rascal!" For what happens in the Search, one single and same story infinitely varied? It is clear that the narrator sees nothing, hears nothing, is a body without organs, or rather like a spider folded back, frozen on its web; who observes nothing, but responds to the least signs, to the least vibration by leaping upon its prey. Everything begins with nebulae, statistical ensembles with fuzzy contours, molar or collective formations composing singularities distributed at random (a salon, a group of young girls, a landscape…). Then, in these nebulae or these collectives, "sides" are drawn, series organize themselves, persons figure themselves in these series, under strange laws of lack, absence, asymmetry, exclusion, non-communication, vice and guilt. Then again, everything blurs anew, undoes itself, but this time in a pure and molecular multiplicity, where the partial objects, the "boxes," the "vases" all equally have their positive determinations, and enter into aberrant communication following a transversal that traverses the entire work, immense flux that each partial object produces and cuts across, reproduces and cuts at once. More than vice, says Proust, disquiet the madness and its innocence. If schizophrenia is the universal, the great artist is indeed the one who crosses the schizophrenic wall and reaches the unknown homeland, there where he is of no time, of no milieu, of no school.

65It is thus with an exemplary passage, the first kiss with Albertine. Albertine's face is at first a nebula, barely extracted from the collective of young girls. Then the person of Albertine emerges, through a series of planes that are like her distinct personalities, Albertine's face jumping from one plane to another, as the narrator's lips approach her cheek. Finally, in the exaggerated proximity, everything undoes itself like a vision on sand, Albertine's face bursts into molecular partial objects, while those of the narrator's face rejoin the full body, eyes closed, nose pinched, mouth filled. But, even more, it is love entirely that recounts the same story. From the statistical nebula, from the molar ensemble of man-woman loves, there emerge the two accursed and guilty series that testify to the same castration under two non-superposable faces, the series of Sodom and the series of Gomorrah, each excluding the other. Yet this is not the final word, since the vegetal theme, the innocence of flowers, brings us still another message and another code: each is bisexual, each has both sexes, but partitioned, incommunicating; man is only he in whom the male part dominates statistically, woman, she in whom the female part dominates statistically. So much so that at the level of elementary combinations, one must bring in at least two men and two women to constitute the multiplicity in which are established transversal communications, connexions of partial objects and of flux: the male part of a man can communicate with the female part of a woman, but also with the male part of a woman, or with the female part of another man, or again with the male part of the other man, etc. There ceases all culpability, for it cannot attach itself to these flowers. To the alternative of exclusions "either...or," opposes itself the "either" of combinations and permutations where differences return to the same without ceasing to be differences.

66We are heterosexual statistically or molarly, but homosexual personally, without knowing it or knowing it, and finally trans-sexed elementarily, molecularly. This is why Proust, the first to deny any oedipianizing interpretation of his own interpretations, opposes two types of homosexuality, or rather two régimes of which only one is oedipal, exclusive and depressive, but the other schizoidal anœdipal, included and inclusive: "For some, those who doubtless had the most timid childhood, they scarcely concern themselves with the material sort of pleasure they receive, provided they can relate it to a masculine face. While others, doubtless having more violent senses, give their material pleasure imperious localizations. Those might perhaps shock the world's average by their admissions. They perhaps live less exclusively under the satellite of Saturn, for for them women are not entirely excluded as for the first... The second seek those who love women, they can present them with a young man, increase the pleasure they have in finding themselves with him; more than that, they can, in the same manner, take with them the same pleasure as with a man... For in the relations they have with them, they play, for the woman who loves women, the role of another woman, and the woman offers them at the same time roughly what they find in the man...". {52}

67What opposes itself here are two usages of connective synthesis; a global and specific usage, a partial and non-specific usage. In the first usage, desire receives at once a fixed subject, me specified under this or that sex, and complete objects determined as global persons. The complexity and foundations of such an operation appear better if one considers the mutual reactions between the different syntheses of the unconscious according to this or that usage. Indeed, it is first the synthesis of registration that poses, on its surface of inscription in the conditions of Oedipus, a me determinable or differentiable in relation to parental images serving as coordinates (mother, father). There is a triangulation that implies in its essence a constitutive interdict, and that conditions the differentiation of persons: prohibition on committing incest with the mother, and on taking the place of the father. But it is by a strange reasoning that one concludes that, since it is prohibited, this very thing was desired. In truth, global persons, the form itself of persons do not preexist the interdicts that weigh upon them and constitute them, any more than the triangulation into which they enter: it is at the same time that desire receives its first complete objects, and finds them prohibited. It is therefore indeed the same Oedipal operation that founds the possibility of its own "solution," by way of differentiation of persons in conformity with the interdict, and the possibility of its failure or its stagnation, by fall into the undifferentiated as the reverse of differentiations that the interdict creates (incest by identification with the father, homosexuality by identification with the mother…). No more than the form of persons does the personal matter of transgression preexist the interdict. One sees therefore the property that the interdict has of displacing itself, since from the outset it displaces desire. It displaces itself, in the sense that Oedipal inscription does not impose itself in the synthesis of registration without reacting upon the synthesis of production, and profoundly transforming the connections of this synthesis by introducing new global persons. These new images of persons are the sister and the wife, after the father and the mother. It has often been remarked indeed that the interdict existed under two forms, one negative that bears above all upon the mother and imposes differentiation, the other positive that concerns the sister and commands exchange (obligation to take as wife someone other than my sister, obligation to reserve my sister to someone else; leave my sister to a brother-in-law, receive my wife from a father-in-law){53}. And, although new stases or falls occur at this level, as new figures of incest and homosexuality, it is certain that the Oedipal triangle would have no means of transmitting itself and reproducing itself without this second degree: the first degree elaborates the form of the triangle, but only the second assures the transmission of this form. I take a wife other than my sister to constitute the differentiated base of a new triangle whose summit, head down, will be my child — which is called exiting Oedipus, but equally well reproducing it, transmitting it rather than bursting alone, incest, homosexual and zombie.

68This is how parental or familial usage of the synthesis of recording extends itself into a conjugal usage, or alliance usage, of the connective syntheses of production: a régime of conjugation of persons substitutes itself for the connection of partial objects. Overall, the connections of machine-organs proper to desiring production give way to a conjugation of persons under the rules of familial reproduction. Partial objects now seem extracted from persons, rather than from non-personal flux that pass from one to another. This is because persons are derived from abstract quantities, in place of flux. Partial objects, rather than connective appropriation, become the possessions of a person and, if need be, the property of another. Kant, just as he draws the conclusion of centuries of scholastic meditation by defining God as the principle of the disjunctive syllogism, draws the conclusion of centuries of Roman juridical meditation when he defines marriage as the bond according to which a person becomes proprietor of the sexual organs of another person{54}. It suffices to consult a religious manual of sexual casuistry to see with what restrictions the connections of desiring machine-organs remain tolerated in the régime of conjugation of persons, which legally fixes the extraction from the body of the spouse. But, better still, the difference of régime appears each time a society allows to subsist an infantile state of sexual promiscuity, where all is permitted until the age at which the young man enters in turn under the principle of conjugation that regulates the social production of children. Without doubt the connections of desiring production obeyed a binary rule; and indeed we have seen that a third term intervened in this binarity, the full body which reinjected producing into the product, extends the connections of machines and serves as a surface of recording. But precisely no bi-univocal operation is produced here, which folds production back onto representatives; no triangulation appears at this level, which relates the objects of desire to global persons, nor desire to a specific subject. The sole subject is desire itself on the full body, insofar as it machines partial objects and flux, extracting and cutting them by one another, passing from one body to another, following connections and appropriations that each time destroy the factitious unity of a possessing or proprietor self (anœdipian sexuality).

69The triangle forms in parental usage, and reproduces itself in conjugal usage. We do not yet know what forces determine this triangulation, which insinuates itself into the recording of desire in order to transform all its productive connections. But we can follow at least, summarily, the way in which these forces proceed. We are told that partial objects are taken up in an intuition of early totality, just as the self, in an intuition of unity that precedes its accomplishment. (Even in Melanie Klein, the schizoid partial object is referred to a whole that prepares the advent of the complete object in the depressive phase). It is clear that such a totality-unity is posited only on a certain mode of absence, as that of which partial objects and subjects of desire are "in lack." From then on, everything is decided: we find everywhere the analytical operation that consists in extrapolating something transcendent and common, but which is a universal-common only in order to introduce lack into desire, to fix and specify persons and a self under such or such a face of its absence, and to impose on the disjunction of the sexes an exclusive meaning. Thus in Freud: for Oedipus, for castration, for the second moment of the fantasy A child is being beaten, or again for the famous latency period where analytical mystification culminates. This something common, transcendent and absent, we will name phallus or law, to designate "the" signifier that distributes throughout the entire chain the effects of signification and introduces exclusions into it (hence the oedipianizing interpretations of Lacanism). Now it is this that acts as formal cause of triangulation, that is, that makes possible both the form of the triangle and its reproduction: thus Oedipus has as its formula 3 + 1, the One of the transcendent phallus without which the terms in question would not form a triangle.{55} Everything happens as if the so-called signifying chain, made of elements themselves non-signifying, of a polyvocal writing and of detachable fragments, were the object of a special treatment, a crushing that extracted from it a detached object, despotic signifier to whose law the entire chain seems henceforth suspended, each link triangulated. There is here a curious paralogism that implies a transcendent usage of the syntheses of the unconscious: we pass from detachable partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by assignment of lack. For example, in the capitalist code and its trinitarian formula, money as a detachable chain is converted into capital as a detached object, which exists only under the fetishistic aspect of stock and lack. It is the same with the oedipal code: libido as energy of extraction and detachment is converted into phallus as a detached object, the latter existing only under the transcendent form of stock and lack (something common and absent that no less lacks in men than in women). It is this conversion that tips all sexuality into the oedipal frame: this projection of all cuts-flux onto the same mythic place, of all non-signifying signs into the same major signifier. "Effective triangulation permits the specification of sexuality to sex. Partial objects have lost nothing of their virulence and efficacy. Nevertheless the reference to the penis gives castration its full meaning. Through it are signified after the fact all external experiences linked to privation, to frustration, to the lack of partial objects. The entire anterior history is refounded in a new version in the light of castration."{56}

70That is precisely what disturbs us—this reworking of history, and this "lack" attributed to partial objects. And how could partial objects not have lost their virulence and efficacy once introduced into a usage of synthesis that remains fundamentally illegitimate with respect to them? We do not deny that there is an Oedipal sexuality, an Oedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, an Oedipal castration—complete objects, global images and specific egos. We deny that these are productions of the unconscious. Moreover, castration and oedipianization engender a fundamental illusion that makes us believe that real desiring production is answerable to higher formations that integrate it, submit it to transcendent laws and make it serve a superior social and cultural production: there appears then a sort of "detachment" of the social field from desiring production, in the name of which all resignations are justified in advance. Now psychoanalysis, at the most concrete level of the cure, supports with all its strength this apparent movement. It assures itself this conversion of the unconscious. In what it calls pre-Oedipal, it sees a stage that must be transcended in the direction of an evolutive integration (toward the depressive position under the reign of the complete object), or organized in the direction of a structural integration (toward the position of a despotic signifier, under the reign of the phallus). The aptitude for conflict of which Freud spoke, the qualitative opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, is in fact a consequence of Oedipus: far from being an obstacle to the cure encountered from without, it is a product of oedipianization, and a counter-effect of the cure that reinforces it. The problem in truth concerns not at all pre-Oedipal stages that would still have Oedipus as their axis, but the existence and nature of an anœdipal sexuality, an anœdipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, an anœdipal castration: the cuts-flux of desiring production do not allow themselves to be projected onto a mythic place, the signs of desire do not allow themselves to be extrapolated into a signifier, trans-sexuality gives rise to no qualitative opposition between a local and non-specific heterosexuality and homosexuality. Everywhere, in this reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion. But rather than assuring, tending to assure the reversion of all the unconscious to the form and in the anœdipal content of desiring production, analytic theory and practice do not cease to promote the conversion of the unconscious to Oedipus, form and content (we shall indeed see what psychoanalysis calls "resolving" Oedipus). This conversion, it therefore promotes first by making of connective syntheses a global and specific usage. This usage can be defined as transcendent, and implies a first paralogism in the psychoanalytic operation. If we use Kantian terms once more, it is for a simple reason. Kant proposed, in what he named critical revolution, to discover criteria immanent to knowledge in order to distinguish the legitimate and illegitimate usage of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of a transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent usage of syntheses as it appeared in metaphysics. We must say the same of psychoanalysis: it has its metaphysics, namely Oedipus. And a revolution, this time materialist, can only pass through the critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate usage of the syntheses of the unconscious as it appears in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to recover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice as schizo-analysis.

SECTION 4

71When Oedipus slips into the disjunctive syntheses of desiring registration, he imposes upon them the ideal of a use, limitative or exclusive, which confounds itself with the form of triangulation — being papa, mama, or child. It is the reign of Either-Or in the differentiating function of the incest prohibition: there it is mama who begins, there it is papa, and there it is you. Stay in your place. Oedipus's misfortune is precisely not to know anymore where one begins, nor who is who. And "being parent or child" is accompanied also by two other differentiations on the sides of the triangle, "being man or woman," "being dead or alive." Oedipus must no more know whether he is alive or dead, man or woman, than parent or child. Incest, you will be zombie and hermaphrodite. It is precisely in this sense that the three great so-called familial neuroses seem to correspond to Oedipal failures of the differentiating function or of the disjunctive synthesis: the phobic can no longer know whether he is parent or child, the obsessive, whether he is dead or alive, the hysteric, whether he is man or woman.{57} In short, the familial triangulation represents the minimum condition under which a "me" receives the coordinates that differentiate it at once as to generation, as to sex and as to state. And the religious triangulation confirms this result in another mode: thus in the trinity, the effacement of the feminine image in favor of a phallic symbol shows how the triangle shifts toward its own cause and attempts to integrate it. It is this time a matter of the maximum conditions under which persons differentiate themselves. This is why the Kantian definition mattered to us which poses God as a priori principle of the disjunctive syllogism, in that all things derive from it by limitation of a greater reality (omnitudo realitatis): Kant's humor which makes God the master of a syllogism.

72The peculiarity of oedipal recording is to introduce an exclusive, limitative, negative use of disjunctive synthesis. We are so formed by Oedipus that we have difficulty imagining another use; and even the three family neuroses do not escape it, although they suffer from no longer being able to apply it. We have seen exercised everywhere in psychoanalysis, in Freud, this taste for exclusive disjunctions. It appears nevertheless that schizophrenia gives us a singular extra-oedipal lesson, and reveals to us an unknown force of disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be exclusive nor limitative, but fully affirmative, unlimitative, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and yet affirms the disjoint terms, affirms them across their entire distance, without limiting one by the other nor excluding the other from the one, this is perhaps the highest paradox. "Either… or," instead of "or else." The schizophrenic is not man and woman. He is man or woman, but precisely he is on both sides, man on the side of men, woman on the side of women. Aimable Jayet (Albert Désiré, matricule 54161001) litanizes the parallel series of masculine and feminine, and places himself on both sides: "Mat Albert 5416 ricu-le sultan Roman vesin," "Mat Désiré 1001 ricu-la sultane romaine vesine." The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of the two at the end of a distance he glides across. He is child or parent, not one and the other, but one at the end of the other like the two ends of a stick in an indecomposable space. Such is the meaning of the disjunctions in which Beckett inscribes his characters and the events that befall them: everything divides, but in itself. Even distances are positive, at the same time as disjunctions are included. It would be to misunderstand entirely this order of thought to act as if the schizophrenic substituted for disjunctions vague syntheses of identification of contradictories, like the last of Hegelian philosophers. He does not substitute syntheses of contradictories for disjunctive syntheses, but to the exclusive and limitative use of disjunctive synthesis he substitutes an affirmative use. He is and remains in the disjunction: he does not suppress the disjunction by identifying contradictories through deepening, he affirms it on the contrary through gliding across an indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual, nor between the two, nor intersexual, but trans-sexual. He is trans-alive-dead, trans-parent-child. He does not identify two contraries in the same, but affirms their distance as what relates them to one another as different. He does not close himself off on contradictories, he opens himself on the contrary, and, like a sack swollen with spores, releases them as so many singularities he was unduly enclosing, which he claimed to exclude some of, retain others of, but which now become point-signs, all affirmed by their new distance. Inclusive, the disjunction does not close itself on its terms, it is on the contrary unlimitative. "Then I was no longer this closed box to which I owed being so well preserved, but a partition collapsed," which liberates a space where Molloy and Moran no longer designate persons, but singularities arrived from all sides, evanescent agents of production. This is free disjunction; the differential positions subsist perfectly, they even take on a free value, but they are all occupied by a faceless and trans-positional subject. Schreber is man and woman, parent and child, dead and alive: that is, he is everywhere there is a singularity, in all series and in all branches marked with a singular point, because he himself is this distance that transforms him into woman, at the end of which he is already mother of a new humanity and can finally die.

73This is why the schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion, although they occupy themselves with the same syllogism. In the Baphomet, Klossowski opposed to God as master of exclusions and limitations in the reality that derives from it, an antichrist, prince of modifications, determining on the contrary the passage of a subject through all possible predicates. I am God I am not God, I am God I am Man: it is not a matter of a synthesis that would surpass in an originiary reality of Man-God the negative disjunctions of derived reality, it is a matter of an inclusive disjunction that itself operates the synthesis by deriving from one term to the other and following distance. There is nothing originiary. It is like the famous: "It is midnight. Rain lashes the windowpanes. It was not midnight. It was not raining." Nijinsky wrote: I am God I was not God I am the clown of God; "I am Apis, I am an Egyptian, a red-skin Indian, a Negro, a Chinese, a Japanese, a stranger, an unknown, I am the seabird and the one who flies over firm land, I am the tree of Tolstoy with its roots." "I am the husband and the wife, I love my wife, I love my husband…" What counts is not the parental appellations, nor the racial appellations or the divine appellations. It is only the use one makes of them. No problem of meaning, but only of usage. No originiary nor derived, but a generalized drift. One would say the schizo liberates a raw genealogical matter, unlimitative, where he can place himself, inscribe himself, and locate himself in all the branchings at once, from all sides. He blows up the oedipal genealogy. Beneath the relations of proximity to proximity, he operates absolute overflights of indivisible distances. The mad genealogist grids the body without organs with a disjunctive network. Thus God, which designates nothing other than the energy of recording, can be the greatest enemy in the paranoiac inscription, but also the greatest friend in the miraculating inscription. In any case, the question of a being superior to nature and to man does not pose itself at all. Everything is on the body without organs, and what is inscribed, and the energy that inscribes. On the ungenerated body, the indecomposable distances are necessarily overflown, at the same time as the disjunct terms, all affirmed. I am the letter and the pen and the paper (it is in this mode that Nijinsky kept his journal) — yes, I have been my father and I have been my son.

74The disjunctive synthesis of recording thus leads us to the same result as the connective synthesis: it too is capable of two usages, one immanent, the other transcendent. And why does psychoanalysis here again support the transcendent usage that introduces everywhere exclusions, limitations in the disjunctive network, and makes the unconscious tip over into Oedipus? And why is it precisely this, oedipianization? It is because the exclusive relationship introduced by Oedipus plays not only between the various disjunctions conceived as differentiations, but between the entirety of these differentiations it imposes and an undifferentiated that it presupposes. Oedipus tells us: if you do not follow the lines of differentiation, daddy-mommy-me, and the exclusives that mark them out, you will fall into the black night of the undifferentiated. Let us understand that exclusive disjunctions are not at all the same as the inclusive ones: God does not have the same usage there, nor the parental appellations. These no longer designate intensive states through which the subject passes on the body without organs and in the unconscious that remains orphaned (yes, I have been…), but designate global persons who do not preexist the interdicts that ground them, and differentiate them from each other and in relation to the me. So that the transgression of the interdict becomes correlatively a confusion of persons, an identification of the me with persons, in the loss of the differentiating rules or differential functions. But we must say of Oedipus that he creates both, and the differentiations he orders and the undifferentiated by which he threatens us. It is in the same movement that the Oedipus complex introduces desire into triangulation, and forbids desire from satisfying itself with the terms of the triangulation. It forces desire to take for object the differentiated parental persons, and forbids the correlative me from satisfying its desire upon these persons, in the name of the same requirements of differentiation, brandishing then the threats of the undifferentiated. But this undifferentiated, it is he who creates it as the reverse of the differentiations he creates. Oedipus tells us: either you will internalize the differential functions that command the exclusive disjunctions, and thus you will "resolve" Oedipus — or you will fall into the neurotic night of imaginary identifications. Either you will follow the lines of the triangle that structure and differentiate the three terms — or you will always make one term play as if it were in excess in relation to the other two, and you will reproduce in all senses the dual relationships of identification in the undifferentiated. But, from one side as from the other, it is Oedipus. And everyone knows what psychoanalysis calls resolving Oedipus: to internalize it the better to find it again outside in social authority, and by that to disseminate it, to pass it on to the little ones. "The child becomes a man only by resolving the Oedipus complex, which resolution introduces him into society where he finds, in the figure of Authority, the obligation to relive it, this time all exits barred. Between the impossible return to what precedes the state of culture and the growing malaise that this provokes, it is not certain either that a point of equilibrium can be found."{60} Oedipus, it is like the labyrinth, one exits it only by entering it (or by having someone enter it). Oedipus as problem or as solution, it is the two ends of a ligature that arrests all the production of desire. One tightens the nuts, nothing more can pass from production, except a rumor. One has crushed, triangulated the unconscious, one has put it in a choice that was not its own. All exits blocked: there is no longer any possible usage of the inclusive, inciting disjunctions. One has made parents for the unconscious!

75Bateson calls double bind the simultaneous emission of two orders of messages, one of which contradicts the other (for example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but who strongly implies that any actual criticism, or at least a certain kind of criticism, would be unwelcome). Bateson sees in it a situation particularly schizophrenogenic, which he interprets as a "nonsense" from the point of view of Russell's theory of types.{61} It seems to us rather that the double bind, the double impasse, is a commonplace situation, oedipalizing par excellence. And, if we must formalize it, it refers to the other kind of Russellian nonsense: an alternative, an exclusive disjunction is determined in relation to a principle that nonetheless constitutes both terms or both subsets of it, and which enters itself into the alternative (a case altogether pertinent to what happens when the disjunction is inclusive). This is the second paralogism of psychoanalysis. In short, the "double bind" is nothing other than the Oedipal set. It is in this sense that Oedipus must be presented as a series, or oscillates between two poles: neurotic identification, and the said normative internalization. On one side as on the other, it is Oedipus, the double impasse. And if a schizo is here produced as an entity, it is only as the sole means of escaping this double path, where normativity is no less without issue than neurosis, the solution no less blocked than the problem: then one withdraws onto the body without organs.

76It seems that Freud himself had a vivid awareness of what Oedipus was inseparable from: a double impasse into which it precipitated the unconscious. Thus, in the 1936 letter to Romain Rolland: "Everything happens as if the principal thing in success were to go further than the father, and as if it were always forbidden that the father be surpassed." We see it even more clearly when Freud expounds the entire historico-mythic series: at one end Oedipus is knotted by murderous identification, at the other end it is retied by the restoration and internalization of paternal authority ("re-establishment of the old order on a new plane").{62} Between the two, latency, the famous latency, without doubt the greatest psychoanalytic mystification: this society of "brothers" which forbids itself the fruits of crime, and spends all the necessary time internalizing. But we are warned: the society of brothers is indeed dreary, unstable and dangerous, it must prepare the reunion with an equivalent of parental authority, it must make us pass to the other pole. In conformity with a suggestion of Freud, American society, industrial society with anonymity of management and disappearance of personal power, etc., is presented to us as a resurgence of the "society without fathers." With the obligation for it, of course, to find original modes for the restoration of the equivalent (for example, Mitscherlich's astonishing discovery, that the English royal family, after all, is not a bad thing…).{63} It is therefore understood that one leaves an Oedipal pole only to pass to the other. No question of getting out of it, neurosis or normality. The society of brothers recovers nothing of production and machines of desire; it spreads out instead the veil of latency. As for those who do not let themselves be oedipianized, in one form or another, at one end or the other end, the psychoanalyst is there to call to the aid of the asylum or the police. The police with us! Never has psychoanalysis better shown its taste for supporting the movement of social repression, and participating in it with all its forces. Do not believe that we are making allusion to folkloric aspects of psychoanalysis. It is not because, on Lacan's side, one has another conception of psychoanalysis, that one must hold as minor what is the prevailing tone in the most recognized associations: see Dr. Mendel, Drs. Stéphane, the state of rage they enter into, and their literally police invocation, at the idea that someone claim to escape the Oedipal mousetrap. Oedipus is like those things which become all the more dangerous as no one believes in them anymore; then the cops are there to replace the high priests. The first profound example of an analysis of double bind, in that sense, would be found in Marx's Question of the Jews: between the family and the State — the Oedipus of family authority and the Oedipus of social authority.

77Oedipus is strictly of no use, except to bind the unconscious on both sides. We shall see in what sense Oedipus is strictly "undecidable," following the language of mathematicians. We are profoundly weary of these stories where one is in good health through Oedipus, ill from Oedipus, and of various illnesses under Oedipus. It happens that an analyst has had enough of this myth that makes the trough and the burrow of psychoanalysis, and returns to the sources: "Freud ultimately never left the world of the father, nor guilt… But he is the first who, by giving the possibility of constructing a logic of the relation to the father, opens the path to deliverance from this grip of the father on man. The possibility of living beyond the law of the father, beyond all law, is perhaps the most essential possibility that Freudian psychoanalysis brings. But, paradoxically, and perhaps because of Freud himself, everything suggests that this deliverance, which psychoanalysis makes possible, will be accomplished, is already being accomplished, outside of it."{64} We cannot, however, share either this pessimism or this optimism. For there is much optimism in thinking that psychoanalysis makes possible a true solution to Oedipus: Oedipus is like God; the father is like God; the problem is resolved only when one suppresses both the problem and the solution. Schizoanalysis does not propose to resolve Oedipus, it does not claim to resolve it better than is done in Oedipal psychoanalysis. It proposes to de-Oedipalize the unconscious, in order to reach the true problems. It proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious, precisely "beyond all law," where the problem can no longer even be posed. As a result, we do not share either the pessimism that consists in believing that this change, this deliverance can only be accomplished outside of psychoanalysis. We believe on the contrary in the possibility of an internal reversion, which makes the analytical machine an indispensable piece of the revolutionary apparatus. More than that, the objective conditions for it seem to be given at present.

78Everything thus happens as if Oedipus had in itself two poles: a pole of identificatory imaginary figures, a pole of differentiating symbolic functions. But in any case, one is oedipianized: if one does not have Oedipus as crisis, one has it as structure. Then one transmits the crisis to others, and it begins again. Such is the oedipal disjunction, the pendulum movement, exclusive inverse reason. This is why, when we are invited to go beyond a simplistic conception of Oedipus founded on parental images in order to define symbolic functions in a structure, we may well replace the traditional daddy-mommy with a mother-function, a father-function, we do not see much what we gain by it, except to found the universality of Oedipus beyond the variability of images, to weld desire still better to law and to the prohibition, and to push the process of oedipianization of the unconscious to its end. Oedipus finds here its two extremes, its minimum and its maximum, according as one considers it as tending toward an undifferentiated value of its variable images, or toward the power of differentiation of its symbolic functions. "When one approaches material imagination, the differential function diminishes, one tends toward equivalences; when one approaches the forming elements, the differential function increases, one tends toward distinctive valences."⁶⁵ One will scarcely be astonished to learn that Oedipus as structure is the Christian trinity, while Oedipus as crisis is a family trinity insufficiently structured by faith: always the two poles in inverse reason, Oedipus for ever!⁶⁶ How many interpretations of Lacanism, openly or secretly pious, have thus invoked a structural Oedipus to form and close the double impasse, conduct us back to the question of the father, oedipianize even the schizo, and show that a hole in the symbolic sent us back to the imaginary, and inversely smudges or confusions imaginary sent us back to the structure. As a famous predecessor said to his animals, you have already made a hackneyed tune of it… This is why we could for our part allow no difference of nature, no frontier, no limit between the imaginary and the symbolic, no more than between Oedipus-crisis and Oedipus-structure, or the problem and the solution. It is only a matter of a double correlative impasse, a pendulum movement charged with sweeping the entire unconscious, and which, ceaselessly, sends back from one pole to the other. A double pincer that crushes the unconscious in its exclusive disjunction.

79The true difference in nature is not between the symbolic and the imaginary, but between the real element of the machinic, which constitutes desiring production, and the structural ensemble of the imaginary and the symbolic, which forms only a myth and its variants. The difference is not between two uses of Oedipus, but between the anœdipian use of inclusive disjunctions, non-limitative, and the œdipian use of exclusive disjunctions, whether this latter use borrows the paths of the imaginary or the values of the symbolic. Thus one had to hear Lacan's warnings about the Freudian myth of Oedipus, which "cannot indefinitely remain on the stage in forms of society where the sense of tragedy is lost more and more…: a myth does not suffice in supporting no rite, and psychoanalysis is not the rite of Oedipus." And even if one ascends from images to structure, from imaginary figures to symbolic functions, from the father to the law, from the mother to the great Other, in truth the question is only pushed back.{67} And if one considers time in this recession, Lacan says further: the sole foundation of the society of brothers, of fraternity, is "segregation" (what does he mean?). It was not fitting in any case to tighten the screws, there where Lacan had just loosened them; to œdipianize the schizo, there where he had on the contrary just schizophrenized even neurosis, passing through a schizophrenic flux capable of subverting the field of psychoanalysis. The object a broke forth within structural equilibrium in the manner of an infernal machine, the machine of desire. There arrives a second generation of Lacan's disciples, less and less sensitive to the false problem of Oedipus. But the first ones, if they were tempted to close again the yoke of Oedipus, is it not in the measure where Lacan seemed to maintain a sort of projection of signifying chains onto a despotic signifier, and to suspend everything to a missing term, missing to itself and reintroducing lack into the series of desire to which it imposed an exclusive use? Was it possible to denounce Oedipus as myth, and yet to maintain that the castration complex, itself, was not a myth, but on the contrary something real? (Was it not to take up again Aristotle's cry: "one must indeed stop," this Freudian Necessity, this Rock?)

SECTION 5

80We have seen how, in the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, the full body was truly an egg, traversed by axes, stretched with zones, localized in areas or fields, measured by gradients, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds. We believe in this sense in the possibility of a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in connection with the biochemistry of drugs), which will be increasingly capable of determining the nature of this egg and the distribution field — gradient — threshold. It is a matter of relations of intensities through which the subject passes on the full body, and operates becomings, falls and rises, migrations and displacements. Laing is entirely right to define the schizo process as an initiatory voyage, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego that makes a subject say: "I had in some sense arrived at the present from the most primitive form of life" (the full body), "I looked, no, I rather felt before me a frightening voyage".{68} There, there is no more metaphor in speaking of a voyage than just now in speaking of the egg, and of what happens in it and on it, morphogenetic movements, displacements of cellular groups, stretchings, foldings, migrations, local variations of potentials. One must not even oppose an interior voyage to exterior voyages: Lenz's walk, Nijinsky's walk, the walks of Beckett's creatures are effective realities, but where the real of matter has abandoned all extension, as the interior voyage has left all form and quality, to make shine within as without only pure intensities coupled, almost unbearable, through which passes a nomadic subject. It is not a hallucinatory experience nor a delirious thought, but a feeling, a series of emotions and sentiments as consumption of intensive quantities, which form the material of subsequent hallucinations and deliriums. Intensive emotion, affect, is at once common root and principle of differentiation of deliriums and hallucinations. One would thus believe that everything mingles in these becomings, passages and intense migrations, all this drift that ascends and descends time — countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, historical and geographical appellations and even miscellaneous facts. (I feel that) I become God, I become woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Elagabalus, and the Great Mongol, a Chinese, a red-skin, a Templar, I have been my father and I have been my son. And all the criminals, the entire list of criminals, the honest criminals and the dishonest: Szondi rather than Freud and his Oedipus. "It is perhaps by trying to be Worm that I shall finally be Mahood! Then I shall have only to be Worm. Which I shall doubtless achieve by striving to be Tartempion. Then I shall have only to be Tartempion." But if everything mingles thus, it is in intensity, there is no confusion of spaces and forms since these are precisely undone, in favor of a new order, the intense order, intensive.

81What is this order? What distributes itself first on the full body are races, cultures and their gods. We have not sufficiently remarked to what extent the schizo makes history, hallucinates and delirious the universal history, and disseminates races. All delirium is racial, and this does not necessarily mean racist. It is not that the régimes of the full body "represent" races and cultures. The full body represents nothing at all. On the contrary, it is races and cultures that designate régimes on this body, that is to say zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Within these fields are produced phenomena of individuation, of sexualization. From one field to another one passes by crossing thresholds: one ceases migrating, one changes individual as one changes sex, and to leave becomes as simple as to be born and to die. It happens that one struggles against other races, that one destroys civilizations, in the manner of great migrants behind whom nothing grows anymore when they pass — although these destructions, we will see, can be made in two very diverse ways. How would the exceeding of a threshold not imply ravages elsewhere? The full body closes itself off on the places abandoned. The theater of cruelty, we cannot separate it from the struggle against our culture, and from the confrontation of the "races", and from the great migration of Artaud toward Mexico, its powers and its religions: individuations are only produced in fields of forces expressly defined by intensive vibrations, and which animate cruel characters only as induced organs, pieces of machines of desire (mannequins). A season in hell, how separate it from the denunciation of European families, from the appeal to destructions that do not come fast enough, from admiration for the convict, from the intense crossing of the thresholds of history, from this prodigious migration, this becoming-woman, this becoming-Scandinavian and Mongol, this "displacement of races and continents", this sentiment of brute intensity that presides over delirium as over hallucination, and above all this deliberate, obstinate, material will to be "of inferior race for all eternity": "I have known every son of family, … I have never been of this people, I have never been Christian, … yes my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a negro…"

82And Zarathustra, can one separate him from "great politics," and from the animation of races that makes Nietzsche say: I am not a German, I am Polish. Here again individuations are made only within complexes of forces that determine persons as so many intensive states incarnated in a "criminal," ceaselessly surpassing a threshold by destroying the factitious unity of a family and an ego: "I am Prado, I am the father of Prado, I dare say that I am Lesseps: I wanted to give to my Parisians whom I love a new notion, that of an honest criminal. I am Chambige, another honest criminal… What is disagreeable and hinders my modesty, is that fundamentally every name in history, that is me."{70} Yet it is never a question of identifying oneself with characters, as one wrongly says of a madman who "thinks he is…". It is a matter of something entirely different: identifying races, cultures and gods with fields of intensity on the body without organs, identifying characters with states that fill these fields, with effects that flash and traverse these fields. Hence the role of names, in their proper magic: there is not an ego that identifies itself with races, peoples, persons, on a scene of representation, but proper names that identify races, peoples and persons with regions, thresholds or effects in a production of intensive quantities. The theory of proper names must not be conceived in terms of representation, but refers to the class of "effects": these are not a simple dependence of causes, but the fulfillment of a domain, the effectuation of a system of signs. One sees this clearly in physics, where proper names designate such effects in fields of potentials (Joule effect, Seebeck effect, Kelvin effect). It is in history as in physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect — all the names of history, and not the name of the father…

83On the scarcity of reality, the loss of reality, the lack of contact with life, autism and athymia, everything has been said, schizophrenics themselves have said everything — quick to flow into the expected clinical mold. Black world, expanding desert: a solitary machine hums on the beach, an atomic plant installed in the desert. But if the body without organs is indeed this desert, it is as an indivisible, indecomposable distance that the schizo flies over to be everywhere that the real is produced, everywhere that the real has been and will be produced. It is true that reality has ceased to be a principle. According to such a principle, the reality of the real was posited as an abstract divisible quantity, while the real was distributed in qualified units, distinct qualitative forms. But now, the real is a product that envelops distances in intensive quantities. The indivisible is enveloped, and signifies that what envelops it does not divide without changing nature or form. The schizo is without principles: it is something only by being something else. It is Mahood only by being Worm, and Worm by being Tartempion. It is a young girl only by being an old man who mimes or simulates the young girl. Or rather, by being someone who simulates an old man simulating a young girl. Or rather by simulating someone…, etc. It was already the entirely oriental art of the Roman emperors, the twelve paranoiacs of Suetonius. In a marvelous book by Jacques Besse, we find again the schizo's double wandering, the exterior geographical voyage following indecomposable distances, the interior historical voyage following enveloping intensities: Christopher Columbus only calms his revolted crew and becomes admiral again by simulating a (false) admiral who simulates a whore who dances. But simulation must be understood as identification was just now. It expresses these indecomposable distances always enveloped in intensities that divide themselves into one another by changing form. If identification is a nomination, a designation, simulation is the writing that corresponds to it, writing strangely polyvocal within the real itself. It carries the real out of its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the machine of desire. That point where the copy ceases to be a copy to become the Real and its artifice. To grasp an intensive real as it is produced in the coextension of nature and history, to dig through the Roman empire, Mexican cities, Greek gods and discovered continents to extract from them this ever-more of reality, and to form the treasure of paranoiac tortures and solitary glories — all the pogroms of history, that is me, and all the triumphs too, as if a few simple univocal events disengaged themselves from this extreme polyvocality: such is the schizophrenic's "histrionicism," following Klossowski's formula, the true program of a theater of cruelty, the staging of a machine for producing the real. Far from having lost some contact with life, the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, at an intense point that coincides with the production of the real, and which makes Reich say: "What characterizes schizophrenia is the experience of this vital element, … as concerns their feeling of life, the neurotic and the pervert are to the schizophrenic what the sordid shopkeeper is to the great adventurer." Then the question returns: what reduces the schizophrenic to its autistic figure, hospitalized, cut off from reality? Is it the process, or on the contrary the interruption of the process, its exasperation, its continuation in the void? What forces the schizophrenic to retreat onto a body without organs become deaf, blind and mute again?

84One says: he thinks he is Louis XVII. Nothing of the kind. In the Louis XVII affair, or rather in the finest case, that of the claimant Richemont, there is at the center a machine of desire or celibate: the horse with articulated short legs, in which the dauphin would have been placed, to make it... And then, all around, there are agents of production and anti-production, the organizers of the escape, the accomplices, the allied sovereigns, the revolutionary enemies, the hostile and jealous uncles, who are not persons but so many states of rise and fall through which the claimant passes. Moreover, the stroke of genius of the claimant Richemont, it is not simply to "account for" Louis XVII, nor to account for the other claimants by denouncing them as false. It is to account for the other claimants by assuming them, by authenticating them, that is to say by making them, too, states through which he has passed: I am Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau who said they were Louis XVII. Richemont does not identify himself with Louis XVII, he claims the reward that belongs to the one who passes through all the singularities of the series converging around the machine for abducting Louis XVII. There is no me at the center, any more than there are persons distributed around the perimeter. Nothing but a series of singularities in the disjunctive network, or intensive states in the conjunctive tissue, and a transpositional subject over the entire circle, passing through all the states, triumphing over some as his enemies, savoring the others as his allies, gathering everywhere the fraudulent reward of his avatars. Partial object: a local scar, moreover uncertain, is better proof than all the childhood memories which the claimant lacks. The conjunctive synthesis can then be expressed: it is therefore me, the king! it is therefore to me that the kingdom belongs! But this me, it is only the residual subject that traverses the circle and concludes itself from its oscillations.

85Every delirium has a historico-worldly, political, racial content; it draws in and churns races, cultures, continents, kingdoms: one asks whether this long drift constitutes only a derivative of Oedipus. The family order explodes, families are rejected, son, father, mother, sister — "I hear families like mine, which hold everything from the declaration of human rights!", "If I seek my deepest opposite, I always find my mother and my sister; to see myself related to such German rabble was a blasphemy toward divinity, ... the most profound objection against my thought of eternal return!" It is a matter of knowing whether the historico-political, racial and cultural, is only part of a manifest content and formally depends on a work of elaboration, or whether on the contrary it must be followed as the thread of the latent that the order of families hides from us. Must the rupture with families be held as a kind of "family romance" which, precisely, would still bring us back to families, would send us back to an event or to a structural determination interior to the family itself? Or is it the sign that the problem must be posed entirely otherwise, because it poses itself elsewhere for the schizo himself, outside the family? Are "the names of history" derivatives of the name of the father, and races, cultures, continents, substitutes for papa-mama, dependencies of Oedipal genealogy? Does history have the dead father as its signifier? Let us consider once more the delirium of President Schreber. Certainly, the use of races, the mobilization or notion of history there takes place in an entirely different manner than among the authors we invoked previously. Remains that Schreber's Memoirs are filled with a theory of peoples elected by God, and of the dangers facing the currently elected people, the Germans, threatened by Jews, Catholics, Slavs. In his metamorphoses and intense passages, Schreber becomes student with the Jesuits, burgomaster of a city where Germans fight against Slavs, young girl who defends Alsace against the French; finally he crosses the gradient or the Aryan threshold to become Mongol prince. What does this becoming-student, burgomaster, young girl, Mongol signify? There is no paranoiac delirium that does not stir such historical, geographical and racial masses. The fault would be to conclude from it, for example, that fascists are simple paranoiacs; it would be a fault, precisely, because, in the present state of things, it would still amount to bringing the historical and political content of delirium back to an internal family determination. And what we find even more troubling is that all this enormous content disappears entirely from the analysis made by Freud: no trace of it subsists, everything is crushed, ground, triangulated into Oedipus, everything is brought down onto the father, so as to reveal most crudely the insufficiency of an Oedipal psychoanalysis.

86Let us consider yet another paranoid delirium with a particularly rich political character, as Maud Mannoni reports it. The example strikes us all the more forcefully in that we have great admiration for Maud Mannoni's work and the manner in which she knows how to pose institutional and anti-psychiatric problems. Here then is a Martinican who situates himself in his delirium in relation to Arabs and the Algerian War, to Whites and the events of May, etc.: "I fell ill through the Algerian problem. I had committed the same stupidity as them (sexual pleasure). They adopted me as a brother of race. I have Mongol blood. The Algerians contested me in all realizations. I had racist ideas… I descend from the dynasty of the Gauls. By this title I have the value of nobility… Let one determine my name, let one determine it scientifically and I will then be able to establish a harem." Now, while acknowledging the character of "revolt" and "truth for all" implied in psychosis, Maud Mannoni wants the breaking apart of family relations in favor of themes that the subject declares himself to be racist, political and metaphysical, to have its origin within the family structure as matrix. This origin is thus found in the symbolic void or "the initial forclusion of the signifier of the father." The name to be determined scientifically, and which haunts history, is nothing more than the paternal name. In this case as in others, the utilization of the Lacanian concept of forclusion tends toward forced oedipianization of the rebel: the absence of Oedipus, one interprets it as a lack on the side of the father, a hole in the structure; then, in the name of this lack, we are sent back to the other Oedipal pole, that of imaginary identifications in the undifferentiated maternal. The law of the double bind functions mercilessly, which rejects us from one pole to the other, in the sense that what is foreclosed in the symbolic must reappear in the real in hallucinatory form. But thus the entire historico-political theme is interpreted as a set of imaginary identifications under the dependence of Oedipus, or of what "lacks" in the subject to allow itself to be oedipianized. And certainly the question is not whether family determinations or indeterminations have a role. It is evident that they do have one. But is it an initial role of symbolic organizer (or disorganizer) from which the floating contents of historical delirium would derive, as so many splinters of an imaginary mirror? The void of the father, and the cancerous development of the mother and sister, is that it, the trinitarian formula of the schizo that brings him back to Oedipus, forced constraint? And yet, as we have seen, if there is a problem that does not pose itself in schizophrenia, it is that of identifications… And if healing is oedipianization, one understands the convulsions of the patient who "does not want to heal," and treats the analyst as an ally of the family, and then of the police. Is the schizophrenic ill, and cut off from reality, because he lacks Oedipus, because he "lacks" something in Oedipus — or on the contrary is he ill by virtue of the oedipianization that he cannot bear, and that everything concurs in making him undergo (social repression before psychoanalysis)?

87The schizophrenic egg is like the biological egg: they have a similar history, and knowledge of them has encountered the same difficulties, the same illusions. It was first believed that in the development and differentiation of the egg, true "organizers" determined the destiny of parts. But it was perceived, on the one hand, that all sorts of variable substances had the same action as the envisaged stimulus, on the other hand that the parts themselves had competencies or specific potentialities escaping the stimulus (graft experiment). Hence the idea that stimuli are not organizers, but simple inductors: at the limit, inductors of any nature whatsoever. All sorts of substances, all sorts of materials, killed, boiled, triturated, have the same effect. What created the illusion were the beginnings of development: the simplicity of the beginning, consisting for example in cellular divisions, could make one believe in a sort of adequation between the induced and the inductor. But we know well that a thing is always badly judged from its beginnings, because it is forced, in order to appear, to mime structural states, to cast itself into states of forces that serve it as masks. Moreover: from the beginning one can recognize that it makes an entirely different use of them, and that it invests already beneath the mask, through the mask, the terminal forms and the specific superior states that it will posit for themselves later. Such is the history of Oedipus: parental figures are in no way organizers, but inductors or stimuli of any value whatsoever that trigger processes of an entirely different nature, endowed with a sort of indifference to the stimulus. And no doubt one can believe that, at the beginning (?), the stimulus, the oedipal inductor is a true organizer. But to believe is an operation of consciousness or the preconscious, an extrinsic perception and not an operation of the unconscious upon itself. And, from the beginning of the child's life, it is already an entirely different enterprise that pierces through the mask of Oedipus, another flux that flows through all its cracks, another adventure that is that of desiring production. Now, one cannot say that psychoanalysis has not recognized this in a certain way. In its theory of the originary fantasy, of traces of an archaic heredity and of the endogenous sources of the superego, Freud constantly affirms that the active factors are not the real parents, nor even the parents as the child imagines them. Likewise and all the more so the disciples of Lacan, when they take up again the distinction of the imaginary and the symbolic, when they oppose the name of the father to the imago, and the foreclosure that concerns the signifier, to an absence or real lack of the paternal figure. One cannot better recognize that parental figures are inductors of any kind whatsoever, and that the true organizer is elsewhere, on the side of the induced and not of the inductor. But it is there that the question begins, the same as for the biological egg. For, in these conditions, is there any other way out than to restore the idea of a "terrain," either in the form of a phylogenetic innateness of preformation, or in the form of a cultural a-priori symbolic linked to prematuration? Worse still: it is evident that in invoking such an a-priori one does not exit familialism in the narrowest sense, which burdens all of psychoanalysis; one sinks into it on the contrary and generalizes it. The parents have been put in their true place in the unconscious, which is that of inductors of any kind whatsoever, but one continues to entrust the role of organizer to symbolic or structural elements that are still of the family and its oedipal matrix. Once again one does not exit it: one has only found the means to render the family transcendent.

88That is it, the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, framing the unconscious within Oedipus, ligating it on both sides, crushing desiring production, conditioning the patient to respond papa-mama, to consume always papa-mama. Foucault was thus entirely right when he said that psychoanalysis completed in a certain way, accomplished what nineteenth-century asylum psychiatry had proposed for itself, with Pinel and Tuke: to weld madness to a parental complex, to bind it "to the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the family" — to constitute a microcosm where "the massive great structures of bourgeois society and its values" are symbolized, Family-Children, Fault-Punishment, Madness-Disorder — to make desalientation pass by the same path as alienation, Oedipus at both ends, to found thus the moral authority of the doctor as Father and Judge, Family and Law — and to end finally at the following paradox: "While the mental patient is entirely alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the reality of mental illness in the critical concept of madness."75 Luminous pages. Let us add that in enveloping the illness in a family complex interior to the patient, then the family complex itself in the transference or the patient-doctor relation, Freudian psychoanalysis made of the family a certain intensive usage. Certainly, this usage disfigured the nature of intensive quantities in the unconscious. But it still respected in part the general principle of a production of these quantities. On the contrary, when it was necessary once again to confront psychosis, at the same moment the family re-deployed itself in extension, and was considered for itself as the gradimeter of the forces of alienation and desalientation. It is thus that the study of schizophrenic families relaunched Oedipus by making it reign in the extensive order of a deployed family, where not only did each combine more or less well his triangle with that of the others, but where the ensemble of the extended family oscillated between the two poles of a "healthy" triangulation, structuring and differentiating, and forms of perverted triangles, operating their fusion in the undifferentiated.

89Jacques Hochman analyzes interesting varieties of psychotic families under the same "fusional postulate": the properly fusional family, where differentiation exists only between inside and outside (those who are not of the family); the scission family which establishes within itself blocs, clans or coalitions; the tubular family, where the triangle multiplies infinitely, each member having its own which interlocks with others without being able to recognize the limits of a nuclear family; the foreclosing family, where differentiation is found at once as included and conjured away in one of its members eliminated, annulled, foreclosed.{76} One understands that a concept like that of foreclosure functions within this extensive framework of a family where several generations, at least three, form the condition for the fabrication of a psychotic: for example, the mother's troubles with regard to her own father mean that the son, in turn, cannot even "pose his desire" with regard to the mother. Hence the strange idea that if the psychotic escapes Oedipus, it is only because he is in it squared, in a field of extension that includes grandparents. The problem of the cure becomes quite close to an operation of differential calculus, where one proceeds by depotentialization to rediscover the first functions and restore the characteristic or nuclear triangle — always a holy trinity, access to a three-term situation… It is evident that this familialism in extension, where the family receives the proper powers of alienation and desalienation, entails an abandonment of the basic positions of psychoanalysis concerning sexuality, despite the formal preservation of an analytical vocabulary. True regression to the profit of a taxonomy of families. One sees this clearly in the attempts at community psychiatry or so-called family psychotherapy, which effectively break asylary existence, but nonetheless retain all its presuppositions, and fundamentally renew ties with nineteenth-century psychiatry, following the slogan proposed by: "from the family to the hospital institution, from the hospital institution to the family institution, … therapeutic return to the family"!

90But, even in the progressive or revolutionary sectors of institutional analysis on the one hand, and anti-psychiatry on the other, the danger persists of this familialism in extension, in conformity with the double impasse of an extended Oedipus, as much in the diagnosis of families pathogenic in themselves as in the constitution of quasi-family therapeutic arrangements. Once it is said that it is no longer a matter of re-forming frameworks of adaptation or familial and social integration, but of instituting original forms of active groups, the question that poses itself is knowing to what extent these base groups resemble artificial families, to what extent they still lend themselves to oedipianization. These questions have been profoundly analyzed by Jean Oury. They show that revolutionary psychiatry, however much it breaks with the ideals of communitarian adaptation, with everything that Maud Mannoni calls the police of adaptation, still risks at every instant being folded back into the framework of a structural Oedipus whose gap one diagnoses and whose integrity one restores, holy trinity that continues to strangle the production of desire and to stifle its problems. The political and cultural content, historical-world and racial, remains crushed in the oedipal mill. It is that one persists in treating the family as a matrix, or, better, as a microcosm, an expressive milieu valid for itself, and which, however capable it may be of expressing the action of alienating forces, "mediates" them precisely by suppressing the true categories of production in the machines of desire. It seems to us that such a point of view remains present even in Cooper (Laing in this regard extricated himself better from familialism, thanks to the resources of a flux come from the East). "Families," writes Cooper, "operate a mediation between social reality and their children. If the social reality in question is rich in alienated social forms, then this alienation will be mediated for the child and experienced by him as strangeness in familial relations… A person may say, for example, that his mind is controlled by an electrical machine or by men from another planet. These constructions, however, are in a large measure incarnations of the familial process, which has the appearances of substantial reality, but is nothing other than the alienated form of the action or praxis of the members of the family, praxis which literally dominates the mind of the psychotic member. These metaphorical men of the cosmos are literally the mother, the father and the brothers who take their place around the breakfast table in the company of the supposed psychotic." Even the essential thesis of anti-psychiatry, which poses at the limit an identity of nature between social alienation and mental alienation, must be understood in function of a maintained familialism, and not of its refutation. For it is inasmuch as the family-microcosm, the family-gauge, expresses social alienation, that it is supposed to "organize" mental alienation in the mind of its members, or of its psychotic member (and among all its members, "which one is the good one"?).

91In the general conception of microcosm-macrocosm relations, Bergson introduced a discreet revolution to which we must return. The assimilation of the living to a microcosm is an ancient commonplace. But if the living was similar to the world, it was, one said, because it was or tended to be an isolated system, naturally closed: the comparison of microcosm and macrocosm was thus that of two closed figures, of which one expressed the other and inscribed itself in the other. At the beginning of Creative Evolution, Bergson entirely changes the scope of the comparison by opening both wholes. If the living resembles the world, it is on the contrary to the extent that it opens onto the openness of the world; if it is a whole, it is to the extent that the whole, that of the world as of the living, is always in the process of making itself, of producing or progressing itself, of inscribing itself in an irreducible and non-closed temporal dimension. We believe it is the same with the family-society relation. There is no oedipal triangle: Oedipus is always open in an open social field. Oedipus open to all winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3 + 1, but 4 + n). Poorly closed triangle, porous or seeping triangle, shattered triangle from which the flux of desire escape toward other places. It is curious that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples to notice that, at the summits of the pseudotriangle, the mama danced with the missionary, the papa was being buggered by the tax collector, the self beaten by a White. It is precisely this coupling of parental figures with agents of another nature, their embrace like wrestlers, which prevents the triangle from closing itself, from having value for itself and from pretending to express or represent this other nature of the agents that are at stake in the unconscious itself. When Fanon encounters a case of persecution psychosis linked to the death of the mother, he first asks himself if he is "in the presence of an unconscious guilt complex as Freud described in Mourning and Melancholia"; but he learns quickly that the mother was killed by a French soldier, and that the subject himself assassinated the wife of a colonist, whose eviscerated phantom comes perpetually to drag, shred the memory of the mother. One can always say that these limit situations of war trauma, of colonization state, of extreme social misery, etc., are little propitious to the construction of Oedipus — and that it is precisely through this that they favor a psychotic development or explosion —, we sense well that the problem is elsewhere. For, besides the fact that one admits that a certain comfort of the bourgeois family is necessary to furnish oedipianized subjects, one always pushes further the question of knowing what is really invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposed normal or normative Oedipus.

92The revolutionary is the first to be able to say in right: Oedipus, I don't know him — because the disjoint pieces remain stuck to all the corners of the historical social field, as battlefield and not as scene of bourgeois theater. Too bad if psychoanalysts roar. But Fanon remarked that troubled periods had not only unconscious effects on active militants, but also on the neutral and those who claim to remain outside the affair, not to meddle in politics. One will say the same of apparently peaceful periods: grotesque error to believe that the child-unconscious knows only daddy-mommy, and does not know "in its own way" that the father has a boss who is not a father of a father, or again that he himself is a boss who is not a father… So much so that it is for all cases that we posit the following rule: the father and the mother exist only in pieces, and never organize themselves in a figure nor in a structure capable at once of representing the unconscious, and of representing in it the diverse agents of the collectivity, but always explode in fragments that border on these agents, confront, oppose or reconcile with them as in a hand-to-hand. The father, the mother and the self are engaged, and in direct grip with the elements of the historical and political situation, the soldier, the cop, the occupant, the collaborator, the protester or the resistant, the boss, the boss's wife who break at each instant all triangulation, and prevent the whole of the situation from folding back onto the family complex and from internalizing itself in it. In short, never is the family a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even inscribed in a larger circle that it would mediate and express. The family is by nature eccentric, decentered. We are told of fusional family, scissional, tubular, foreclosing. But from where vibrating the cuts and their distribution, which precisely prevent the family from being an "interior"? There is always an uncle from America, a brother who went wrong, an aunt who left with a soldier, an unemployed cousin, in bankruptcy or who suffered the crash, an anarchist grandfather, a grandmother in the hospital, mad or senile. The family does not generate its cuts. Families are cut through by cuts that are not familial: the Commune, the Dreyfus affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish war, the rise of fascism, Stalinism, the Vietnam war, May 68… all this forms the complexes of the unconscious, as efficacious as sempiternal Oedipus. And it is indeed a matter of the unconscious. If structures there are, they do not exist in the mind, in the shadow of a fantastic phallus that would distribute their gaps, passages and articulations. They exist in the impossible immediate real. As Gombrowicz says, structuralists "seek their structures in culture, me in the immediate reality. My way of seeing was in direct relation with the events of the time: Hitlerism, Stalinism, fascism… I was fascinated by the grotesque and terrifying forms that surged up in the sphere of the interhuman in destroying all that was until then venerable."{79}

93Hellenists are right to recall that, even in venerable Oedipus, it was already a matter of "politics." They are simply wrong to conclude from this that libido has nothing to do with it. It is quite the opposite: what libido invests through the disjunct elements of Oedipus, and precisely insofar as these elements never form an autonomous expressive mental structure, are these extrafamilial cuts, sub-familial cuts, these forms of social production in relation to the production of desire. Schizo-analysis therefore does not hide the fact that it is a political and social psychoanalysis, a militant analysis: not because it would generalize Oedipus into culture, under the ridiculous conditions that have obtained until now. But, on the contrary, because it proposes to show the existence of an unconscious libidinal investment of historical social production, distinct from the conscious investments that coexist with it. Proust is not wrong to say that, far from making an intimate work, he goes further than those who hold to a populist or proletarian art that content themselves with describing the social and political in "voluntarily" expressive works. For his part, he is interested in the manner in which the Dreyfus affair, then the war of '14 intersect families, introduce into them new cuts and new connections that entail a reworking of heterosexual and homosexual libido (for example in the decomposed milieu of the Guermantes). It is up to libido to invest the social field under unconscious forms, and thereby to hallucinate all history, to delirate civilizations, continents and races, and to "feel" intensely a worldwide becoming. No signifying chain without a Chinese, an Arab, a Black who pass their head through and come to trouble the night of a paranoid White. Schizo-analysis proposes to undo the expressive oedipal unconscious, always artificial, repressive and repressed, mediated by the family, in order to reach the immediate productive unconscious. Yes, the family is a stimulus—but a stimulus of whatever value, an inducer that is neither organizer nor disorganizer. As for the response, it always comes from elsewhere. If there is language, it is on the side of the response and not of the stimulus. Even oedipal psychoanalysis has well recognized the indifference of effective parental images, the irreducibility of the response to the stimulation that they effect. But it contented itself with understanding the response from an expressive symbolism still familial, rather than interpreting it in an unconscious system of production as such (analytic economy).

94The great argument of familialism is: "at least at the beginning…" This argument can be explicitly formulated, but it also has an implicit persistence in theories that nonetheless refuse the point of view of genesis. At least at the beginning, the unconscious would express itself in a state of relations and familial constellations where the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic would be mingled. Social and metaphysical relations would emerge afterward, as an beyond. And since the beginning always goes by two (it is even the condition for not getting out of it), one invokes a first pre-Oedipal beginning, "the primitive indifferentiation of the earliest stages of personality" in relation with the mother, then a second beginning, Oedipus itself with the law of the father and the exclusive differentiations it prescribes within the family—finally latency, the famous latency, after which the beyond begins. But since this beyond consists in making others redo the same path (children to come), and also since the first beginning is said "pre-Oedipal" only to already mark its belonging to Oedipus as axis of reference, it is quite evident that one has simply closed the two ends of Oedipus, and that the beyond or the after will always be interpreted in function of Oedipus, in relation to Oedipus, within the framework of Oedipus. Everything will be collapsed onto it, as the discussions on the compared role of infantile factors and actual factors in neurosis testify: how could it be otherwise, so long as the "actual" factor is conceived under this form of the after? But, in truth, we know that actual factors are there from childhood, and determine libidinal investments in function of the cuts and connections they introduce in the family. Over the heads of family people, or beneath, it is the production of desire and social production that experience in childhood their identity of nature and their difference of régime. Let one consider three great books of childhood: L'Enfant by Jules Vallès, Bas les cœurs by Darien, Mort à crédit by Céline. One will see there how health, money, habitat, social promotion, bourgeois and revolutionary values, wealth and poverty, oppression and revolt, social classes, political events, metaphysical and collective problems, what is it to breathe? why be poor? why are there rich people? become the object of investments in which parents have only the role of agents of production or of particular anti-production, always collared with other agents which they express all the less as they are wrestling with them in the heaven and hell of childhood. And the child says: why? The Rat Man does not wait to be a man to invest the rich woman and the poor woman that constitute the actual factor of his obsession. It is for unavowable reasons that one denies the existence of an infantile sexuality, but it is also for barely avowable reasons that one reduces this sexuality to desiring mama and wanting the father's place. The Freudian blackmail consists in this: either you recognize the Oedipal character of infantile sexuality, or else you abandon any position of sexuality. Yet, it is not even in the shadow of a transcendent phallus that unconscious effects of "signified" pose themselves on the ensemble of determinations of a social field; on the contrary, it is the libidinal investment of these determinations that fixes their particular use in the production of desire, and the compared régime of this production with social production, from which flow the state of desire and its repression, the distribution of agents and the degree of oedipianization of sexuality. Lacan rightly says that in function of the crises and cuts of science, there is a drama of the savant that sometimes goes as far as madness, and which "could not here include itself in Oedipus, except by putting it in question," by consequence.{80} Each child is in this sense a little savant, a little Cantor. And one may go back through the course of ages, never does one find a child taken in an autonomous, expressive, or signifying familial order. In its games as in its nourishments, its chains and its meditations, even the infant finds itself already taken in an actual production of desire where parents play the role of partial objects, witnesses, reporters, and agents, in the current of a process that overflows them from all sides, and which puts desire in immediate relation with a historical and social reality. It is true that nothing is pre-Oedipal, and that one must push Oedipus back to earliest age, but in the order of a repression of the unconscious. It is no less true that everything is anœdipian in the order of production; that there is the non-Oedipal, the anœdipian which begins as early as Oedipus and continues as late, on another rhythm, under another régime, in another dimension, with other uses of syntheses that nourish the self-production of the unconscious, the orphan-unconscious, the gambling-unconscious, the meditative and social unconscious.

95The operation of Oedipus consists in establishing a set of one-to-one relations between the agents of social production, reproduction, and anti-production on the one hand, and on the other hand the agents of the so-called natural familial reproduction. This operation is called an application. Everything happens as if one folded a tablecloth, and its 4 (+ n) corners were bent back into 3 (3 + 1, to designate the transcendent factor that operates the folding). It is henceforth forced that collective agents be interpreted as derivatives or substitutes of parental figures, in a system of equivalence that finds everywhere the father, the mother, and the self. (And one only pushes back the difficulty if one considers the whole of the system, making it depend then on the transcendent term, phallus). There is a misuse of conjunctive synthesis, which makes one say "so it was your father, so it was your mother…" And that one discovers only afterwards that all of it was the father and mother has nothing surprising about it, since one supposes that it is so from the beginning, but that it is then forgotten-repressed, all the same to find it again afterwards in relation to the afterwards. Whence the magic formula that marks well the one-to-one-ification, that is to say the crushing of the polyvocal real in favor of a symbolic relation between two articulations: so that was what this meant to say. One makes everything depart from Oedipus, by explanation, with all the more certainty in that one has brought everything back to it by application. It is only in appearance that Oedipus is a beginning, either as historical or prehistorical origin, or as structural foundation. It is a wholly ideological beginning, for ideology. In fact, Oedipus is always and only a set of arrival for a set of departure constituted by a social formation. Everything applies itself to it, in the sense that the agents and relations of social production, and the libidinal investments that correspond to them, are bent back onto the figures of familial reproduction. In the set of departure there is the social formation, or rather social formations; the races, the classes, the continents, the peoples, the kingdoms, the sovereignties; Joan of Arc and the Great Mongol, Luther and the Aztec Serpent. In the set of arrival, there is nothing more than papa, mama, and me. Of Oedipus as of desiring production, one must therefore say: it is at the end, not at the beginning. But it is not at all in the same manner. We have seen that desiring production was the limit of social production, always thwarted in the capitalist formation: the full body at the limit of the deterritorialized socius, the desert at the gates of the city… But precisely it is urgent, it is essential that the limit be displaced, that it be rendered harmless and pass, seem to pass inside the social formation itself. Schizophrenia or desiring production, it is the limit between molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; the limit of deterritorialization must now pass inside molar organization, must apply itself to a factitious and subjected territoriality. One senses then what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it interiorizes it. Rather a people of neurotics than a single successful schizophrenic, not autistic. Incomparable instrument of gregariousness, Oedipus is the ultimate subjected and private territoriality of European man. (Much more, the displaced limit, conjured, passes inside Oedipus, between its two poles.)

96A word on psychoanalysis's shame in history and politics. The procedure is well known: one brings the Great Man and the Crowd into presence. One claims to make history with these two entities, these two puppets, the great Crustacean and the mad Invertebrate. One puts Oedipus at the beginning. On one side one has the great man defined oedipally: he has therefore killed the father, from this murder that never ends, either to annihilate him and identify with the mother, or to internalize him, take his place or reconcile himself (and, in detail, so many variants that correspond to neurotic, psychotic, perverse or "normal" solutions, that is to say sublimatory…). In any case, the great man is already great, because in good or in evil he has found a certain original solution to the oedipal conflict. Hitler annihilates the father and unleashes in him the forces of the bad mother, Luther internalizes the father and establishes a compromise with the superego. On the other side, one has the crowd, defined itself too oedipally, by parental images of second order, collective; the encounter can thus take place, Luther and the Christians of the sixteenth century, Hitler and the German people, in correspondences that do not necessarily imply identity (Hitler plays the role of father through "homosexual transfusion" and in relation to the feminine crowd; Luther plays the role of woman in relation to the God of Christians). Of course, to guard against the historian's justified anger, the psychoanalyst specifies that he concerns himself only with a certain order of causes, that one must take into account the "other" causes, but that he cannot do everything. Moreover he concerns himself just enough with the other causes to give us a foretaste: he takes into account the institutions of an era (from the Roman church in the sixteenth century, from capitalist power in the twentieth) if only to see in them… parental images of yet another order, associating father and mother, which will be dissociated and otherwise regrouped in the action of the great man and the crowd. It matters very little whether the tone of these books is orthodox Freudian, culturalist, archetypal. Such books give nausea. Let one not dismiss them by saying they belong to psychoanalysis's distant past: they are still being written in our day, and many. Let one not say it is a reckless use of Oedipus: what other use would you make of it? It is no more an ambiguous dimension of "applied psychoanalysis"; for it is all Oedipus, Oedipus in itself, that is already an application, in the strict sense of the word. And when the best psychoanalysts forbid themselves historico-political applications, one cannot say that things go much better, since they retreat onto the rock of castration presented as the site of an "unbearable truth" irreducible: they lock themselves in a phallocentrism that determines them to consider analytical activity as having to evolve always in a familial microcosm, and still treat the direct investments of the social field by libido as simple imaginary dependencies of Oedipus, where one would need to denounce "a fusional dream," "a fantasy of return to Unity." Castration, they say, there is what separates us from the political, there is what makes our originality, we analysts, who do not forget that society too is triangular and symbolic!

97If it is true that Oedipus is obtained by reduction or application, it presupposes itself a certain type of libidinal investment of the social field, of the production and formation of this field. There is no more individual Oedipus than individual fantasy. Oedipus is a means of integration into the group, as much under the adaptive form of its own reproduction which makes it pass from one generation to another, as in its inadequate neurotic stases which block desire on arranged impasses. Thus Oedipus flourishes in subjected groups, there where an established order is invested in its repressive forms themselves. And it is not the forms of the subjected group which depend on projections and oedipal identifications, but quite the opposite: it is the oedipal applications which depend on the determinations of the subjected group as starting ensemble, and on their libidinal investment (since thirteen I have worked, rise in the social ladder, promotion, be part of the exploiters…). There is thus a segregative usage of the conjunctive syntheses in the unconscious which does not coincide with divisions of classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominant class: it is this which constitutes the feeling of "being one of ours," of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from without. Thus the Poor White son of pioneers, the protestant Irish who commemorates the victory of his ancestors, the fascist of the race of masters. Oedipus depends on such a nationalist, religious, racist sentiment, and not the reverse: it is not the father who projects himself in the chief, but the chief who applies himself to the father, either to tell us "you shall not surpass your father," or to tell us "you shall surpass him by rediscovering our ancestors." Lacan profoundly showed the link of Oedipus with segregation. Not however in the sense where segregation would be a consequence of Oedipus, underlying the fraternity of brothers once the father is dead. On the contrary, segregative usage is a condition of Oedipus, insofar as the social field only reduces onto the family link by presupposing an enormous archaism, an incarnation of race in person or in spirit — yes, I am of yours…

98It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field, which coexists but does not necessarily coincide with preconscious investments, or with what preconscious investments "should be." This is why, when subjects, individuals or groups, manifestly go against their class interests, when they adhere to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should determine them to combat, it is not enough to say: they have been deceived, the masses have been deceived. It is not an ideological problem, of misrecognition and illusion; it is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infra-structure. Preconscious investments are made or should be made according to the interests of opposing classes. But unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject that desires, individual or collective. They can ensure the general submission to a dominant class, by passing cuts and segregations through a social field as invested precisely by desire, and no longer by interests. A form of social production and reproduction, with its economic and financial mechanisms, its political formations, etc., can be desired as such, all or part, independently of the interest of the subject that desires. It is not by metaphor, even by paternal metaphor, that Hitler made the fascists hard. It is not by metaphor that a banking or stock market operation, a security, a coupon, a credit, make people hard who are not only bankers. And money sprouting, money that produces money? There are "complexes" economic-social that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a Voluptas from top to bottom of their hierarchy (the industrial military complex). And ideology, Oedipus and the phallus have nothing to do here, because they depend on it instead of being at the principle. It is that it is a matter of flux, of stocks, of cuts and of fluctuations of flux; desire is everywhere that something flows and couler, drawing along interested subjects, but also subjects drunk or asleep toward mortal mouths.

99Such is therefore the aim of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments of the economic and the political; and thereby to show how desire can be determined to desire its own repression in the subject that desires (whence the role of the death drive in the connection of desire and the social). All of this takes place, not in ideology, but well below it. An unconscious investment of fascist or reactionary type can coexist with the revolutionary conscious investment. Inversely, it can happen (rarely) that a revolutionary investment, at the level of desire, coexists with a reactionary investment conforming to a conscious interest. In any case, conscious and unconscious investments are not of the same type, even when they coincide and overlap. We defined reactionary unconscious investment as conforming to the interest of the dominant class, but proceeding on its account, in terms of desire, by the segregative use of conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus flows: I am of the superior race. Unconscious revolutionary investment is such that desire, still in its own mode, intersects the interest of the dominated, exploited classes, and makes flow fluxes capable of rupturing at once all segregations and their oedipal applications, capable of hallucinating history, of deliring races and of setting continents ablaze. No, I am not of yours, I am the outside and the deterritorialized, "I am of inferior race for all eternity, … I am a beast, a negro." There again it is a matter of an intense power to invest and counter-invest in the unconscious. Oedipus leaps, because its very conditions have leaped. The nomadic and polyvocal use of conjunctive syntheses opposes the segregative and bi-univocal use. Delirium has as it were two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizo-nomadic. And between the two so many subtle uncertain slidings, where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charges and its revolutionary potentialities. Even Schreber finds himself Grand Mongol in crossing the Aryan segregation. From there the ambiguity of texts in great authors, when they handle the theme of races, fertile in equivocation as destiny. Schizoanalysis must here untangle the thread. For to read a text is never an erudite exercise in search of the signifieds, still less a highly textual exercise in quest of a signifier, but a productive use of the literary machine, an arrangement of machines of desire, schizoid exercise that disengages from the text its revolutionary power. The "Thus it is!" or Igitur's meditation on race, in essential relation with madness.

SECTION 6

100Inexhaustible and always current, Oedipus's collection of follies. We are told that fathers died "throughout thousands of years" (well, well) and that the corresponding "interiorization" of the paternal image occurred during the paleolithic until the beginning of the neolithic, "approximately 8,000 years ago."{81} Either one makes history or one doesn't. But truly, as for the death of the father, the news travels slowly. One would be wrong to drag Nietzsche into this business. For Nietzsche is not the one who rumbles over the death of the father, and who spends his entire paleolithic internalizing it. On the contrary: Nietzsche is profoundly weary of all these stories made around the death of the father, the death of God, and wants to put an end to the interminable discourses on this subject, discourses already fashionable in his Hegelian time. Alas, he was mistaken; the discourses continued. But Nietzsche wanted one to finally move on to serious matters. Regarding the death of God, he gives twelve or thirteen versions, for good measure and so one would speak of it no more, to render the event comic. And he explains that this event has strictly no importance whatsoever, that it truly interests only the last pope: God dead or not dead, the father dead or not dead, it amounts to the same thing, since the same repression and the same refoulement continue, here in the name of God or a living father, there in the name of man or the interiorzed dead father. Nietzsche says that what is important is not the news that God is dead, but the time it takes to bear its fruit. Here the psychoanalyst pricks up his ears, he believes he recognizes himself there: it is well known that the unconscious takes time to digest news, one can even cite several texts by Freud on the unconscious that ignores time, and that preserves its objects like an Egyptian tomb. Only, Nietzsche does not mean that at all: he does not mean that the death of God takes a long time to make its way through the unconscious. He means that what takes so long to arrive at consciousness is the news that the death of God has no importance whatsoever for the unconscious. The fruit of the news is not the consequence of the death of God, but this other news that the death of God has no consequence. In other words: that God, that the father never existed (or else, so long ago, during the paleolithic perhaps…). One has only ever killed a corpse. The fruits of the news of the death of God suppress the flower of death as much as the bud of life. For, living or dead, it is only a question of belief, one does not escape the element of belief. The announcement of the dead father constitutes a final belief, "the belief in the virtue of unbelief" of which Nietzsche says: "This violence always manifests the need for a belief, a support, a structure…" Oedipus-structure.

101Engels paid homage to Bachofen's genius for having recognized in myth the figures of maternal right and paternal right, their struggles and their relations. But he slips in a reproach that changes everything: it seems that Bachofen really believes in it, that he believes in myths, in the Erinyes, in Apollo and Athena. The same reproach is directed even more at psychoanalysts: it seems they believe in it, in myth, in Oedipus, in castration. They respond: the question is not whether we believe in it, but whether the unconscious itself believes in it. But what is this unconscious reduced to the state of belief? Who injects belief into it? Psychoanalysis can become a rigorous discipline only if it proceeds to a bracketing of belief, that is to say to a materialist reduction of Oedipus as ideological form. It is not a matter of saying that Oedipus is a false belief, but that belief is necessarily something false, which deflects and suffocates effective production. This is why seers are the least believing. When we relate desire to Oedipus, we condemn ourselves to ignoring the productive character of desire, we condemn it to vague dreams or imaginations which are only its conscious expressions, we relate it to independent existences, the father, the mother, the progenitors, who do not yet understand their elements as internal elements of desire. The question of the father is like that of God: born of abstraction, it presupposes a broken link between man and nature, the link between man and world, so that man must be produced as man by something external to nature and to man. On this point Nietzsche makes a remark altogether similar to those of Feuerbach or Engels: "We burst out laughing merely at seeing man and world neighbour, separated by the sublime pretension of the little word and." Altogether different is the coextensivity, the coextension of man and nature; circular movement by which the unconscious, always remaining subject, produces itself and reproduces itself. The unconscious does not follow the paths of a generation progressing (or regressing) from one body to another, your father, your father's father, etc. The organized body is the object of reproduction through generation; it is not its subject. The sole subject of reproduction is the unconscious itself, which holds itself in the circular form of production. It is not sexuality that is a means in service of generation, it is the generation of bodies that is in service of sexuality as self-production of the unconscious. It is not sexuality that represents a bonus for the ego, in exchange for its subordination to the process of generation, it is on the contrary generation that is the consolation of the ego, its prolongation, the passage from one body to another through which the unconscious does nothing but reproduce itself in itself. It is indeed in this sense that one must say: the unconscious has always been orphaned, that is to say it engenders itself in the identity of nature and man, of world and man. It is the question of the father, it is the question of God that has become impossible, indifferent, insofar as it comes to the same thing to affirm or to deny such a being, to live it or to kill it: one and the same misunderstanding regarding the nature of the unconscious.

102But psychoanalysts insist on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man thus, and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression or regression: your father, and your father's father, Oedipal snowball down to the father of the horde, God and the paleolithic. It is Oedipus who makes us man, for better or worse, says the book of foolishness. On this the tone may vary, but the substance remains the same: you will not escape Oedipus, you have only the choice between the "neurotic outcome" and the "non-neurotic outcome." The tone may be that of the enraged psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst-cop: those who do not recognize the imperialism of Oedipus are dangerous deviants, leftists who must be handed over to social and police repression, they talk too much and lack anality (Dr Mendel, Drs Stéphane). Following what troubling play on words does the analyst become a promoter of anality? Or else the psychoanalyst-priest, the pious psychoanalyst who sings the incurable insufficiency of being: don't you see that Oedipus saves us from Oedipus, it is our misery, but our greatness also, depending on whether one lives it neurotically, or lives its structure, mother of holy belief (J. M. Pohier). Or else the techno-psychoanalyst, the reformist obsessed with the triangle, and who wraps in Oedipus the splendid gifts of civilization, identity, manic depression and freedom under an infinite progression: "In Oedipus, the individual learns to live the triangular situation, guarantee of his identity, and at the same time discovers, now in the depressive mode, now in that of exaltation, the fundamental alienation, his irremediable solitude, price of his freedom. The fundamental structure of Oedipus must not only be generalized in time to all the child's triangular experiences with his parents, it must be generalized in space to triangular relations other than parent-child relations."

103The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, but only problems of usage. The question of desire is not "what does it mean?", but how it works. How do the machines of desire function, yours, mine, with what malfunctions forming part of their usage, how do they pass from one body to another, how do they attach themselves to the body without organs, how do they confront their régime with social machines? A docile cog gets greased, or on the contrary an infernal machine prepares itself. What connections, what disjunctions, what conjunctions, what is the usage of the syntheses? It represents nothing, but it produces, it means nothing, but it functions. It is in the general collapse of the question "what does it mean?" that desire makes its entry. The problem of language could only be posed insofar as linguists and logicians evacuated meaning; and the highest power of language was discovered when the work was considered as a machine producing certain effects, subject to a certain usage. Malcolm Lowry says of his work: it is whatever you want, as long as it functions, "and it functions, be sure of it, for I have experienced it" — a machinery. Only, that meaning is nothing other than usage becomes a firm principle only if we dispose of immanent criteria capable of determining legitimate usages, as opposed to illegitimate usages, which on the contrary refer usage back to a supposed meaning and restore a sort of transcendence. The so-called transcendental analysis is precisely the determination of these criteria, immanent to the field of the unconscious, insofar as they oppose themselves to the transcendent exercises of a "what does it mean?". Schizo-analysis is at once a transcendental and materialist analysis. It is critical, in that it conducts the critique of Oedipus, or leads Oedipus to the point of its own self-critique. It proposes to explore an unconscious that is transcendental rather than metaphysical; material rather than ideological; schizophrenic rather than oedipal; non-figurative rather than imaginary; real rather than symbolic; machinic rather than structural; molecular, micropsychic and micrological rather than molar or gregarious; productive rather than expressive. And it is here a matter of practical principles as directions of the "cure".

104We have thus seen previously how the immanent criteria of desire production allowed us to define legitimate uses of syntheses, quite distinct from Oedipal uses. And in relation to this desire production, the illegitimate Oedipal uses seemed to us multiform, but always turning around the same error and enveloping theoretical and practical paralogisms. In the first place, a partial and non-specific use of connective syntheses opposed the Oedipal use, global and specific. This global-specific use had two aspects, parental and conjugal, to which corresponded the triangular form of Oedipus and the reproduction of this form. It rested upon a paralogism of extrapolation, which constituted finally the formal cause of Oedipus, and whose illegitimacy weighed upon the ensemble of the operation: extracting from the signifying chain a complete object transcending it, as a despotic signifier upon which the entire chain seemed then to depend, assigning a lack to each position of desire, welding desire to a law, engendering the illusion of a takeoff. In the second place, an inclusive or unlimitatif use of disjunctive syntheses opposed their Oedipal use, exclusive, limitative. This limitative use in turn has two poles, imaginary and symbolic, since it leaves choice only between exclusive symbolic differentiations and undifferentiated imaginary, correlatively determined by Oedipus. It shows this time how Oedipus proceeds, what is the procedure of Oedipus: paralogism of the double bind, of the double impasse (or would it be better to translate, following a suggestion of Henri Gobard, "double grip," as in a double hold in wrestling, to better show the treatment to which one constrains the unconscious when one ligatures it at both ends, leaving it no other chance than to answer Oedipus, to recite Oedipus, in sickness as in health, in its crises as in its denouement, in its solution as in its problem; for, in any case, the double bind is not the schizophrenic process, but quite on the contrary Oedipus, insofar as it arrests the process or makes it turn in the void). In the third place, a nomadic and polyvocal use of conjunctive syntheses opposed the segregative and bi-univocal use. Here again this bi-univocal use, illegitimate from the point of view of the unconscious itself, has as it were two moments: a racist, nationalist, religious moment, etc., which constitutes by segregation a set of departure always presupposed by Oedipus, even in entirely implicit manner; then a familial moment which constitutes the set of arrival by application. Whence the third paralogism, of application, which fixes the condition of Oedipus by instituting a set of bi-univocal relations between the determinations of the social field and the familial determinations, thus rendering possible and inevitable the reduction of libidinal investments to the eternal mom-dad. Even so we have not exhausted all the paralogisms which orient practically the cure in the direction of a frenzied Oedipalization, betrayal of desire, putting into the nursery of the unconscious, narcissistic machine for little chattering and arrogant egos, perpetual absorption of capitalist surplus-value, flux of speech against flux of money, the interminable history, psychoanalysis.

105The three errors about desire are called lack, law, and the signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious. And no matter how one interprets these notions in terms of a combinatory that makes lack an empty place rather than a privation, law a rule of the game rather than a commandment, the signifier a distributor rather than a meaning, one cannot prevent them from dragging behind them their theological retinue, insufficiency of being, guilt, signification. Structural interpretation repudiates all belief, rises above images, retains of the father and mother only functions, defines the interdict and transgression as operators of structure: but what water will wash these concepts of their background, of their back-worlds — religiosity? Scientific knowledge as disbelief is truly the last refuge of belief, and, as Nietzsche says, there was never but a single psychology, that of the priest. As soon as one reintroduces lack into desire, one crushes all desiring production, one reduces it to being only production of fantasy; but the sign does not produce fantasies, it is production of real and position of desire in reality. As soon as one resolds desire to law, one does not believe one speaks so truly in recalling that it is a thing known since time immemorial, that there is no desire without law, one begins again in effect the eternal operation of eternal repression, which closes upon the unconscious the circle of the interdict and transgression, white mass and black mass; but the sign of desire is never a sign of law, it is a sign of power — and who would dare call law this fact that desire poses and develops its power, and that everywhere it is, it makes flux flow and cuts substances (« I refrain from speaking of chemical laws, the word has an aftertaste of the moral. ») ? As soon as one makes desire depend upon the signifier, one puts desire again under the yoke of a despotism whose effect is castration, there where one recognizes the trait of the signifier itself; but the sign of desire is never signifying, it is in the thousand productive cuts-flux that do not let themselves be signified in the unary trait of castration, always a multi-dimensional point-sign, polyvocity as the base of a punctual semiology.

106The unconscious is black, they say. Reich and Marcuse are often reproached for their "Rousseauism," their naturalism: a certain conception too idyllic of the unconscious. But precisely, does one not attribute to the unconscious horrors that can only be those of consciousness, and of a belief too sure of itself? Is it exaggerated to say that, in the unconscious, there is necessarily less cruelty and terror, and of another type, than in the consciousness of an heir, a military man or a head of state? The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the sleep of reason that engenders monsters, but rather vigilant and insomniac rationality. The unconscious is Rousseauist, being man-nature. And what malice and cunning in Rousseau. Transgression, guilt, castration: are these determinations of the unconscious, or is this the way a priest sees things? And no doubt there are many other forces than psychoanalysis to oedipianize the unconscious, to make it guilty, to castrate it. But psychoanalysis supports the movement, it invents a last priest. Oedipal analysis imposes on all the syntheses of the unconscious a transcendent usage that assures their conversion. Thus the practical problem of schizo-analysis is the opposite reversion: to return the syntheses of the unconscious to their immanent usage. De-oedipianize, undo the spider's web of mother-father, undo the beliefs to attain the production of machines of desire, and to the economic and social investments where militant analysis is played out. Nothing is done so long as one does not touch the machines. This implies very concrete interventions in truth: to the pseudo-neutral benevolence of the oedipal analyst, who wants and hears only father and mother, substitute a malevolent activity, openly malevolent—you're busting my balls with Oedipus, if you continue we stop the analysis, or else an electric shock, stop saying daddy-mommy—of course, "Hamlet lives in you as Werther lives in you," and Oedipus too, and everything you want, but "you make uterine arms and legs grow, uterine lips, a uterine mustache; by reliving the reminiscent dead, your ego becomes a kind of mineral theorem that constantly demonstrates the vanity of life… Were you born Hamlet? Did you not rather make Hamlet be born in you? Why return to the myth?" By renouncing myth, it is a matter of putting a little joy, a little discovery back into psychoanalysis. For it has become quite dreary, quite sad, quite interminable, everything made in advance. Will one say that the schizo either is not joyful? But does not his sadness come from the fact that he can no longer bear the forces of oedipianization, of Hamletization that encircle him from all sides? Rather flee, onto the full body, and shut himself in it, close it back on himself. The little joy, it is schizophrenization as process, not the schizo as clinical entity. "Of the process you have made a goal…" If one forced a psychoanalyst to enter into the domains of productive unconscious, he would feel as displaced there, with his theater, as an actress of the Comédie-Française in a factory, a priest of the Middle Ages in a factory assembly line. Setting up units of production, connecting machines of desire: what happens in this factory, what is this process, its agonies and its glories, its pains and its joys, remain still unknown.

SECTION 7

107We attempted to analyze the form, the reproduction, the cause (formal), the procedure, the condition of the Oedipal triangle. But we postponed the analysis of the real forces, the real causes on which triangulation depends. The general line of the answer is simple, was traced by Reich: it is social repression, the forces of social repression. Yet this answer allows two problems to subsist, and even gives them greater urgency: on one hand the specific relationship of refoulement with repression; on the other hand the particular situation of Oedipus in the repression-refoulement system. The two problems are evidently linked because, if refoulement bore upon incestuous desires, it would thereby acquire an independence and a primacy, as condition of constitution of exchange or of any society, with respect to repression which would henceforth concern only the returns of the repressed in a constituted society. We must therefore first consider the second question: does refoulement bear upon the Oedipal complex as adequate expression of the unconscious? Must we even say with Freud that the Oedipal complex, following its two poles, is either repressed (not without leaving traces and returns that will collide with interdicts), or else suppressed (but not without passing to the children, with whom the same history recommences)?{87} The question is asked whether Oedipus effectively expresses desire; if it is desired, it is indeed upon it that refoulement bears. Now the Freudian argument has reason to give pause: Freud takes up a remark of Frazer according to which "the law forbids only what men would be capable of doing under the pressure of certain of their instincts; thus, from the legal prohibition of incest, we must conclude that there exists a natural instinct that impels us to incest".{88} In other words, we are told: if it is forbidden, it is because it is desired (there would be no need to forbid what one does not desire…). Once again, it is this confidence in the law that gives us pause, the ignorance of the ruses and the procedures of the law.

108The immortal father of Death on the Installment Plan cries out: so you want to make me die, is that what you want, huh, tell me? We wanted nothing of the sort, however. We didn't want the train to be papa, nor the station mama. We only wanted innocence and peace, and to be left alone to machine our little machines, ô production of desire. Of course, pieces of mother's and father's body are caught up in the connections, parental appellations surge up in the disjunctions of the chain, the parents are there like any stimuli that trigger the becoming of adventures, of races and of continents. But what a strange Freudian mania to refer to Oedipus what overflows it from all sides, starting with the hallucination of books and the delirium of apprenticeships (the teacher-substitute of the father, and the novel family romance…). Freud could not bear a simple jest from Jung, saying that Oedipus must not have a very real existence since even the savage prefers a young and pretty woman to his mother or his grandmother. If Jung betrayed everything, it was not however by this jest, which can only suggest that the mother functions as a pretty girl just as much as the pretty girl as mother, the main thing being for the savage or for the child to form and set running his machines of desire, to make his flux pass, to operate his cuts. The law tells us: You shall not marry your mother and you shall not kill your father. And we, docile subjects, we tell ourselves: so that's what I wanted! Will the suspicion come to us that the law dishonors, that it has an interest in dishonoring and disfiguring the one it presumes guilty, the one it wants guilty, the one it wants to feel himself guilty? One acts as if one could conclude directly from repression to the nature of the repressed, and just as well from prohibition to the nature of what is prohibited. There is here typically a paralogism, yet another, a fourth paralogism that must be named displacement. For it happens that the law prohibits something perfectly fictive in the order of desire or of "instincts," to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. It is even the only way for the law to bite on intention, and to make the unconscious guilty. In short, we do not find ourselves before a two-term system where one could conclude from formal prohibition to what is really prohibited. We find ourselves in a three-term system, where this conclusion becomes entirely illegitimate. We must distinguish: the repressing representation, which operates repression; the repressed representative, on which repression really bears; the displaced represented, which gives of the repressed an apparent rigged image to which desire is supposed to let itself be taken. That is it, Oedipus, the rigged image. It is not in it that repression operates, and it is not on it that repression bears. It is not even a return of the repressed. It is an artificial product of repression. It is only the represented, insofar as it is induced by repression. This one cannot act without displacing desire, without raising up a consequent desire, all ready for punishment, all warm for punishment, and putting it in place of the antecedent desire on which it bears in principle or in reality ("ah, so that was it!"). Lawrence, who does not wage a struggle against Freud in the name of the rights of the Ideal, but who speaks by virtue of the flux of sexuality, the intensities of the unconscious, and who grieves and is alarmed at what Freud is doing when he shuts sexuality up in the Oedipal nursery, senses this operation of displacement and protests with all his strength: no, Oedipus is not a state of desire and pulsions, it is an idea, nothing but an idea that repression inspires us concerning desire, not even a compromise, but an idea in the service of repression, of its propaganda or its propagation. "The incestuous motive is a logical deduction of human reason resorting to this last extremity to save itself… It is first and foremost a logical deduction of reason, even carried out unconsciously, and which is then introduced into the passionate sphere where it becomes principle of action… This has nothing to do with the active unconscious, which scintillates, vibrates, travels… We understand that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing that holds in the least of a concept, and consequently nothing personal, since the form of persons, just as the ego, belongs to the conscious or mentally subjective self. So that the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not at stake. The first contact is neither personal nor biological, a fact that psychoanalysis has failed to understand."

109Oedipal desires are in no way repressed, and have no need to be. Yet they stand in an intimate relationship with repression, but in another way. They are the lure, or the image disfigured by which repression traps desire. If desire is repressed, it is not because it is desire for the mother, and for the death of the father; on the contrary, it only becomes that because it is repressed, it only takes on that mask under the repression that molds it and plasters it onto it. One might moreover doubt that incest is a true obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchange-based conception say. We have seen others… The true danger lies elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, however small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is a-social, quite the contrary. But it is disturbing; there is no machine of desire that can be posited without making entire social sectors explode. Whatever certain revolutionaries may think, desire is in its essence revolutionary — desire, not festivity! — and no society can tolerate a position of true desire without its structures of exploitation, enslavement and hierarchy being compromised. If a society is confounded with these structures (an amusing hypothesis), then yes, desire essentially threatens it. It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something better than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, enslavement themselves are desired. It is altogether unfortunate to have to say such rudimentary things: desire does not threaten a society because it is desire to sleep with the mother, but because it is revolutionary. And this means, not that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in Oedipus's bedroom, they rather dream of open waters, and make pass strange flux that do not allow themselves to be stored in an established order. Desire does not "want" revolution, it is revolutionary by itself and as involuntarily, in wanting what it wants. Since the beginning of this study, we maintain both that social production and desiring production are one, but that they differ in régime, such that a social form of production exerts an essential repression on desiring production, and also that desiring production (a "true" desire) is capable of, potentially, making the social form explode. But what is a "true" desire, since repression too is desired? How are we to distinguish them — we claim the rights of a very slow analysis. For, let us make no mistake about it, even in their opposed usages, they are the same syntheses.

110One clearly sees what psychoanalysis expects from a supposed bond, where Oedipus would be the object of repression, and even its subject through the intermediary of the superego. It expects from it a cultural justification of repression, which brings it to the foreground and no longer considers the problem of repression except as secondary from the point of view of the unconscious. This is why critics have been able to assign a conservative or reactionary turn in Freud, from the moment he gave repression an autonomous value as a condition of culture exerting itself against incestuous drives: Reich even says that the great turn of Freudianism, the abandonment of sexuality, is when Freud accepts the idea of an originary anxiety that would trigger repression in an endogenous manner. That one consider the 1908 article on "civilized sexual morality": Oedipus is not yet named there, repression is considered in function of repression, which occasions a displacement, and which exerts itself on partial drives insofar as they represent in their own way a sort of desiring production, before exerting itself against incestuous or other drives threatening legitimate marriage. But then it is evident that, the more the problem of Oedipus and incest occupies center stage, the more repression and its correlates, suppression and sublimation, will be founded in supposedly transcendent exigencies of civilization, at the same time that psychoanalysis will sink further into a familial and ideological vision. We have no need to retell the narrative of the reactionary compromises of Freudianism, and even of its "theoretical capitulation": this work has been done several times, profoundly, rigorously and with nuance. We see no particular problem in the coexistence, within a single theoretical and practical doctrine, of revolutionary, reformist and reactionary elements. We refuse the gambit of "take it or leave it," under the pretext that theory justifies practice, having been born of it, or that one cannot contest the process of the "cure" except from elements drawn from this same cure. As if every great doctrine were not a combined formation, made of pieces and scraps, of codes and diverse fluxes intermixed, of partials and derivatives, which constitute its very life or its becoming. As if one could reproach someone for having an ambiguous relation with psychoanalysis without first mentioning that psychoanalysis is made of an ambiguous relation, theoretically and practically, with what it discovers and the forces it handles. If the critical study of Freudian ideology is done, and done well, on the other hand the history of the movement is not even sketched: the structure of the psychoanalytic group, its politics, its tendencies and its focal points, its auto-applications, its suicides and its madnesses, the enormous group superego, everything that happened on the full body of the master. What is conventionally called Jones's monumental work does not break through the censorship, it codifies it. And how did three elements coexist: the exploratory and pioneering element, revolutionary, which discovered desiring production; the classical cultural element, which reduces everything to a scene of Oedipal theatrical representation (the return to myth!); and finally the third element, the most disturbing, a sort of racket thirsting for respectability, which will not cease to have itself recognized and institutionalized, a formidable enterprise of surplus-value absorption, with its codification of the interminable cure, its cynical justification of the role of money, and all the pledges it gives to the established order. In Freud there was all of this, fantastic Christopher Columbus, genial bourgeois reader of Goethe, of Shakespeare, of Sophocles, masked Al Capone.

111Reich's strength was in showing how repression depended on constraint. This implies no confusion of the two concepts, since constraint precisely needs repression to form docile subjects and ensure the reproduction of the social formation, including in its repressive structures. But, far from social constraint being understood on the basis of a familial repression coextensive with civilization, it is the latter that must be understood as a function of a constraint inherent to a given form of social production. Constraint bears upon desire, and not merely upon needs or interests, only through sexual repression. The family is indeed the delegated agent of this repression, insofar as it assures "a mass psychological reproduction of a society's economic system." One will certainly not conclude from this that desire is oedipal. On the contrary, it is the repression of desire or sexual repression, that is, the stasis of libidinal energy, that actualizes Oedipus and engages desire in this intended impasse, organized by repressive society. Reich was the first to pose the problem of desire's relation to the social field (he went further than Marcuse, who treats it lightly). He is the true founder of a materialist psychiatry. Posing the problem in terms of desire, he is the first to refuse the explanations of a crude Marxism too quick to say that the masses have been deceived, mystified… But, because he had not sufficiently formed the concept of a desiring production, he could not determine the insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the insertion of pulsions into social production. Thereupon, revolutionary investment seemed to him such that desire there coincided simply with economic rationality; as for mass reactionary investments, they still seemed to him to refer back to ideology, so that psychoanalysis had only the role of explaining the subjective, the negative and the inhibited, without participating directly as such in the positivity of revolutionary movement or in desiring creativity (was this not in a certain way to reintroduce the error or illusion?). Nonetheless, Reich, in the name of desire, brought a song of life into psychoanalysis. In the final resignation of Freudianism, he denounced a fear of life, a resurgence of the ascetic ideal, a breeding ground of bad conscience. Rather go in search of Orgone, he said, the vital and cosmic element of desire, than continue to be psychoanalyst under such conditions. No one forgave him, while Freud received great forgiveness. He had been the first to try to make the analytical machine and the revolutionary machine function together. And, in the end, he had only his machines of desire left to him, his paranoid boxes, miraculous, solitary, metallic walls geniuses of wool and cotton.

112That repression is distinguished from suppression by the unconscious character of the operation and its result ("even the inhibition of revolt has become unconscious"), this distinction indeed expresses a difference in nature. But one cannot conclude from this to any real independence. Repression is such that suppression becomes desired, ceasing to be conscious; and it induces a consequent desire, a doctored image of that upon which it bears, which gives it an appearance of independence. Properly speaking, repression is a means in the service of suppression. That upon which it bears is also the object of suppression: the production of desire. But precisely it implies a double originary operation, one by which the repressive social formation delegates its power to a repressing instance, the other by which, correlatively, the repressed desire is as it were covered over by the displaced and doctored image that repression brings forth from it. There is at once a delegation of repression by the social formation, and a disfigurement, a displacement of the desiring formation by repression. The delegated agent of repression, or rather delegated to repression, is the family; the disfigured image of the repressed, these are the incestuous drives. The Oedipal complex, oedipianization, is thus the fruit of the double operation. It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is made to be replaced by the repressing family, and that this latter gives of the production of desire a displaced image which represents the repressed as familial incestuous drives. To the rapport of the two productions is thus substituted the rapport family-drives, in a diversion where all of psychoanalysis goes astray. And one sees well the interest of such an operation from the point of view of social production, which could not otherwise conjure away the power of revolt and revolution of desire. By holding out to it the deforming mirror of incest (eh, is that what you wanted?), one shames desire, one stupefies it, one puts it in a situation without exit, one persuades it easily to renounce "itself" in the name of the superior interests of civilization (and if everyone did the same, if everyone married his mother, or kept his sister for himself? there would no longer be differentiation, nor possible exchange…). One must act quickly and early. A somewhat deep stream slandered incest.

113But if one sees the interest of the operation from the point of view of social production, one sees less well what makes it possible from the point of view of desiring production itself. We nonetheless have the elements of an answer. Social production would need to have, on the surface of recording of the socius, an instance capable of biting as well, of inscribing itself as well on the surface of recording of desire. Such an instance exists, the family. It belongs essentially to the recording of social production, as system of the reproduction of producers. And doubtless, at the other pole, the recording of desiring production on the body without organs is accomplished through a genealogical network that is not familial: parents intervene in it only as partial objects, flux, signs and agents of a process that exceeds them on all sides. At most the child "reports" innocently to the parents something of the astonishing productive experience it conducts with its desire; but this experience does not relate to them as such. Now it is precisely there that the operation emerges. Under the early action of social repression, the family slips in, insinuates itself into the network of desiring genealogy, it alienates to its account all genealogy, it confiscates the Numen (but come now, God, it's daddy…). One acts as if the desiring experience "related itself" to the parents, and as if the family were its supreme law. One submits partial objects to the famous law of totality-unity acting as "lacking." One submits disjunctions to the alternative of the undifferentiated or of exclusion. The family introduces itself therefore into the production of desire, and from the earliest age will operate upon it a displacement, an unprecedented repression. It is delegated to repression by social production. And if it can slip in thus into the recording of desire, it is because the body without organs where this recording occurs already exercises for its account, as we have seen, an originary repression on desiring production. It belongs to the family to profit from it, and to superpose upon it the secondary repression properly so-called, which is delegated to it or to which it is delegated (psychoanalysis has well shown the difference between these two repressions, but not the scope of this difference or the distinction of their régime). This is why repression properly so-called does not content itself with repressing the real desiring production, but gives of the repressed an apparent displaced image, by substituting a familial recording for the recording of desire. The ensemble of desiring production takes on the well-known oedipal figure only in the familial translation of its recording, translation-betrayal.

114We say now that Oedipus is nothing, almost nothing (in the order of desiring production, even in the child), now that it is everywhere (in the enterprise of domesticating the unconscious, of representing desire and the unconscious). And certainly we have never thought to say that psychoanalysis invented Oedipus. Everything shows the contrary: the subjects of psychoanalysis arrive already oedipianized, they ask for it, they ask for more of it… Press clipping: Stravinsky declares before dying: "My unhappiness, I am sure of it, came from my father's distance and the little affection my mother gave me. I decided then that one day I would show them…" If even artists go in for it, one would be wrong to hold back and have the ordinary scruples of an applied psychoanalyst. If a musician tells us that music testifies, not to active and conquering forces, but to reactive forces, to reactions to father-mother, there is nothing left but to replay a paradox dear to Nietzsche, modifying it only slightly — Freud-musician. No, psychoanalysts invent nothing, although they have invented much in another way, much legislated, much reinforced, much injected. What psychoanalysts do is only to push the movement, to add one last impetus to the displacement of all the unconscious. What they do is only to make the unconscious speak according to the transcendent usages of synthesis that are imposed on it by other forces — Global Persons, Complete Object, great Phallus, terrible Undifferentiated of the imaginary, Symbolic Differentiations, Segregation… What psychoanalysts invent is only the transference, a transference Oedipus, an Oedipus of Oedipus in the office, particularly noxious and virulent, but where the subject finally has what it wants, and sucks on its Oedipus on the full body of the analyst. And that is already too much. But Oedipus is made in the family, not in the analyst's office which acts only as last territoriality. And Oedipus is not made by the family. The oedipal usages of synthesis, oedipianization, triangulation, castration, all this refers to forces somewhat more powerful, somewhat more underground than psychoanalysis, than the family, than ideology, even united. There are all the forces of production, reproduction and social repression. It is that truly powerful forces are required to vanquish those of desire, to bring them to resignation, and to substitute everywhere reactions of the papa-mama type for what was essentially active, aggressive, artistic, productive and conquering in the unconscious itself. It is in this sense, as we have seen, that Oedipus is an application, and the family a delegated agent. And, even through application, it is hard, it is difficult for a child to live itself as an angle,

115This child,

116it is not there,

117it is only an angle,

118an angle to come,

119and there is no angle…

120or this world of the father-mother is precisely what must go away from it,

121it is this doubled-double world,

122in a state of constant disunion,

123in constant will of unification also…

124around which the entire system of this world revolves

125malignantly sustained by the darkest organization.

SECTION 8

126Freud, in 1924, proposed a simple criterion for distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis: in neurosis the ego obeys the demands of reality, even if it means repressing the drives of the it, whereas in psychosis it is under the sway of the it, even if it means breaking with reality. Freud's ideas often took some time before passing into France. Yet not this one; the same year, Capgras and Carrette presented a case of schizophrenia with delusion of doubles, where the patient manifested a vivid hatred of the mother and an incestuous desire for the father, but in conditions of loss of reality where the parents were experienced as false parents, as "doubles." They drew from it the illustration of the inverse relation: in neurosis the objectal function of reality is preserved, but on the condition that the causal complex is repressed; in psychosis the complex invades consciousness and becomes its object, at the price of a "repression" that now bears upon reality itself or the function of the real. Doubtless Freud insisted upon the schematic character of the distinction; for the break is found also in neurosis with the return of the repressed (hysterical amnesia, obsessional cancellation), and in psychosis a recovery of reality appears with delirious reconstruction. It remains that Freud never renounced this simple distinction.{92} And it seems important that, by an original path, he rediscovers an idea dear to traditional psychiatry: the idea that madness is fundamentally linked to a loss of reality. Convergence with the psychiatric elaboration of the notions of dissociation, of autism. Which is why, perhaps, the Freudian exposition enjoys such rapid diffusion.

127Now, what interests us is the precise role of the Oedipus complex in this convergence. For if it is true that family themes often irrupt into psychotic consciousness, one will be all the more astonished, following a remark of Lacan's, that Oedipus was "discovered" in neurosis where it is supposed to be latent, rather than in psychosis where it would on the contrary be patent.{93} But is it not that, in psychosis, the family complex appears precisely as a stimulus of any value whatsoever, simple inducer having no role of organizer, the intensive investments of reality bearing on something entirely other (the social, historical and cultural field)? It is at the same time that Oedipus invades consciousness, and dissolves in itself, testifying to its incapacity to be an "organizer". It suffices from then on that one measures psychosis by this rigged measure, that one brings it back to this false criterion, Oedipus, so that one obtains the effect of loss of reality. It is not an abstract operation: one imposes on the psychotic an Oedipal "organization", were it only to assign the lack of it in him, in him. It is an exercise in full flesh, in full soul. He reacts by autism and loss of reality. Is it possible that the loss of reality is not the effect of the schizophrenic process, but the effect of its forced Oedipalization, that is to say of its coupure? Must one correct what we were saying just now, and suppose that certain ones tolerate Oedipalization less well than others? The schizo would not be sick in Oedipus, of an Oedipus which would surge all the more in his hallucinated consciousness as he would lack it in the symbolic organization of "his" unconscious. On the contrary, he would be sick from the Oedipalization one makes him undergo (the darkest organization) and which he can no longer bear, set out on a distant journey, as if one were constantly bringing back to Bécon the one who drifts the continents and cultures. He does not suffer from a divided self, from a shattered Oedipus, but on the contrary from being brought back to all of that which he has left. Fall of intensity down to the full body = O, autism: he has no other means of reacting to the barrier of all his investments of reality, barrier which the Oedipal system repression-originary repression opposes to him. As Laing says, one interrupts them in the journey. They have lost reality. But when did they lose it? in the journey or in the coupure of the journey?

128So another possible formulation of an inverse relation: there would be as it were two groups, the psychotics and the neurotics, those who cannot tolerate oedipianization, and those who tolerate it and even content themselves with it, evolving within it. Those on whom the oedipal imprint does not take, and those on whom it takes. "I believe that my friends started at the beginning of the New Age in a group, with forces of practical explosion that launched them into a paternalistic deviation that I believe vicious… A second group of isolates, of which I am one, constituted no doubt by centers of clavicles, was removed outside all possibility of individual success at the moment they were assuming heavy studies in infused science. As for me, my rebellion against the paternalism of the first group put me from the second year onward in increasingly suffocating social difficulty. Uh, do you believe that these two groups are capable of junction? I don't hold it too much against these bastards of virile paternalism, I am not vindictive… In any case, if I have won, there will no longer be a struggle of the Father and the Son!… I speak of persons of God, naturally, and not of the neighbors who distinguish themselves for…"{94} What opposes itself across the two groups is the registration of desire on the uncreated full body, and the familial registration on the socius. Infused science in psychosis and experimental neurotic sciences. It is the eccentric schizoid circle and the neurotic triangle. It is more generally the two kinds of uses of synthesis. They are the machines of desire on one hand, and on the other the oedipal-narcissistic machine. To understand the details of this struggle, one must consider that the family cuts, never ceases to cut into desiring production. Inscribing itself in the registration of desire, slipping its grip there, it operates a vast capture of productive forces, it displaces and reorganizes in its own way the ensemble of cuts that characterized the machines of desire. All these cuts, it makes them fall into the place of universal castration that conditions it itself ("a dead rat's ass," says Artaud, "suspended from the ceiling of heaven"), but also it redistributes them according to its own laws and the exigencies of social production. The family cuts according to its triangle, distinguishing what belongs to the family and what does not. It also cuts from within, according to the lines of differentiation that form global persons: there it is papa, there it is mama, there it is you, and then your sister. Cut here the flux of milk, it's your brother's turn, don't shit here, cut there the river of shit. The first function of the family is retention: it is a matter of knowing what it will reject from desiring production, what it will retain from it, what it will connect to the dead-end paths that lead to its own undifferentiated (cloaca), what it will instead conduct on the paths of a differentiable and reproducible differentiation. For the family creates at once its shames and its glories, the undifferentiation of its neurosis and the differentiation of its ideal that distinguish themselves only in appearance. And, meanwhile, what does desiring production do? The elements retained do not enter into the new use of synthesis that imposes such a profound transformation upon them without making the entire triangle resonate. The machines of desire are at the door, they make everything vibrate when they enter. More than that, what does not enter perhaps makes vibrate even more. They reintroduce or attempt to reintroduce their aberrant cuts. The child senses the task to which it is invited. But what to put in the triangle, how to select? The father's nose and the mother's ear, would that do, could that be retained, would that make a good oedipal cut? And the bicycle horn? What belongs to the family? It belongs to the triangle to vibrate, to resonate, under the pressure of what it retains as much as what it repels. Resonance (there again stifled or public, shameful or glorious) is the second function of the family. The family is at once anus that retains, voice that resonates, and also mouth that consumes: its three syntheses, since it is a matter of connecting desire to ready-made objects of social production. Buy madeleines from Combray to have resonances.

129But, in that case, one cannot stick to the simple opposition of two groups, which would allow one to define neurosis as an intra-oedipal disorder, and psychosis as an extra-oedipal flight. It is not even enough to note that the two groups are "capable of junction." It is rather the very possibility of discerning them directly that poses a problem. How to distinguish the pressure that familial reproduction exerts on desiring production, and that which desiring production exerts on familial reproduction? The oedipal triangle vibrates and trembles; but is this as a function of the grip it is securing for itself on the machines of desire, or rather as a function of these machines that elude its imprint and make it lose its grip? Where is the limit of resonance? A family romance expresses an effort to save oedipal genealogy, but also a free impulse of non-oedipal genealogy. Fantasms are never pregnant forms; they are phenomena of border or frontier ready to tip from one side to the other. In short, Oedipus is strictly undecidable. One can all the more find it everywhere because it is undecidable; it is just in this sense to say that it serves strictly for nothing. Let us return to Nerval's fine story: he wants Aurélie, the woman he loves, to be the same as Adrienne, the little girl of his childhood; he "perceives" them as identical. And Aurélie and Adrienne, both in one, that is the mother. Will one say that identification, as "identity of perception," is here the sign of psychosis? One finds again the criterion of reality: the complex invades psychotic consciousness only at the price of a rupture with the real, whereas in neurosis the identity remains that of unconscious representations and does not compromise perception. But what has one gained by inscribing everything in Oedipus, even psychosis? One step further, and Aurélie, Adrienne and the mother, that is the Virgin. Nerval seeks the limit of vibration of the triangle. "You are looking for a drama," says Aurélie. One does not inscribe everything in Oedipus without everything, at the limit, fleeing out of Oedipus. Identifications were not identifications of persons from the point of view of perception, but identifications of names to regions of intensity, which give the start toward other regions even more intense, arbitrary stimuli that trigger an entirely different voyage, stases that prepare other breakthroughs, other movements where one encounters no longer the mother, but the Virgin and God: and I have thrice victorious crossed the Acheron. Thus the schizo will accept that one reduce everything to the mother, since it has no importance whatsoever: he is sure of being able to make everything emerge from the mother, and to draw from it for his secret use all the Virgins that had been placed there.

130Everything converts into neurosis, or everything spills out into psychosis: this is therefore not how the question must be posed. It would be inexact to retain for neuroses an Oedipal interpretation, and to reserve for psychoses an extra-Oedipal explanation. There are not two groups, there is no difference in nature between neuroses and psychoses. For in any case it is desiring production that is the cause, the ultimate cause either of psychotic subversions that break Oedipus or submerge it, or of neurotic resonances that constitute it. Such a principle takes on its full meaning if one relates it to the problem of "actual factors." One of the most important points of psychoanalysis was the evaluation of the role of these actual factors, even in neurosis, insofar as they distinguish themselves from infantile familial factors; all the great dissensions were bound to this evaluation. And the difficulties bore on several aspects. First, the nature of these factors (somatic, social, metaphysical? the famous "problems of life," by which a very pure desexualized idealism was reintroduced into psychoanalysis?) Second, the modality of these factors: did they act in a negative, privative manner, by simple frustration? Finally, their moment, their time: was it not self-evident that the actual factor emerged afterward, and signified "recent," in opposition to the infantile or the most ancient which was sufficiently explained by the familial complex? Even an author like Reich, so concerned with putting desire in relation to the forms of social production, and thereby to show that there is no psycho-neurosis that is not also actual neurosis, continues to present actual factors as acting by repressive privation (the "sexual stasis"), and emerging afterward. This leads him to maintain a sort of diffuse Oedipalism, since the stasis or the privative actual factor defines only the energy of the neurosis, but not the content which on its side refers back to the infantile Oedipal conflict, this ancient conflict finding itself reactivated by the current stasis. But the Oedipalists say nothing different when they remark that a current privation or frustration can only be experienced within an older internal qualitative conflict, which not only blocks the paths forbidden by reality, but equally those it leaves open and which the ego forbids to itself in turn (formula of the double impasse): "would one find examples" illustrating the schema of actual neuroses "in the prisoner or the concentration camp inmate or the laborer exhausted by work? It is not certain that they would provide a large contingent of them… Our systematic tendency is not to accept without examination the evident iniquities of reality, without attempting to discern in what the disorder of the world stems from subjective disorder, even if it is with time inscribed in structures more or less irreversible." We understand this sentence, and yet cannot help but find it has an disquieting ring. We are imposed the following choice: either the actual factor is conceived in a wholly exterior privative manner (which is impossible), or else it plunges into an internal qualitative conflict necessarily in relation with Oedipus… (Oedipus, the source where the psychoanalyst washes his hands of the iniquities of the world).

131In quite another direction, if we consider the idealistic deviations of psychoanalysis, we see there an interesting attempt to give to present factors a status other than privative and subsequent. It is that two concerns found themselves linked in an apparent paradox, for example in Jung: the concern to shorten the interminable cure by attacking the present or the actuality of the trouble, and the concern to go further than Oedipus, further even than the pre-Oedipal, to go back much higher — as if the most actual were also the most originary, and the shortest, the most distant.{97} The archetypes are presented by Jung, at once as present factors that precisely overflow the familial images in the transference, and as archaic factors infinitely more ancient, and of another antiquity than the infantile factors themselves. But thus nothing has been gained, since the present factor ceases to be privative only on condition of enjoying the rights of the Ideal, and ceases to be an after-the-fact only on condition of becoming a beyond, which must be signified anagogically by Oedipus instead of depending on it analytically. So that the after-the-fact necessarily reintroduces itself in the difference of temporality, as testified to by the astonishing distribution proposed by Jung: for the young, whose problems are of family and love, Freud's method! for the less young, whose problems are of social adaptation, Adler! and Jung, for adults and the old, whose problems are those of the Ideal…{98} And we have seen what remains common between Freud and Jung, always the unconscious measured against myths (and not against units of production), although the measure is made in two opposite directions. But what finally does it matter whether morality or religion find in Oedipus an analytical and regressive sense, or in Oedipus, an anagogic and prospective sense, in morality or religion?

132We say that the cause of the disturbance, neurosis or psychosis, is always in desiring production, in its relation with social production, its difference or its conflict of régime with the latter, and the modes of investment it operates in it. Desiring production insofar as it is caught in this relation, this conflict and these modalities, such is the actual factor. Thus this factor is neither privative nor ulterior. Constitutive of the full life of desire, it is contemporary with the tenderest infancy, and accompanies it at every step. It does not supervene after Oedipus, it supposes in no way an oedipal organization, nor a pre-organization pre-oedipal. On the contrary, it is Oedipus that depends on it, either as a stimulus of any value whatsoever, simple inducer through which the anœdipal organization of desiring production is made from infancy, or as the effect of the repression that social reproduction imposes on desiring production through the family. Actual is not so named because more recent, and because it would oppose itself to ancient or infantile, but by difference with "virtual." And what is virtual is the Oedipus complex, either insofar as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as the derived effect of the actual factor, or insofar as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. It is indeed in this sense that the idea of the after-the-fact seemed to us a last paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; the active desiring production, in its very process, invests from the beginning an ensemble of somatic, social and metaphysical relations that do not succeed oedipal psychological relations, but will apply on the contrary to the oedipal sub-set defined by reaction, or will exclude it from the field of investment of their activity. Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactional, such is Oedipus. It is only a reactional formation. Reactional formation to desiring production: one is greatly wrong to consider this formation for itself, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

133And yet that is precisely what psychoanalysis does by shutting itself up in Oedipus, and determining progressions and regressions as a function of Oedipus, or even in relation to him: thus the idea of pre-Oedipal regression by which one sometimes tries to characterize psychosis. It is like a Cartesian diver; regressions and progressions occur only within the artificially closed vessel of Oedipus, and depend in truth on a state of changing forces, but always actual and contemporary, in anœdipal desiring production. Desiring production has no other existence than actual; progressions and regressions are only the effectuations of a virtuality which is always filled as perfectly as it can be by virtue of states of desire. Among the rare psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who have managed to establish with schizophrenics, adults or children, a directly real rapport truly inspired, Gisela Pankow and Bruno Bettelheim trace new paths through their theoretical force and therapeutic efficacy. It is not by chance that both of them call into question the notion of regression. Taking the example of bodily care given to a schizophrenic, massages, baths, wrappings, Gisela Pankow asks whether it is a matter of reaching the sick person at the point of his regression, to give him indirect symbolic satisfactions that would allow him to reconnect with a progression, to resume a progressive march. But it is not a question, she says, "of giving care that the schizophrenic did not receive when he was a baby. But it is a matter of giving the sick person tactile bodily sensations and others that bring him to a recognition of the limits of his body… It is a matter of the recognition of an unconscious desire, and not of its satisfaction." To recognize desire is precisely to set desiring production back in motion on the full body, there where the schizo had withdrawn to silence it and stifle it. This recognition of desire, this position of desire, this Sign, refers to an order of real and actual productivity, which does not confuse itself with an indirect or symbolic satisfaction, and which, in its stoppages as in its setting in motion, is as distinct from a pre-Oedipal regression as from a progressive restoration of Oedipus.

SECTION 9

134Between neurosis and psychosis, there is no difference of nature, of species, nor of group. No more than psychosis, one cannot explain neurosis oedipally. It is rather the opposite: neurosis explains Oedipus. So how to conceive the relation psychosis-neurosis? And does it not depend on other relations? Everything changes depending on whether we call psychosis the process itself, or on the contrary an interruption of the process (and what kind of interruption?). Schizophrenia as process, it is desiring production, but as it is at the end, as limit of social production determined in the conditions of capitalism. It is our "illness" for us, modern men. End of history has no other meaning. In it rejoin the two meanings of the process, as movement of social production that goes to the end of its deterritorialization, and as movement of metaphysical production that carries away and reproduces desire in a new Earth. "The desert grows… the sign is near…" The schizo carries away the decoded flux, makes them traverse the desert of the full body, where it installs its machines of desire and produces a perpetual flux of acting forces. It has crossed the limit, the schize, that maintained the production of desire always at the margin of social production, tangential and always repelled. The schizo knows how to depart: it has made of departure something as simple as being born and dying. But at the same time its voyage is strangely in place. It does not speak of another world, it is not of another world: even displacing itself in space, it is a voyage in intensity, around the machine of desire that sets itself up and remains here. For it is here that the desert propagated by our world is, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos thunder, planets for a new sun. These men of desire (or do they not yet exist) are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos and illnesses. They have their specters. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary and joyful, finally capable of saying and doing something simple in his own name, without asking permission, desire that lacks nothing, flux that crosses barriers and codes, name that no longer designates any self. It has simply ceased to be afraid of going mad. It lives itself as the sublime illness that will no longer touch it. What is worth, what would be worth here a psychiatrist? In all of psychiatry, only Jaspers, then Laing had the idea of what process signified, and of its accomplishment (which is why they were able to escape the familialism that makes the ordinary bed of psychoanalysis and psychiatry). "If the human species survives, men of the future will consider our enlightened epoch, I imagine, as a true century of obscurantism. They will doubtless be capable of savoring the irony of this situation with more amusement than we. It is us they will laugh at. They will know that what we called schizophrenia was one of the forms through which — often by way of entirely ordinary people — light began to break through the cracks of our closed minds… Madness is not necessarily a breakdown; it can also be a breakthrough… The individual who experiences the transcendental loss of ego may or may not lose balance, in various ways. It can then be considered mad. But being mad is not necessarily being ill, even if in our world the two terms have become complementary… From the starting point of our pseudo-mental health, everything is equivocal. This health is not a true health. The madness of others is not a true madness. The madness of our patients is a product of the destruction that we impose on them and that they impose on themselves. Let no one imagine that we encounter true madness, any more than we are truly of sound mind. The madness we are dealing with in our patients is a gross disguise, a semblance, a grotesque caricature of what could be the natural healing of this strange integration. True mental health implies in some way the dissolution of the normal ego…"{100}

135The visit to London, that's our visit to the Pythia. Turner is there. Looking at his paintings, one understands what it means to cross the wall, and yet to remain, to make flux pass through us of which we no longer know whether they carry us elsewhere or whether they already return upon us. The paintings are arranged in three periods. If the psychiatrist had to speak, he could speak on the two first, although they are the most reasonable in truth. The first canvases are catastrophes of the end of the world, avalanche and storm. That's where Turner begins. The second are like delirious reconstruction, where delirium hides itself, or rather goes hand in hand with a high technique inherited from Poussin, from Lorrain, or from Dutch tradition: the world is reconstructed, through archaisms having a modern function. But something incomparable happens at the level of the third paintings, of the series that Turner does not show, keeps secret. One cannot even say he is very far ahead of his time: something that is of no age, and that comes to us from an eternal future, or flees toward it. The canvas sinks into itself, it is pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion. The themes of the preceding paintings can be found here again, their meaning has changed. The canvas is truly cut, split by what pierces it. Only a background of mist and gold remains afloat, intense, intensive, crossed in depth by what comes to split it in its width: the schize. Everything becomes confused, and it is there that the breakthrough occurs (not the collapse).

136Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from Lawrence to Lowry, from Miller to Ginsberg and Kerouac, men know how to leave, scramble codes, make flux pass, traverse the desert of the body without organs. They cross a limit, they break through a wall, the capitalist bar. And certainly it happens to them to miss the accomplishment of the process, they never cease to miss it. The neurotic impasse closes back up — the papa-mama of oedipianization, America, the return to the native land — or else the perversion of exotic territorialities, and then drugs, alcohol — or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium better oscillated from one of its poles to the other. But, through the impasses and triangles, a schizophrenic flux flows, irresistible, sperm, river, sewer, blennorrhea or stream of words that will not let themselves be coded, libido too fluid and too viscous: a violence to syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, nonsense erected as flux, polyvocity that comes back to haunt all relations. How badly the problem of literature is posed, starting from the ideology it carries or from the recuperation that a social order operates on it. One recuperates people, not works, which will always come to wake a new young man asleep, and which never cease to carry their fire further. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion, because it prevents us from grasping the relation of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the sign emitted pierces this "form of content" that attempted to maintain it in the order of the signifier. Yet it was long ago that Engels showed, already concerning Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot help but trace and make flux flow that pierce the Catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily feed a revolutionary machine at the horizon. That is style, or rather the absence of style, asyntaxia, agrammaticality: moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it signifying, but by what makes it flow, flux and burst — desire. For literature is altogether like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression.

137Here again, oedipianization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of doing harm to anyone. It is not a matter of the personal oedipianization of the author and his readers, but of the oedipal form to which one attempts to enslave the work itself, in order to make of it this minor expressive activity that secretes ideology following the dominant social codes. It is thus that the work of art is supposed to inscribe itself between the two poles of Oedipus, problem and solution, neurosis and sublimation, desire and truth — the one regressive, under which it churns and redistributes the unresolved conflicts of childhood, the other prospective by which it invents the paths of a new solution concerning the future of man. It is an interior conversion to the work that constitutes it, it is said, as a "cultural object." There is no longer even reason, from this point of view, to apply psychoanalysis to the work of art, since it is the work of art itself that constitutes a successful psychoanalysis, a sublime "transfer" with exemplary collective virtualities. There resounds the hypocritical warning: a little neurosis is good for the work of art, good material, but not psychosis, above all not psychosis; we distinguish the possibly creative neurotic aspect, and the psychotic aspect, alienating and destructive… As if the great voices, which knew how to effect a breakthrough of grammar and syntax, and make of all language a desire, did not speak from the depths of psychosis and did not show us an eminently psychotic revolutionary point of escape. It is just to confront established literature with an oedipal psychoanalysis: it is that it deploys a form of superego proper to it, even more harmful than the unwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact literary before being psychoanalytic. There will always be a Breton against Artaud, a Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against Hölderlin, to superego-ize literature, and tell us: attention, no further! no "lapses of tact"! Werther yes, Lenz no! The oedipal form of literature is its mercantile form. We are free to think that there is even finally less dishonesty in a psychoanalysis than in this literature, since the neurotic pure and simple produces a solitary, irresponsible, unreadable and unsaleable work, which must on the contrary pay in order to be not only read, but translated and reduced. He commits at least an economic fault, a fault against tact, and does not spread his values. Artaud said clearly: all writing is garbage — that is to say all literature that takes itself as an end, or fixes itself ends, instead of being a process that "digs into the shit of being and its language," carries along the feeble-minded, aphasics, the illiterate. Spare us at least sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which traps its parcel, fabricating counterfeit currency, bursting the superego of its form of expression, and the mercantile value of its form of content. But some respond: Artaud is not literature, he is outside because he is schizophrenic. The others: he is not schizophrenic, since he belongs to literature, and to the greatest, to the textual. Both have at least in common making of schizophrenia the same puerile and reactionary conception, and of literature the same neurotic mercantile conception. A clever critic writes: one must understand nothing of the signifier "to declare peremptorily that Artaud's language is that of a schizophrenic; the psychotic produces an involuntary discourse, thwarted, subjected: the very opposite therefore in every respect of textual writing." But what is this enormous textual archaism, the signifier, which subjects literature to the mark of castration and sanctifies the two aspects of its oedipal form? And who tells this clever one that the discourse of the psychotic is "involuntary, thwarted, subjected"? It is no more that it be the opposite, thank god. But these oppositions themselves are singularly little pertinent. Artaud is the tearing to pieces of psychiatry, precisely because he is schizophrenic and not because he is not. Artaud is the accomplishment of literature, precisely because he is schizophrenic and not because he is not. It is long since he burst through the wall of the signifier: Artaud the Schizo. From the depths of his suffering and his glory, he has the right to denounce what society does to the psychotic in the process of decoding the fluxes of desire ("Van Gogh the suicide of society"), but also what it does to literature, when it opposes it to psychosis in the name of a neurotic or perverse recoding (Lewis Carroll or the coward of belles-lettres).

138This schizophrenic wall or limit indeed operates what Laing calls the breakthrough: "perfectly ordinary people" and yet… But most approach the wall and retreat horrified. Rather fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. They therefore displace the limit, they make it pass inside the social formation, between the social production and reproduction which they invest, and the familial reproduction onto which they fold back, to which they apply all investments. They make the limit pass inside the domain thus described by Oedipus, between the two poles of Oedipus. They cease not to involute and evolve between these two poles. Oedipus as last rock, and castration as alveolus: ultimate territoriality, were it reduced to the analyst's couch, rather than the decoded flux of desire that flees, flows and carries us where? Such is neurosis, displacement of the limit, to make oneself a little colonial territory. But others want virgin lands, more genuinely exotic, more artificial families, more secret societies which they draw and institute along the wall, in places of perversion. Still others, sickened by Oedipus's utility, but also by perverse trifles and aestheticism, reach the wall and rebound on it, sometimes with extreme violence. Then they immobilize themselves, they fall silent, fold back onto the body without organs, still a territoriality, but quite deserted this time, on which all desiring production stops, or, frozen, feigns stopping: psychosis. These catatonic bodies have fallen into the river like lead weights, immense fixed hippopotamuses that will not return to the surface. With all their strength, they have entrusted themselves to originary repression, to escape the system repression-refoulement that fabricates neurotics. But a more naked repression falls upon them, which identifies them with the hospital schizo, the great autist, clinical entity that "lacks" Oedipus. Why the same word, schizo, to designate at once the process insofar as it crosses the limit, and the result of the process insofar as it strikes the limit and bumps against it forever? To designate at once the possible breakthrough and the possible collapse, and all the transitions, the intricacies of one to the other? It is that, of the three preceding adventures, that of psychosis is in the most intimate relation with the process: in the sense that Jaspers shows that the "demonic," ordinarily repressed-refouled, erupts in favor of such a state or provokes such states which risk ceaselessly to tip it into collapse and disintegration. One no longer knows if it is the process that one must truly call madness, illness being only its disguise or caricature, or if illness is the only madness from which the process was to cure us. But in any case the intimacy of the relation appears directly in inverse ratio: the schizo-entity surges forth all the more as a specific product as the process of production finds itself diverted from its course, brutally interrupted. This is why, on the other hand, we could establish no direct relation between neurosis and psychosis. Neurosis, psychosis and also perversion, their relations depend on the situation of each with regard to the process, and the way each represents a mode of interruption of it, a residual territory to which one still clings so as not to be carried away by the deterritorialized flux of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus, perverse territorialities of artifice, psychotic territoriality of the body without organs: sometimes the process is trapped and turns in the triangle, sometimes it takes itself for an end, sometimes it continues in the void and substitutes for its accomplishment a horrible exasperation. Each of these forms has as its ground schizophrenia, schizophrenia as process is the only universal. Schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breakthrough of the wall and the failures of this breakthrough: "How must one cross this wall, for it serves no purpose to strike it hard, one must mine this wall and cross it with a file, slowly and with patience in my sense."[101] And the stake is not only art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytical machine and the revolutionary machine will remain in the extrinsic relations that make them function in the damped framework of the repression-refoulement system, or they will become pieces and wheels of one another in the flux that nourishes a single and same machine of desire, so many local fires patiently lit for a generalized explosion — the schiz and not the signifier.

CHAPTER 3 - Savages, Barbarians, Civilized

SECTION 1

139If the universal is at the end, full body and production of desire, under the conditions determined by capitalism apparently victorious, how to find enough innocence to make universal history? Production of desire is also from the beginning: there is production of desire as soon as there is social production and reproduction. But it is true that precapitalist social machines are inherent to desire in a very precise sense: they code it, they code the flux of desire. To code desire — and the fear, the anguish of decoded flux — is the affair of the socius. Capitalism is the only social machine, we shall see, that constructed itself as such upon decoded flux, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flux of desire, but under social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it ceases not to thwart with all its exasperated forces the movement that pushes it toward this limit. At the limit of capitalism, the deterritorialized socius gives way to the full body, the decoded flux throw themselves into production of desire. It is therefore just to understand retrospectively all history in the light of capitalism, on condition of following exactly the rules formulated by Marx: first, universal history is that of contingencies, and not of necessity; of cuts and limits, and not of continuity. For it took great chances, astonishing encounters that could have occurred elsewhere, before, or never occurred, so that flux escape coding, and, escaping it, nonetheless constitute a new machine determinable as capitalist socius: thus the encounter between private property and commodity production, which nonetheless present themselves as two very different forms of decoding, by privatization and by abstraction. Or else from the point of view of private property itself, the encounter between flux of convertible wealth possessed by capitalists and a flux of workers possessing only their labor-power (here again, two quite distinct forms of deterritorialization). In a certain manner, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, the panic fear they have of a flux that would escape their codes. On the other hand, if it is capitalism that determines the conditions and the possibility of universal history, this is true only insofar as it essentially has to do with its own limit, its own destruction: as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of criticizing itself (at least up to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, even in the movement that thwarts the tendency…). In short, universal history is not only retrospective, it is contingent, singular, ironic and critical.

140The primitive, savage unity of desire and production is the earth. For the earth is not only the multiple and divided object of labor, it is also the unique indivisible entity, the full body that folds back upon the productive forces and appropriates them as natural or divine presupposition. The soil can be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the appropriation and common utilization of soil. It is the surface upon which the entire process of production inscribes itself, where objects, means and forces of labor register themselves, where agents and products distribute themselves. It appears here as quasi-cause of production and object of desire (upon it knots the bond of desire and its own repression). The territorial machine is therefore the first form of socius, the primitive inscription machine, "megamachine" that covers a social field. It is not confused with technical machines. Under its simplest forms called manual, the technical machine already implies a non-human element, acting, transmitting or even motor, that prolongs man's force and permits a certain disengagement of it. The social machine on the contrary has men as its pieces, even if one considers them with their machines, and integrates them, interiorizes them in an institutional model at all levels of action, transmission and motricity. Thus it forms a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines. These do not in fact contain the conditions of reproduction of their process; they refer back to social machines that condition and organize them, but also limit or inhibit their development. One must await capitalism to find a regime of semi-autonomous technical production, which tends to appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of exploitation of man; but precisely this regime supposes a dismantling of the great preceding social machines. One and the same machine can be technical and social, but not under the same aspect: for example, the clock as technical machine for measuring uniform time, and as social machine for reproducing canonical hours and assuring order in the city. When Lewis Mumford creates the word "megamachine" to designate the social machine as collective entity, he is therefore literally right (although he reserves its application to the barbarous despotic institution): "If, more or less in accord with Reuleaux's classical definition, one can consider a machine as the combination of solid elements each having its specialized function and functioning under human control to transmit a movement and execute a work, then the human machine was indeed a true machine." The social machine is literally a machine, independent of all metaphor, insofar as it presents an immobile motor, and proceeds to various sorts of cuts: extraction of flux, detachment of chain, distribution of shares. To code flux implies all these operations. It is the highest task of the social machine, insofar as extractions of production correspond to detachments of chain, and there results from it the residual share of each member, in a global system of desire and destiny organizing productions of production, productions of recording, productions of consumption. Flux of women and children, flux of herds and seeds, flux of sperm, of shit and of menses, nothing must escape. The primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already social machine or megamachine, that codes the flux of production, of means of production, of producers and of consumers: the full body of the goddess Earth reunites upon itself the cultivable species, the plowing instruments and the human organs.

141Meyer Fortes makes in passing a joyful and meaningful remark: "The problem is not that of the circulation of women… A woman circulates by herself. One does not dispose of her, but the juridical rights over progeny are fixed to the profit of a determined person."104 We have no reason in fact to accept the postulate underlying the exchange conceptions of society; society is not first of all a milieu of exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to make circulate, but a socius of inscription where the essential is to mark and to be marked. There is circulation only if inscription requires or permits it. The procedure of the primitive territorial machine, in this sense, is the collective investment of organs; for the coding of flux is done only insofar as the organs capable respectively of producing them and of cutting them find themselves surrounded, instituted as partial objects, distributed and hooked onto the socius. A mask is such an institution of organs. Initiation societies compose the pieces of a body, at once organs of sense, anatomical pieces and jointures. Interdicts (do not see, do not speak) apply to those who do not have in such a state or such an occasion the enjoyment of an organ invested collectively. The mythologies sing the organs-partial objects, and their relation with a full body that repulses or attracts them: vaginas nailed onto the body of women, immense penis shared among men, independent anus that attributes itself to a body without anus. A Gourmantché tale begins: "When the mouth was dead, one consulted the other parts of the body to know which would take charge of the burial… " The units are never in persons, in the proper or "private" sense, but in series that determine the connections, disjunctions and conjunctions of organs. This is why fantasies are fantasies of the group. It is the collective investment of organs that connects desire to the socius, and reunites in a whole on earth the social production and the production of desire.

142Our modern societies, on the contrary, have proceeded to a vast privatization of organs, which corresponds to the decoding of flux become abstract. The first organ to be privatized, placed outside the social field, was the anus. It was the anus that gave its model to privatization, at the same time that money expressed the new state of abstraction of flux. Hence the relative truth of psychoanalytic remarks on the anal character of monetary economy. But the "logical" order is the following: substitution of abstract quantity for coded flux; collective disinvestment of organs that ensues, on the model of the anus; constitution of private persons as individual centers of organs and functions derived from abstract quantity. One must even say that, if the phallus has taken in our societies the position of a detached object distributing lack to persons of both sexes and organizing the Oedipal triangle, it is the anus that detaches it thus, it is the anus that carries away and sublimes the penis in a sort of Aufhebung constituting the phallus. Sublimation is profoundly linked to analité, but not in the sense that the latter would furnish matter to sublimate, for want of another use. Analité does not represent the lowest that would have to be converted into the highest. It is the anus itself that passes on high, under the conditions that we will have to analyze of its placing outside the field, and which do not presuppose sublimation, since sublimation flows from it on the contrary. It is not the anal that proposes itself to sublimation, it is sublimation entirely that is anal; thus the simplest critique of sublimation is that it does not make us exit shit at all (only the spirit is capable of shitting). Analité is all the greater as the anus is disinvested. The essence of desire is indeed libido; but when libido becomes abstract quantity, the anus raised up and disinvested produces global persons and specific egos that serve as units of measure for this same quantity. Artaud says well: this "ass of dead rat suspended from the ceiling of heaven," from which emerges the triangle papa-mama-me, "the uterine mother-father of a frenzied anal" of which the child is only an angle, this "kind of coating hanging eternally over something that is the ego." All of Oedipus is anal, and implies an over-investment of individual organ to compensate for collective disinvestment. This is why the commentators most favorable to the universality of Oedipus nonetheless recognize that one finds in primitive societies none of the mechanisms, none of the attitudes that effectuate it in our society. No superego, no guilt. No identification of a specific ego to global persons — but identifications always partial and of group, following the compact agglutinated series of ancestors, following the fragmented series of comrades or cousins. No analité — although there is, or rather because there is of the anus invested collectively. So what remains to make Oedipus? The structure, that is to say an uneffectuated virtuality? Must one believe that universal Oedipus haunts all societies, but exactly as capitalism haunts them, that is to say as the nightmare or the anguished presentiment of what would be the decoding of flux and the collective disinvestment of organs, the becoming-abstract of flux of desire and the becoming-private of organs?

143The primitive territorial machine codes the flux, invests the organs, marks the bodies. To what extent circulating, exchanging, is a secondary activity with respect to this task that sums up all the others: marking the bodies, which are of the earth. The essence of the socius as recorder, inscriber, insofar as it appropriates the productive forces and distributes the agents of production, resides in this — tattooing, excising, incising, cutting, scarifying, mutilating, circumscribing, initiating. Nietzsche defined "the morality of mores, or the true work of man upon himself during the longest period of the human species, all his prehistory": a system of evaluations having the force of right concerning the diverse members and parts of the body. Not only is the criminal deprived of organs following an order of collective investments, not only is the one who must be eaten so following social rules as precise as those that cut up and distribute an ox; but the man who fully enjoys his rights and duties has his entire body marked under a régime that relates his organs and their exercise to the collectivity (the privatization of organs will not begin until "the shame man feels at the sight of man"). For it is an act of foundation, by which man ceases to be a biological organism and becomes a full body, an earth, upon which his organs cling, attracted, repelled, worked miracles according to the exigencies of a socius. Let the organs be carved out of the socius, and let the flux flow over it. Nietzsche says: it is a question of giving man a memory; and man who constituted himself through an active faculty of forgetting, through a repression of biological memory, must give himself another memory, which is collective, a memory of words and no longer of things, a memory of signs and no longer of effects. System of cruelty, terrible alphabet, this organization that traces signs upon the body itself: "Perhaps there is nothing even more terrible and more disquieting in the prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics… This never happened without tortures, without martyrs and bloody sacrifices when man judged it necessary to create a memory for himself; the most appalling holocausts and the most hideous commitments, the most repugnant mutilations, the most cruel rituals of all religious cults… One will realize the difficulties there are on earth in raising a people of thinkers!" Cruelty has nothing to do with some violence or natural [violence] one would charge with explaining the history of man; it is the movement of culture that operates in the bodies and inscribes itself upon them, furrowing them. This is what cruelty signifies. This culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly puts production into desire, and inversely it forcibly inserts desire into social production and reproduction. For even death, punishment, tortures are desired, and are productions (cf. the history of fatalism). From men or from their organs, it makes the pieces and the cogs of the social machine. The sign is position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in the bodies. And if one wishes to call "writing" this inscription in the very flesh, then one must indeed say that speech presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of words.

SECTION 2

144The notion of territoriality is ambiguous only in appearance. For if one understands by it a principle of residence or of geographical distribution, it is evident that the primitive social machine is not territorial. Only the apparatus of State will be, which, following Engels's formula, "subdivides not the people, but the territory" and substitutes a geographical organization for gentilicial organization. Yet, there even where kinship seems to take precedence over land, one has no difficulty in showing the importance of local ties. It is that the primitive machine subdivides the people, but does so on an indivisible land where the connective, disjunctive and conjunctive relations of each segment with the others inscribe themselves (thus, for example, the coexistence or the complementarity of the segment chief and the guardian of the land). When the division bears on the land itself, by virtue of an administrative, landed and residential organization, one cannot from then on see in it a promotion of territoriality, but quite to the contrary the effect of the first great movement of deterritorialization on primitive communities. The immanent unity of the land as immobile mover gives way to a transcendent unity of quite another nature, unity of State; the full body is no longer that of the land, but that of the Despot, the Ungenerated, who now takes charge of the fertility of the soil as of the rain from heaven, and of the general appropriation of productive forces. The savage primitive socius was thus indeed the sole territorial machine in the strict sense. And the functioning of such a machine consists in this: to decline alliance and filiation, to decline the lineages on the body of the land, before there is a State.

145If the machine is one of declension, it is because it is impossible to simply deduce alliance from filiation, alliances from filiative lines. One would be wrong to attribute to alliance only a power of individuation over the persons of a lineage; it rather produces a generalized discernibility. Leach cites cases of matrimonial régimes highly diverse without one being able to infer from them a difference in the filiation of corresponding groups. In many analyses, "the accent is placed on the internal links within the unilineal solidary group or on the links between different groups having a common filiation. The structural links that derive from marriage between members of different groups have been largely ignored, or else assimilated to the universal concept of filiation. Thus Fortes, while recognizing to alliance links an importance comparable to that of filiation links, disguises the former under the expression of complementary descent. This concept, which recalls the distinction of the Romans between the agnatic and the cognatic, implies essentially that every individual is linked to the parents of his father and mother because he is the descendant of one and of the other, and not because they are married… (Yet) the perpendicular links that unite laterally the members of patrilineages are not conceived by the natives themselves as links of filiation. The continuity in time of the vertical structure is adequately expressed by the agnatic transmission of a name of patrilineage. But the continuity of the lateral structure does not express itself in such a manner. It is rather maintained by a chain of economic relations between debtor and creditor… It is the existence of these open debts that manifests the continuity of the alliance relation". The filiation is administrative and hierarchical, but alliance, political and economic, and expresses power insofar as it does not coincide with hierarchy nor is deduced from it, the economy insofar as it does not coincide with administration. Filiation and alliance are like the two forms of a primitive capital, fixed capital or filiative stock, circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts. There correspond to them two memories, one bio-filiative, the other, of alliance and of words. If production is recorded in the network of filiative disjunctions on the socius, it still must be that the connections of labor detach themselves from the productive process, and pass into this element of recording which appropriates them as quasi-cause. But it can only do so by taking up on its own account the connective régime, under the form of an alliance link or a conjugation of persons compatible with the disjunctions of filiation. It is in this sense that economy passes through alliance. In the production of children, the child is inscribed in relation to the disjunctive lineages of his father or of his mother, but inversely these inscribe him only by the intermediary of a connection represented by the marriage of father and mother. There is therefore no moment where alliance would derive from filiation, but both compose a cycle essentially open where the socius acts on production, and also where production reacts on the socius.

146The Marxists are right to recall that if kinship is dominant in primitive society, it is determined to be so by economic and political factors. And if filiation expresses what is dominant while being determined, alliance expresses what is determining, or rather the return of the determining within the determined system of dominance. This is why it is essential to consider how alliances compose themselves concretely with filiations on a given territorial surface. Leach precisely isolated the instance of local lineages, insofar as they distinguish themselves from filiation lineages and operate at the level of small segments: these are groups of men residing in the same place, or in neighboring places, who machinate marriages and form the concrete reality, much more than systems of filiation and abstract matrimonial classes. A system of kinship is not a structure, but a practice, a praxis, a procedure and even a strategy. Louis Berthe, analyzing a relation of alliance and hierarchy, shows well that a village intervenes as a third party to permit matrimonial connections between elements that the disjunction of two halves would forbid from the strict point of view of structure: "the third term must be interpreted much more as a procedure than as a genuine structural element."108 Each time one interprets kinship relations in the primitive community in function of a structure that would unfold in the spirit, one falls back into an ideology of great segments that makes alliance depend on major filiations, but which is contradicted by practice. "One must ask whether, in systems of asymmetrical alliance, there exists a fundamental tendency toward generalized exchange, that is, toward the closure of the cycle. I could find nothing similar among the Mru… Each one behaves as if he were ignorant of the compensation that will result from the closure of the cycle, accentuates the relation of asymmetry, insisting on creditor-debtor behavior."109 A system of kinship appears dos only insofar as one cuts it off from the economic and political references that keep it open, and that make alliance something other than an arrangement of matrimonial classes and filiative lineages.

147The entire enterprise concerns coding the flux. How to ensure reciprocal adaptation, the respective embrace of a chain of signification and flux of production? The great nomadic hunter follows the flux, dries them up in place and moves with it. He reproduces his entire filiation in accelerated manner, contracts it at a point that maintains him in a direct rapport with the ancestor or the god. Pierre Clastres describes the solitary hunter who becomes one only with his force and his destiny, and launches his song in a language ever more rapid and deformed: Me, me, me, "I am a powerful nature, an irritated and aggressive nature!"{110} Such are the two characters of the hunter, the great paranoiac of bush or forest: real displacement with the flux, direct filiation with the god. It is that, in nomadic space, the full body of the socius is as if adjacent to production, it has not yet bent down upon it. The space of the encampment remains adjacent to that of the forest, it is constantly reproduced in the process of production, but has not yet appropriated this process. The apparent objective movement of inscription has not suppressed the real movement of nomadism. But there is no pure nomad, there is always and already a campement where it is a matter of storing, however little, of inscribing and distributing, of marrying and of feeding oneself (Clastres shows well among the Guayaki how, at the connection between hunters and living animals, there succeeds in the campement a disjunction between dead animals and hunters, a disjunction similar to a prohibition of incest, since the hunter cannot consume his own catches). In short, as we shall see on other occasions, there is always a pervert who succeeds the paranoiac, or who accompanies him — sometimes the same man in two situations: the paranoiac of bush and the pervert of village. For, as soon as the socius fixes itself, and bends down upon the productive forces, attributes them to itself, the problem of coding can no longer be resolved by the simultaneity of a displacement from the point of view of flux, and an accelerated reproduction from the point of view of the chain. It is necessary that the flux be the object of extractions that constitute a minimum of stock, and that the chain of signification be the object of detachments that constitute a minimum of mediations. A flux is coded insofar as detachments of chain and extractions of flux operate in correspondence, embrace each other and marry each other. And it is already the highly perverse activity of local groups that machine marriages on primitive territoriality: a perversity normal or non-pathological, as Henry Ey said for other cases where there manifests "a psychic work of selection, of refinement and of calculation." And it is the case from the beginning, since there is no pure nomad who could be content to straddle the flux and to sing direct filiation, but always a socius that awaits bending down, already extracting and detaching.

148The extractions of flux constitute a filial stock in the chain of signification; but inversely the detachments of chain constitute mobile debts of alliance, which orient and direct the flux. On the covering as familial stock, one circulates the stones of alliance or cowries. There is as it were a vast cycle of flux of production and chains of inscription, and a narrower cycle, between the stocks of filiation that chain or encase the flux, and the blocs of alliance that make the chains flow. Descent is at once flux of production and chain of inscription, stock of filiation and fluxion of alliance. Everything happens as if the stock constituted a superficial energy of inscription or registration, the potential energy of apparent movement; but the debt is the actual direction of this movement, kinetic energy determined by the respective path of gifts and counter-gifts on this surface. In the Kula, the circulation of necklaces and bracelets stops at certain places, at certain occasions, to reform a stock. There are no productive connexions without disjunctions of filiation that appropriate them, but no disjunctions of filiation that do not reconstitute lateral connexions through alliances and conjugations of persons. Not only the flux and the chains, but the fixed stocks and the mobile blocs, insofar as they imply in their turn relations between chains and flux in both directions, are in a state of perpetual relativity: their elements vary, women, goods of consumption, ritual objects, rights, prestiges and statuses. If one posits that there must be somewhere a sort of equilibrium of prices, one is forced to see in the evident disequilibrium of relations a pathological consequence, which one explains by saying that the supposed closed system extends in one direction and opens as the prestations are broader and more complex. But such a conception contradicts the « cold economy » of the primitive, without net investment, without currency or market, without exchange relation. The spring of such an economy consists on the contrary in a veritable surplus-value of code: each detachment of chain produces, on one side or the other in the flux of production, phenomena of excess and default, of lack and accumulation, which are found compensated by non-exchangeable elements of the type prestige acquired or consumption distributed (« The chief converts perishable values into an imperishable prestige by means of spectacular festivities; in this manner the consumers of goods are in the end the producers of the beginning. »){111} The surplus-value of code is the primitive form of surplus-value, insofar as it answers to Mauss's famous formula: the spirit of the thing given, or the force of things that makes gifts must be returned in usurious fashion, being territorial signs of desire and of power, principles of abundance and of fructification of goods. Far from being a pathological consequence, disequilibrium is functional and primary. Far from being the extension of a system first closed, openness is primary, founded in the heterogeneity of the elements that compose the prestations, and compensate the disequilibrium by displacing it. In short, the detachments of signifying chain following the relations of alliance engender surplus-values of code at the level of flux, from which flow differences of status for the filiative lines (for example, the higher or lower rank of givers and takers of women). The surplus-value of code effects the diverse operations of the primitive territorial machine, detach segments of chain, organize the extractions of flux, distribute the shares that belong to each.

149The idea that primitive societies are without history, dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is particularly weak and inadequate. This idea was not born among ethnologists, but rather among ideologues attached to a tragic Judeo-Christian consciousness that they wanted to credit with the "invention" of history. If one calls history a dynamic and open reality of societies, in a state of functional disequilibrium or oscillating equilibrium, unstable and always compensated, comprising not only institutionalized conflicts, but conflicts generative of changes, revolts, cuts and scissions, then primitive societies are fully in history, and far removed from the stability or even the harmony one wants to lend them in the name of a primacy of a unanimous group. The presence of history in every social machine appears well in the discordances where, as Lévi-Strauss says, "the mark is discovered, impossible to overlook, of the event."[112] It is true that there are several ways of interpreting such discordances: ideally, by the gap between the real institution and its supposed ideal model; morally, by invoking a structural link of law and transgression; physically, as if it were a phenomenon of wear that causes the social machine to no longer be apt to process its materials. But, once again, it seems that the correct interpretation is above all actual and functional: it is in order to function that a social machine must not function well. This could be shown precisely regarding the segmentary system, always called upon to reconstitute itself on its own ruins; likewise the organization of the political function in these systems, which exercises itself effectively only by indicating its own impotence.[113] Ethnologists do not cease to observe that the rules of kinship are not applied nor applicable in real marriages: not because these rules are ideal, but on the contrary because they determine critical points where the apparatus gets back into motion on the condition of being blocked, and situates itself necessarily in a negative relation with the group. It is there that the identity of the social machine with machines of desire appears: it has no limit in wear, but in failure, it functions only by creaking, by breaking down, by exploding in small explosions — dysfunctions are part of its very functioning, and this is not the least aspect of the system of cruelty. Never has a discordance or a dysfunction announced the death of a social machine, which has the habit on the contrary of feeding itself on the contradictions it raises, the crises it provokes, the anxieties it engenders, and infernal operations that invigorate it: capitalism learned this, and ceased to doubt itself, while even socialists renounced believing in the possibility of its natural death by wear. Never has anyone died of contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, in the American way.

150But it is already from this point of view, although not in the same manner, that one must consider the primitive socius, the territorial machine to decline alliances and filiations. This machine is the Segmentary, because, through its double tribal and lineage apparatus, it cuts out segments of variable length: genealogical filiative units of major, minor and minimal lineages, with their hierarchy, and their respective chiefs, elders guardians of stock and organizers of marriages; tribal territorial units of primary, secondary and tertiary sections, with also their dominances and their alliances. "The point of separation between the tribal sections becomes the point of divergence of the clanic structure of the lineages associated with each of the sections; the clans and the lineages are not distinct cohesive groups, but are incorporated into local communities within which they function structurally." {114} The two systems overlap, each segment being associated with fluxes and chains, with stocks of flux and with fluxes of passage, with extractions of flux and with detachments of chains (certain works of production take place within the framework of the tribal system, others, within the framework of the lineage system). Between the inalienable of filiation and the mobile of alliance, all sorts of penetrations that come from the variability and the relativity of segments. It is that each segment measures its length only, and does not exist as such, except by opposition with other segments in a series of levels ordered in relation to one another: the segmentary machine churns competitions, conflicts and ruptures through the variations of filiation and the fluctuations of alliance. The entire system evolves between two poles, that of fusion by opposition to other groups, that of scission by constant formation of new lineages aspiring to independence, with capitalization of alliances and filiation. From one pole to the other, all the misfirings, all the failures occur in the system which ceases not to be reborn from its own discordances. What does Jeanne Favret mean when she shows, with other ethnologists, that "the persistence of a segmentary organization paradoxically requires that its mechanisms be sufficiently inefficacious for fear to remain the motor of the whole"? And what fear? One would say that social formations have a presentiment, a mortiferous and melancholic presentiment, of what will happen to them, although what happens to them always happens to them from without and rushes into their opening. Perhaps it is even for this reason that it happens to them from without; they stifle its interior potentiality, at the price of these dysfunctions that henceforth form an integral part of the functioning of their system.

151The segmentary territorial machine conjures away fusion through scission, and prevents the concentration of power by maintaining organs of chieftaincy in a relation of powerlessness with the group: as if the savages themselves foresaw the rise of the imperial Barbarian, which will nonetheless come from without and overcodes all their codes. But the greatest danger would still be a dispersion, a scission such that all possibilities of code would be suppressed in it: decoded flux, flowing over a socius, blind and mute, deterritorialized, such is the nightmare that the primitive machine conjures away with all its forces, and all its segmentary articulations. The primitive machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce and industry, it conjures them away, localizes them, grids them, encases them, maintains the merchant and the blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that flux of exchange and production do not come to break the codes in favor of their abstract or fictive quantities. And is this not also it, Oedipus, the fear of incest: fear of a decoded flux? If capitalism is the universal truth, it is in the sense that it is the negative of all social formations: it is the thing, the unnameable, the generalized decoding of flux which makes one understand a contrario the secret of all these formations, to code flux, and even to overcode it rather than something escape the coding. It is not the primitive societies that are outside history, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is that which results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and which makes this end come to pass. One cannot say that the anterior formations did not foresee it, this Thing which came from without only by force of rising from within, and which one prevented from rising. Whence the possibility of a retrospective reading of all history as a function of capitalism. One can already seek the sign of classes in precapitalist societies. But ethnologists remark how difficult it is to make the division of these proto-classes, and of castes organized by the imperial machine, and of ranks distributed by the segmentary primitive machine. The criteria that distinguish classes, castes and ranks must not be sought on the side of fixity or permeability, of relative closure or openness; these criteria prove themselves each time disappointing, eminently deceptive. But ranks are inseparable from primitive territorial coding, as castes are from imperial state overcoding; whereas classes are relative to the process of an industrial and mercantile production decoded in the conditions of capitalism. One can thus read all history under the sign of classes, but by observing the rules indicated by Marx, and insofar as classes are the "negative" of castes and ranks. For assuredly the régime of decoding does not signify absence of organization, but the darkest organization, the harshest accounting, the axiomatic replacing the codes, and comprehending them, always a contrario.

SECTION 3

152The full body of the earth is not without distinction. Suffering and dangerous, unique, universal, it folds back onto production, onto the agents and connections of production. But upon it too, everything clings and inscribes itself, everything is attracted, made miraculous. It is the element of disjunctive synthesis and its reproduction: pure force of filiation or genealogy, Numen. The full body is the ungenerated, but filiation is the first character of inscription marked upon this body. And we know what this intensive filiation is, this inclusive disjunction where everything divides, but within itself, and where the same being is everywhere, from all sides, at all levels, differing only in intensity. The same being included traverses indivisible distances upon the full body, and passes through all singularities, all intensities of a synthesis that slides and reproduces itself. It serves no purpose to recall that genealogical filiation is social and not biological, it is necessarily bio-social, insofar as it inscribes itself upon the cosmic egg of the full body of the earth. It has a mythic origin which is the One, or rather the primitive one-two. Must we say the twins, or the twin, who divides and unites within itself, the Nommo or the Nommo? The disjunctive synthesis distributes the primordial ancestors, but each one itself is a complete full body, male and female, agglutinating upon itself all partial objects, with only intensive variations that correspond to the internal zigzag of the Dogon egg. Each one intensively repeats for its own account the entire genealogy. And it is the same everywhere at both ends of the indivisible distance and from all sides, litany of twins, intensive filiation. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, at the beginning of The Pale Fox, sketch a splendid theory of the sign: the signs of filiation, guide-signs and master-signs, signs of desire first intensive, which fall in spiral and traverse a series of explosions before taking an extension in images, figures and drawings.

153If the full body retracts onto productive connections, and inscribes them in a network of intensive and inclusive disjunctions, it must still recover or reawaken lateral connections in this network itself, and attribute them to itself as though it were their cause. These are the two aspects of the full body: enchanted surface of inscription, fantastic law or apparent objective movement; but also magical agent or fetish, quasi-cause. It is not enough for it to inscribe all things, it must act as though it produced them. The connections must reappear in a form compatible with the disjunctions inscribed, even if they react in turn on the form of these disjunctions. Such is the alliance as the second character of inscription: the alliance imposes on productive connections the extensive form of a conjugation of persons, compatible with the disjunctions of inscription, but inversely reacts on the inscription by determining an exclusive and limitative usage of these same disjunctions. It is thus necessary that the alliance be represented mythically as supervening at a certain moment in the filiative lines (although, in another sense, it is already there at all times). Griaule recounts how, among the Dogon, something occurs at a moment, at the level and side of the eighth ancestor: a derailment of disjunctions that cease to be inclusive, that become exclusive; thenceforth a dismemberment of the full body, an annulation of twinship, a separation of the sexes marked by circumcision; but also a recomposition of the body on a new model of connection or conjugation, an articulation of bodies for themselves and between them, a lateral inscription with articulatory alliance stones, in short an entire arch of alliance.{115} Never do alliances derive from filiations, nor are they deduced from them. But, this principle being posited, we must distinguish two points of view: one economic and political, where the alliance is there at all times, combining and declining with extended filiative lineages that do not preexist it in a system supposed given in extension. The other, mythic, which shows how the extension of the system forms and delimits itself from intense and primordial filiative lineages, which necessarily lose their inclusive or illimitative usage. It is from this point of view that the extended system is like a memory of alliances and words, implying an active refoulement of the intense memory of filiation. For if genealogy and filiations are the object of a memory always vigilant, it is insofar as they are already taken in an extensive sense that they certainly did not possess before the determination of alliances conferred it on them; as intense filiations, on the contrary, they are the object of a particular memory, nocturnal and bio-cosmic, that which must precisely undergo refoulement so that the new extended memory may be instituted.

154We can better understand why the problem consists not at all in going from filiations to alliances, or in concluding the latter from the former. The problem is to pass from an intensive energetic order to an extensive system, which comprises at once the qualitative alliances and the extended filiations. That the primary energy of the intensive order — the Numen — is an energy of filiation, changes nothing in the matter, for this intense filiation is not yet extended, comprises still no distinction of persons nor even of sex, but only pre-personal variations in intensity, affecting one same twinness or bisexuality taken at diverse degrees. The signs of this order are therefore fundamentally neutral or ambiguous (following an expression which Leibniz used to designate a sign that could be as well + as —). It is a question of knowing how, starting from this primary intensity, one will pass to a system in extension where 1°) the filiations will be extended filiations in the form of lineages, comprising distinctions of persons and of parental appellations; 2°) the alliances will at the same time be qualitative relations, which extended filiations suppose as much as the reverse; 3°) in short, the ambiguous intense signs will cease to be so and will become positive or negative. One sees this clearly in pages of Lévi-Strauss, explaining for simple forms of marriage the prohibition of parallel cousins and the recommendation of cross cousins: each marriage between two lineages A and B affects the couple with a sign (+) or (—), according to whether this couple results for A or for B of an acquisition or of a loss. It matters little in this regard whether the regime of filiation is patrilineal or matrilineal. In a patrilineal and patrilocal regime for example, "the women relatives are women lost, the women allies are women gained. Each family issuing from these marriages finds itself therefore affected with a sign, determined for the initial group according to whether the mother of the children is a daughter or a daughter-in-law… One changes sign in passing from brother to sister, since the brother acquires a wife while the sister is lost for her own family". But, remarks Lévi-Strauss, one changes sign no less in changing generation: "According to whether, from the point of view of the initial group, the father received a wife or the mother was transferred outside, the sons have the right to a woman or owe a sister. Doubtless this difference is not translated, in reality, by a condemnation to celibacy for half of the male cousins: but it expresses, in any case, this law that a man can receive a wife only from the group from which a woman is exigible, because at the superior generation, a sister or a daughter was lost; while a brother owes the external world a sister (or a father, a daughter), because at the superior generation, a woman was gained… With respect to the pivot couple, formed of a man a married to a woman b, it possesses evidently the two signs according to whether one envisages it from the point of view of A or of B, and the same thing is true of its children. It suffices now to envisage the generation of cousins to observe that all those who are in the relation (+ +) or (— —) are parallel, while all those who are in the relation (+ —) or (— +) are cross". But, the problem thus posed, it is less a matter of the exercise of a logical combinatory regulating a game of exchanges, as Lévi-Strauss would have it, than of the institution of a physical system which will express itself naturally in terms of debts. It seems to us very important that Lévi-Strauss himself invokes the coordinates of a physical system, although he sees in it only a metaphor. In the physical system in extension, something passes which is of the order of a flux of energy (+ — or — +), something does not pass or remains blocked (+ + or — —), something blocks or, on the contrary, makes pass. Something or someone. And, in this system in extension, there is no primary filiation, nor primary generation or initial exchange, but always and already alliances, at the same time that filiations are extended, expressing at once what must remain blocked in filiation and what must pass in the alliance.

155The essential is not that signs change according to sexes and generations, but that one passes from the intensive to the extensive, that is to say from an order of ambiguous signs to a régime of changing but determined signs. It is here that recourse to myth is indispensable, not because it would be a transposed or even inverted representation of actual relations in extension, but because it alone determines in accordance with indigenous thought and practice the intensive conditions of the system (including the system of production). This is why a text by Marcel Griaule that seeks in myth a principle of explanation for the avunculate strikes us as decisive, and escapes the reproach of idealism habitually made to this sort of attempt; likewise the recent article where Adler and Cartry take up the question.{117} These authors are right to remark that Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship (with its four relations brother-sister, husband-wife, father-son, maternal uncle-sister's son) presents itself as a ready-made ensemble, from which the mother as such is strangely excluded, although she may be depending on the case more or less "related" or more or less "allied" in relation to her children. Now it is precisely here that myth takes root, which is not expressive but conditioning. As Griaule reports, the Yourougou, penetrating into the piece of placenta that he stole, is like the brother of his mother to whom he unites himself in this capacity: "This personage indeed came out into space carrying a part of the nourishing placenta, that is to say a part of his own mother. He considered moreover that this organ belonged to him in his own right and was part of his own person, in such a way that he identified himself with his female parent, specifically the matrix of the world, and that he considered himself placed on the same level as her, from the point of view of generations… He feels unconsciously his symbolic belonging to the generation of his mother and his detachment from the real generation of which he is a member… Being according to him of the same substance and generation as his mother, he assimilates himself to a male twin of his female parent, and the mythic rule of the union of the two paired members proposes him as ideal husband. He should therefore, in the capacity of pseudo-brother of his female parent, be in the situation of his maternal uncle, designated husband of this woman." No doubt one finds already at this level all the personages in play, mother, father, son, brother of the mother, sister of the son. But it is evident and striking that these are not persons: their names do not designate persons, but the intensive variations of a "spiraled vibratory movement," inclusive disjunctions, states necessarily twin-like and bisexed through which a subject passes on the cosmic egg. It is in intensity that everything must be interpreted. The egg and the placenta itself, traversed by an unconscious vital energy "susceptible of increase and decrease." The father is in no way absent. But Amma, father and progenitor, is himself a high intensive part, immanent to the placenta, inseparable from the twinness that relates him to his feminine part. And if the Yourougou son in turn carries off a part of the placenta, it is in an intensive relation with another part that contains his own sister or twin. But, aiming too high, the part that he carries off makes him brother of his mother, who eminently replaces the sister, and to whom he unites himself while replacing Amma himself. In short, an entire world of ambiguous signs, divisions included and bisexed states. I am the son, and also the brother of my mother, and the husband of my sister, and my own father. Everything rests on the placenta become earth, the ungenerated, full body of anti-production where the partial organ-objects of a sacrificed Nommo will cling. It is that the placenta, as substance common to mother and child, common part of their bodies, makes it that these bodies are not like a cause and an effect, but both derivative products of this same substance in relation to which the son is twin of his mother: such is indeed the axis of the Dogon myth reported by Griaule. Yes, I have been my mother and I have been my son. Rarely will one have seen myth and science say the same thing at such a great distance: the Dogon account develops a mythic Weismannism, where the germinal plasma forms an immortal and continuous lineage, which does not depend on bodies, but on which the bodies of parents as those of children depend on the contrary. Hence the distinction of two lineages, one continuous and germinal, the other, somatic and discontinuous, alone subjected to the succession of generations. (Lysenko found a naturally Dogon tone to turn it against Weismann, and reproach him for making the son the genetic or germinal brother of the mother: "the morganists-mendelians, following Weismann, start from the idea that parents are not genetically the parents of their children; if one is to believe their doctrine, parents and children are brothers and sisters… ".){118}

156But the son is not somatically the brother and twin of his mother. This is why he cannot marry her (even if we explained just now the meaning of this "why"). He who should have married the mother, then, is the maternal uncle. First consequence thus: incest with the sister is not a substitute for incest with the mother, but on the contrary the intensive model of incest as manifestation of the germinal lineage. And then, it is not Hamlet who is an extension of Oedipus, an Oedipus in the second degree: on the contrary a negative or inverted Hamlet is primary with respect to Oedipus. The subject does not reproach the uncle for having done what he himself desired to do; he reproaches him for not having done what he, the son, could not do. And why did the uncle not marry the mother, his somatic sister? Because he should only do it in the name of this germinal filiation, marked with the ambiguous signs of twinship and bisexuality, according to which the son could have done it equally, and be himself this uncle in intensive relation with the mother-twin. The vicious circle of the germinal lineage closes (the primitive double bind): the uncle too cannot marry the mother; nor the subject thereafter, marry his own sister — the twin of Yourougou will be delivered to the Nommo as a potential ally. The order of the somatic brings the entire intensive scale tumbling down. But, as a result, if the son cannot marry his mother, it is not because he is somatically of another generation. Against Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss showed well that the mixing of generations was not feared as such, and that the prohibition of incest was not explained thus. It is because the mixing of generations in the case son-mother has the same effect as their correspondence in the case uncle-sister, that is, testifies to one and the same intensive germinal filiation that it is a matter of repressing in both cases. In short, a somatic system in extension can only be constituted insofar as filiations become extended, correlatively to lateral alliances that are established. It is through the prohibition of incest with the sister that lateral alliance is knotted, it is through the prohibition of incest with the mother that filiation becomes extended. There is no repression of the father here, no foreclosure of the father's name; the respective position of the mother or father as parent or ally, the patrilineal or matrilineal character of filiation, the patrilateral or matrilateral character of marriage are active elements of repression, and not objects upon which it bears. It is not even the memory of filiation in general that is repressed by a memory of alliance. It is the great nocturnal memory of intensive germinal filiation that is repressed in favor of a somatic memory extensive, made of filiations become extended (patrilineal or matrilineal) and of the alliances they imply. The entire Dogon myth is a patrilineal version of the opposition between the two genealogies, the two filiations: in intensity and in extension, the intensive germinal order and the extensive régime of somatic generations.

157The system in extension is born from intensive conditions which render it possible, but reacts upon them, annuls them, represses them and leaves them only mythic expression. At once the signs cease to be ambiguous and determine themselves in relation to extended filiations and lateral alliances; the disjunctions become exclusive, limitative (the or else replaces the intense "either…or"); the names, the appellations no longer designate intensive states, but discernible persons. Discernibility is posed on the sister, the mother as forbidden wives. It is that persons, with the names which now designate them, do not preexist the interdicts which constitute them as such. Mother and sister do not preexist their interdiction as wives. Robert Jaulin says it very well: "The mythic discourse has for its theme the passage from indifference to incest to its prohibition; implicit or explicit, this theme is underlying to all myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language." Of incest, one must conclude literally that it does not exist, does not exist. Incest, one is always short of it, in a series of intensities which ignores discernible persons; or else beyond it, in an extension which recognizes them, which constitutes them, but which does not constitute them without rendering them impossible as sexual partners. Incest, one can only make it through a series of substitutions which always removes us from it, that is to say with a person who counts for the mother or the sister only by force of not being it: the one who is discernible as possible wife. Such is the sense of preferential marriage: the first permitted incest; but it is not by chance that it is rarely effected, as if it were still too close to the impossible inexistent (for example, the preferential Dogon marriage with the daughter of the uncle, this one counting for the aunt, who counts herself for the mother). Griaule's article is doubtless, in all of ethnology, the text most profoundly inspired by psychoanalysis. And yet it leads to conclusions which make all Oedipus burst forth, because it does not content itself with posing the problem in extension, and thereby supposing it resolved. It is these conclusions which Adler and Cartry knew how to draw: "One is accustomed to considering incestuous relations in myth, either as the expression of the desire or nostalgia for a world where such relations would be possible or indifferent, either as the expression of a structural function of inversion of the social rule, function destined to found the interdiction and its transgression… In one case and in the other, one gives oneself as already constituted what is precisely the emergence of an order which the myth recounts and explains. In other terms, one reasons as if the myth put on stage persons defined as father, mother, son and sister, whereas these parental roles belong to the order constituted by the prohibition… : incest does not exist." Incest is a pure limit. On condition of avoiding two false beliefs concerning the limit: the one which makes of the limit a matrix or an origin, as if the interdiction proved that the thing was "first" desired as such; the other which makes of the limit a structural function, as if a relation supposed "fundamental" between desire and law exercised itself in transgression. Once more it must be recalled that the law proves nothing about an originary reality of desire, because it essentially disfigures the desired, and that transgression proves nothing about a functional reality of the law, because, far from being a derision of the law, it is itself derisory in relation to what the law really interdicts (which is why revolutions have nothing to do with transgressions). In short, the limit is neither a short of nor a beyond: it is limit between the two, Shallow stream slandered incest, always already crossed or not yet crossed. For incest is like movement, it is impossible. And it is not impossible in the sense that the real would be, but quite on the contrary in the sense that the symbolic is.

158But what does it mean, that incest is impossible? Is it not possible to sleep with one's sister or with one's mother? And how to give up the old argument: it must be possible since it is forbidden? But the problem lies elsewhere. The possibility of incest would require both the persons and the names, son, sister, mother, brother, father. Now, in the act of incest, we can dispose of the persons, but they lose their name insofar as these names are inseparable from the prohibition that interdicts them as partners; or else the names subsist, and designate only prepersonal intensive states, which could just as well "extend" to other persons, as when one calls mamma one's lawful wife, or sister one's spouse. It is in this sense that we said: one is always this side or beyond. Our mothers, our sisters dissolve in our arms; their name slides over their person like a too-wet stamp. It is that one can never enjoy at once the person and the name — which would nevertheless be the condition of incest. So be it, incest is a lure, it is impossible. But the problem is only deferred. Is it not the proper characteristic of desire, that one desires the impossible? At least in this case, this platitude is not even true. One recalls how illegitimate it is to conclude from the prohibition to the nature of what is prohibited; for the prohibition proceeds by dishonoring the guilty party, that is to say by inducing a disfigured and displaced image of what is really prohibited or desired. It is precisely in this manner that repression gets prolonged by a refoulement without which it would not bite upon desire. What is desired is the intense germinal or germinative flux, where one would seek in vain for persons and even for discernible functions like father, mother, son, sister, etc., since these names designate in it only intensive variations on the full body of the earth determined as germen. One can always call incest, as well as indifference to incest, this régime of a single and same being or flux varying in intensity according to inclusive disjunctions. But precisely, one cannot confuse incest as it would be in this intensive impersonal régime that would institute it, with incest as it is represented in extension in the state that prohibits it, and that defines it as transgression upon persons. Jung is therefore quite right to say that the Oedipal complex signifies something entirely other than itself, and that the mother in it is equally the earth, incest, an infinite rebirth (his error is only to believe thus to "surpass" sexuality). The somatic complex refers back to a germinal implexe. Incest refers back to a this side that cannot be represented as such in the complex, since the complex is an element derived from the refoulement of this this side. Incest as it is prohibited (form of discernibilized persons) serves to repress incest as it is desired (the ground of intense earth). The intensive germinal flux is the representative of desire, it is upon it that repression bears; the extensive Oedipal figure is its displaced represented, the lure or the faked image that comes to cover desire, brought forth by repression. It matters that this image be "impossible": it performs its office from the moment that desire lets itself be caught in it as in the impossible itself. You see, that is what you wanted!… Yet, it is this conclusion, going directly from repression to the repressed, and from the prohibition to the prohibited, which already implies all the paralogism of repression.

159But why is the implexe or germinal influx repressed, it which is nevertheless the territorial representative of desire? It is that… what it refers to, in the capacity of representative, is a flux that would not be codable, that would not let itself be coded — precisely the terror of the primitive socius. No chain could be detaxed, nothing could be extracted; nothing would pass from filiation to descendance, but descendance would be perpetually folded back onto filiation in the act of regenerating itself; the signifying chain would form no code, it would emit only ambiguous signs and would be perpetually corroded by its energetic support; what would flow over the full body of the earth would be as unleashed as the non-coded flux that slides over the desert of a body without organs. For the question is less one of abundance or scarcity, of source or drying up (even drying up is a flux), than one of the codable and the non-codable. The germinal flux is such that it amounts to the same thing to say that everything would pass or flow with it, or conversely that everything would be blocked. For flux to be codable, their energy must let itself be quantified and qualified — extractions of flux must be made in relation to detachments of chain — something must pass, but also something must be blocked, and something must block or make pass. Now this is only possible in the system in extension that discernibilizes persons, and that makes signs a determined usage, disjunctive syntheses an exclusive usage, connective syntheses a conjugal usage. Such indeed is the meaning of the prohibition of incest conceived as the institution of a physical system in extension: one must seek in each case what passes of the flux of intensity, what does not pass, what makes pass or prevents from passing, according to the patrilineal or matrilineal character of marriages, according to the matrilineal or patrilineal character of lineages, according to the general régime of extended filiations and lateral alliances. Let us return to the preferred Dogon marriage as it is analyzed by Griaule: what is blocked is the relation with the aunt as substitute of the mother, in the form of joking relative; what passes is the relation with the daughter of the aunt, as substitute of the aunt, as first possible or permitted incest; what blocks or what makes pass is the maternal uncle. What passes entails, in compensation for what is blocked, a veritable plus-value of code, which reverts to the uncle insofar as he makes pass, while he undergoes a sort of "minus-value" insofar as he blocks (thus the ritual thefts carried out by the nephews in the house of the uncle, but also, as Griaule says, "the increase and fructification of the uncle's goods when the eldest of the nephews comes to live with him). The fundamental problem: to whom do the matrimonial prestations revert in such or such system? cannot be resolved independently of the complexity of the lines of passage and the lines of blockage — as if what was blocked or prohibited reappeared "at the wedding like a phantom" coming to claim its due.{122} Löffler writes in a specific case: "Among the Mru, the patrilineal model prevails over the matrilineal tradition: the brother-sister relation, which is transmitted from father to son and from mother to daughter, can be transmitted indefinitely by the father-son relation, but not by the mother-daughter relation which terminates with the marriage of the daughter. A married daughter transmits to her own daughter a new relation, namely that which unites her to her own brother. At the same time, a daughter who marries detaches herself not from the lineage of her brother, but solely from that of the brother of her mother. The significance of payments to the brother of the mother at the time of his niece's marriage is understood only thus: the young girl leaves the old family group of her mother. The niece becomes herself mother and point of departure for a new brother-sister relation, on which a new alliance is founded".{123} What is prolonged, what stops, what detaches itself, and the different relations according to which these actions and passions are distributed, make understandable the mechanism of formation of the plus-value of code as an indispensable piece for all coding of flux.

160We can thus sketch out the diverse instances of territorial representation in the primitive socius. First, the germinal influx of intensity conditions all representation: it is the representative of desire. But if it is said representative, it is because it stands for non-codable flux, non-coded or decoded flux. In this sense it implies in its own way the limit of the socius, the limit and the negative of every socius. Thus the repression of this limit is only possible insofar as the representative itself undergoes refoulement. This refoulement determines what will pass and what will not pass from the influx into the system in extension, what will remain blocked or stored in extended filiations, what on the contrary will move and flow according to the relations of alliance, such that the systematic coding of flux is effected. We call alliance this second instance, the repressing representation itself, since filiations become extended only in function of the lateral alliances that measure their variable segments. Hence the importance of these "local lineages" that Leach identified — and which, two by two, organize alliances and machine marriages. When we attributed to them a perverse-normal activity, we meant that these local groups were the agents of refoulement, the great coders. Wherever men meet and gather to take women from each other, negotiate them, share them, etc., one recognizes the perverse bond of a primary homosexuality between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood partners. Emphasizing the universal fact that marriage is not an alliance between a man and a woman, but "an alliance between two families," "a transaction between men concerning women," Georges Devereux drew the just conclusion of a basic and group homosexual motivation.{124} Through women, men establish their own connections; through the disjunction man-woman, which is at each instant the outcome of filiation, alliance puts into connection men of different filiation. The question: why has not a female homosexuality given rise to Amazonian groups capable of negotiating men? — perhaps finds its answer in the affinity of women with the germinal influx, hence in their closed position within extended filiations (hysteria of filiation, as opposed to paranoia of alliance). Male homosexuality is thus the representation of alliance that represses the ambiguous signs of bisexed intense filiation. Nevertheless, Devereux seems to us to be wrong twice: when he declares he long hesitated before this discovery too grave, he says, of a homosexual representation (there is here only a primitive version of the formula "All men are faggots," and certainly they never are more so than when they machine marriages). On the other hand and especially, when he wants to make of this alliance homosexuality a product of the Oedipus complex as repressed. Never does alliance deduce itself from the lines of filiation through the intermediary of Oedipus; it articulates them on the contrary, under the action of local lineages and their primary non-oedipal homosexuality. And if it is true that there exists an oedipal or filiative homosexuality, one must see in it only a secondary reaction to this group homosexuality, first non-oedipal. As for Oedipus in general, it is not the repressed, that is, the representative of desire, which is before and is entirely ignorant of papa-mama. It is no more the repressing representation, which is beyond, and which only discernibilizes persons by submitting them to the homosexual rules of alliance. Incest is only the retroactive effect of the repressing representation on the repressed representative: it disfigures or displaces this representative on which it bears, it projects upon it discernibilized categories which it has itself instituted, it applies to it terms that did not exist before alliance, precisely, organized the positive and negative in the system in extension — it folds it back onto what is blocked in this system. Oedipus is thus indeed the limit, but the displaced limit that now passes within the socius. Oedipus is the deceiving image to which desire lets itself be taken (That's what you wanted! the decoded flux, it was incest!). There then begins a long history, that of oedipianization. But precisely everything begins in the head of Laius, the old group homosexual, the pervert, who sets a trap for desire. For desire is also that, a trap. Territorial representation comprises these three instances, the repressed representative, the repressing representation, the displaced represented.

161We are going too fast, we act as if Oedipus were already installed in the wild territorial machine. Yet, as Nietzsche says regarding bad conscience, it is not on this terrain that such a plant grows. The point is that the conditions of Oedipus as "family complex," understood within the framework of familialism proper to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, are obviously not given. Wild families form a praxis, a politics, a strategy of alliances and filiations; they are formally the motor elements of social reproduction; they have nothing to do with an expressive microcosm; the father, the mother, the sister function there always as something other than father, mother, or sister. And more than the father, the mother, etc., there is the ally, who constitutes the active concrete reality and renders the relations between families coextensive with the social field. It would not even be accurate to say that family determinations burst at every corner of this field, and remain attached to determinations properly social, since the one and the other are a single and same piece in the territorial machine. Family reproduction no longer being a simple means, or a matter in the service of a social reproduction of another nature, there is no possibility of reducing the latter to the former, of establishing between them two relations that would give to any family complex whatsoever an expressive value and an apparent autonomous form. It is on the contrary evident that the individual in the family, even very small, invests directly a social, historical, economic and political field, irreducible to any mental structure no less than to any affective constellation. This is why, when one considers pathological cases and cure processes in primitive societies, it seems to us entirely insufficient to compare them to the psychoanalytic process by referring them to criteria that remain borrowed from this process: for example a family complex, even different from ours, or cultural contents, even referred to an ethnic unconscious — as one sees in the parallels attempted between psychoanalytic cure and shamanic cure (Devereux, Lévi-Strauss). We defined schizo-analysis by two aspects: the destruction of the pseudo-expressive forms of the unconscious, the discovery of the unconscious investments of the social field by desire. It is from this point of view that one must consider many primitive cures; they are schizo-analyses in act.

162Victor Turner gives a remarkable example of such a cure among the Ndembu.{125} The example is all the more striking in that everything, to our perverted eyes, appears at first Oedipal. Effeminate, unbearable, vain, failing in all his undertakings, the patient K is prey to the shadow of his maternal grandfather who makes harsh reproaches upon him. Although the Ndembu are matrilineal and must dwell with their maternal relatives, K spent an exceptionally long time in his father's matrilineage, of which he was the favorite, and married paternal cousins. But, at his father's death, he is cast out and returns to the maternal village. There his house expresses his situation well, wedged between two sectors, the houses of members of the paternal group and those of his own matrilineage. Now how do divination, charged with indicating the cause of the illness, and medical cure, charged with treating it, proceed? The cause is the tooth, the two upper incisors of the hunter-ancestor, contained in a sacred sack, but which can escape from it to penetrate the body of the patient. But, in order to diagnose, to ward off the effects of the incisor, the diviner and the doctor engage in a social analysis concerning the territory and its neighborhood, the chiefdom and sub-chiefdoms, the lineages and their segments, the alliances and the filiations: they never cease to bring to light the desire in its relations with political and economic units — and it is on this point moreover that the witnesses try to deceive them. "Divination becomes a form of social analysis in the course of which hidden struggles between individuals and factions are brought to light, in such a way that they can be treated by traditional ritual procedures…, the vague character of mystical beliefs allowing them to be manipulated in relation to a great number of social situations." It appears that the pathogenic incisor is indeed, principally, that of the maternal grandfather. But he was a great chief; his successor, the "real chief" had to renounce, for fear of being bewitched; and his presumed heir, intelligent and enterprising, has no power; the present chief is not the right one; as for the patient K, he did not know how to have the mediating role that might have made him a chief-candidate. Everything is complicated by reason of the colonizer-colonized relations, they having not recognized the chiefdom, the impoverished village falling into decrepitude (the two sectors of the village come from a fusion of two groups having fled the English; the elders groan over the present decay). The doctor does not organize a sociodrama, but a genuine group analysis centered on the patient. Giving him potions, attaching horns to his body to draw out the incisor, having the drums beaten, the doctor proceeds through a ceremony interspersed with stops and re-starts, flux of all sorts, flux of words and cuts: the members of the village come to speak, the patient speaks, the shadow is invoked, one stops, the doctor explains, one begins again, drums, songs, trances. It is not merely a matter of discovering the preconscious investments of the social field by interests, but more profoundly its unconscious investments by desire, such as they pass through the patient's marriages, his position in the village, and all the positions of chief lived in intensity in the group.

163We were saying that the point of departure seemed oedipal. It was only the point of departure for us, trained to say Oedipus each time someone speaks to us of father, mother, grandfather. In truth, Ndembu analysis was never oedipal: it was directly connected to social organization and disorganization; sexuality itself, through women and marriages, was such an investment of desire; parents played the role of stimuli there, and not that of the organizer (or disorganizer) of the group, held by the chief and his figures. Instead of everything being reduced to the name of the father, or of the maternal grandfather, it opened onto all the names of history. Instead of everything being projected onto a grotesque cut of castration, everything swarmed in the thousand cut-fluxes of chiefdoms, of lineages, of colonization relations. All the play of races, clans, alliances and filiations, all this historical and collective drift: just the opposite of oedipal analysis, when it obstinately crushes the content of a delirium, when it forces it at all costs into "the symbolic void of the father." Or rather, if it is true that analysis does not even begin oedipal, except for us, does it not nonetheless become so, to a certain extent, and to what extent? Yes, it does become so in part, under the effect of colonization. The colonizer for example abolishes the chiefdom, or uses it for his ends (and many other things: the chiefdom is still nothing). The colonizer says: your father, he is your father and nothing else, or the maternal grandfather, do not take them for chiefs,… you can get yourself triangulated in your corner, and put your house between those of the paternal and maternal relatives,… your family, it is your family and nothing else, social reproduction no longer passes through there, even though we have just need of your family to furnish material that will be subjected to the new régime of reproduction… Then yes, an oedipal frame sketches itself for dispossessed savages: Oedipus of the shantytown. We saw however that the colonized remained a typical example of resistance to Oedipus: indeed, it is there that the oedipal structure fails to close, and that the terms remain stuck to the agents of oppressive social reproduction, either in a struggle, or in a complicity (the White, the missionary, the tax collector, the exporter of goods, the village notable become agent of administration, the elders who curse the White, the young who enter into political struggle, etc.). But both are true: the colonized resists oedipianization, and oedipianization tends to close back over him. To the extent that there is oedipianization, it is the fact of colonization, and it must be joined to all the procedures that Jaulin was able to describe in White Peace. "The state of colonized can lead to a reduction of the humanization of the universe, such that every solution sought for it will be at the measure of the individual or of the restricted family, with, by way of consequence, an anarchy or extreme disorder at the level of the collective: anarchy of which the individual will always be the victim, with the exception of those who are at the key of such a system, in this case the colonizers, who, in this same time when the colonized reduces the universe, will tend to extend it." Oedipus, it is something like euthanasia in ethnocide. The more social reproduction escapes the members of the group, in nature and in extension, the more it reduces them to it, or reduces them themselves to a restricted and neurotized family reproduction of which Oedipus is the agent.

164For, finally, how are we to understand those who say they find an Indian or African Oedipus? They themselves acknowledge that they find nothing of the mechanisms and attitudes that constitute our Oedipus—our supposed Oedipus. It doesn't matter, they say the structure is there, even though it has no existence "accessible to clinical practice"; or that the problem, the point of departure, is indeed oedipal, although the developments and solutions are altogether different from ours (Parin, Ortigues). They say it is an Oedipus "that never stops existing," when it does not even have (outside colonization) the necessary conditions to begin to exist. If it is true that thought is evaluated by the degree of oedipianization, then yes, whites think too much. The competence, honesty, and talent of these authors, Africanist psychoanalysts, are beyond question. But it is the same for them as for certain psychotherapists among us: one would say they do not know what they are doing. We have psychotherapists who sincerely believe they are doing progressive work by applying new ways of triangulating the child—attention, a structural Oedipus, not imaginary! Likewise these psychoanalysts in Africa who wield the yoke of a structural or "problematic" Oedipus, in service of their progressive intentions. There or here, it is the same thing: Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that, even among us, Europeans, it is our intimate colonial formation. How are we to understand the sentences with which M. C. and E. Ortigues conclude their book? "Illness is considered as a sign of an election, of special attention from supernatural powers, or as a sign of an aggression of magical character: this idea does not readily allow itself to be profaned. Analytical psychotherapy can intervene only from the moment when a demand can be formulated by the subject. Our entire research was thus conditioned by the possibility of establishing a psychoanalytic field. When a subject adhered fully to traditional norms and had nothing to say in his own name, he allowed himself to be taken in charge by traditional therapists and the family group or by the medicine of 'medications.' Sometimes, the fact that he wished to speak to us of traditional treatments corresponded to the beginning of psychotherapy and became for him a means of situating himself personally in his own society... Other times, the analytical dialogue could develop further and in this case the oedipal problem tended to take on its diachronic dimension, making the conflict of generations appear."{127} Why think that supernatural powers and magical aggressions form a myth inferior to Oedipus? On the contrary, do they not determine desire toward more intense and more adequate investments of the social field, in its organization as in its disorganizations? Meyer Fortes at least showed the place of Job beside Oedipus. And by what right do we judge that the subject has nothing to say in his own name so long as he adheres to traditional norms? Does the ndembu cure not show quite the opposite? Would Oedipus not also be a traditional norm, ours? How can one say it makes us speak in our own name, when one specifies on the other hand that its solution teaches us "the incurable insufficiency of being" and universal castration? And what is this "demand" one invokes to justify Oedipus? It is understood, the subject demands and redemands papa-mama: but what subject, and in what state? Is this the means "of situating oneself personally in one's own society"? And what society? The neo-colonized society that is made for him, and that finally succeeds in what colonization had only sketched out, an actual reduction of the forces of desire to Oedipus, to a father's name, in the grotesque triangle?

165Let us return to the famous inexhaustible discussion between culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts: Is Oedipus universal? is it the great Catholic paternal symbol, the reunification of all churches? The discussion began between Malinowski and Jones, continued between Kardiner, Fromm on one side, Roheim on the other. It continues still between certain ethnologists and certain disciples of Lacan (those who gave not only an Oedipianizing interpretation of Lacan's doctrine, but an ethnographic extension to this interpretation). On the side of the universal, there are two poles: that, seemingly outmoded, which makes Oedipus an originary affective constellation, and a real event at the limit, whose effects would be transmitted by phylogenetic heredity. And that which makes Oedipus a structure, which must be discovered at the limit in fantasy, in relation to biological prematuration or neoteny. Two very different conceptions of the limit, the one as originary matrix, the other as structural function. But in these two senses of the universal, we are invited to "interpret," since the latent presence of Oedipus appears only through its manifest absence, understood as an effect of repression, or better still since the structural invariant is discovered only through imaginary variations, testifying if need be to a symbolic foreclosure (the father as empty place). The universal of Oedipus begins again the old metaphysical operation that consists in interpreting negation as privation, as a lack: the symbolic lack of the dead father, or the great Signifier. To interpret is our modern manner of believing, and of being pious. It was already Roheim who proposed to organize savages in a series of variables converging toward the neotenic structural invariant. It was he who said without humor that one did not find the Oedipus complex if one did not seek it. And that one did not seek it if one had not had oneself analyzed. And that is why your daughter is mute, that is to say: the tribes, daughters of the ethnologist, do not speak the Oedipus that makes them speak nonetheless. Roheim added that it was ridiculous to believe that Freud's theory of censorship depended on the régime of repression in the empire of Franz Joseph. He did not seem to see that Franz Joseph was not a pertinent historical cut, but that oral, written, or even "capitalist" civilizations were perhaps such cuts with which varied the nature of repression, the sense and scope of refoulement.

166It is certainly complicated, this matter of refoulement. Things would be simpler if libido or affect were refouled, in the broadest sense of the word (suppressed, inhibited or transformed) — at the same time as the supposed oedipal representation. But it is not so: most ethnologists have well remarked the sexual character of affects in the public symbols of primitive society; and this character remains integrally lived by the members of that society, although they have not been psychoanalyzed, and despite the displacement of the representation. As Leach says apropos of the sex-hair relation, "the symbolic displacement of the phallus is customary, but the phallic origin is not in the least refouled."[129] Must one say that savages refoul the representation, and keep the affect intact? And would it be the contrary with us, in patriarchal organization where the representation remains clear, but with affects suppressed, inhibited or transformed? Yet no: psychoanalysis tells us that we too refoul the representation. And everything tells us that we too often keep the full sexuality of the affect; we know perfectly well what it is about, without having been psychoanalyzed. But by what right speak of an oedipal representation upon which refoulement would bear? Is it because incest is forbidden? We always fall back on this pale reason: incest desired because it is forbidden. The prohibition of incest would imply an oedipal representation, of refoulement and of its return from which it would be born. Yet the contrary is evident; and not only does the oedipal representation suppose the prohibition of incest, but one cannot even say that it is born from it or results from it. Reich, making himself a partisan of Malinowski's theses, added a profound remark to it: desire is all the more oedipal as the interdicts bear, not simply on incest, but "on sexual relations of every other type," sulking the other paths.[130] In short, the repression of incest is born no more from a refouled oedipal representation than it provokes itself this refoulement. But, what is quite different, the general system repression-refoulement brings forth an oedipal image as a disfiguration of the refouled. That this image in turn comes to undergo a refoulement, that it comes in place of the refouled or of the effectively desired, to the extent that sexual repression bears on something other than incest, it is a long story which is that of our society. But the refouled is not first the oedipal representation. What is refouled is desiring production. It is that which, of this production, does not pass into social production or reproduction. It is what would introduce disorder and revolution into it, the unco­ded flux of desire. What passes, on the contrary, from desiring production to social production forms a direct sexual investment of this social production, without any refoulement of the sexual character of the symbolism and the corresponding affects, and above all without reference to an oedipal representation one would suppose originally refouled or structurally foreclosed. The animal is not only the object of a preconscious investment of interest, but that of a libidinal investment of desire which draws from it only secondarily an image of father. Likewise the libidinal investment of nourishment, everywhere where are revealed a fear of going hungry, a pleasure of not going hungry, and which relates only secondarily to an image of mother.[131] We have seen previously how the prohibition of incest referred, not to Oedipus, but to the unco­ded flux constitutive of desire, and to their representative, the intense pre-personal flux. As for Oedipus, it is still a manner of co­ding the unco­dable, of co­difying what eludes co­des, or of displacing desire and its object, of trapping them.

167Culturalists and ethnologists well show that institutions are primary in relation to affects and structures. For structures are not mental, they are in things, in forms of social production and reproduction. Even an author like Marcuse, little suspect of complacency, recognizes that culturalism set out on a good path: to introduce desire into production, to tie the link "between the instinctual structure and the economic structure, and at the same time to indicate the possibilities there are for progress beyond a patricentric and exploitative culture."[132] So what went wrong with culturalism? and here again there is no contradiction in its starting well at the beginning, and turning badly from the beginning. Perhaps it is the postulate common to Oedipal relativism and absolutism, that is, the stubborn maintenance of a familial perspective, which exercises its ravages everywhere. For if the institution is first understood as familial institution, it matters greatly little to say that the familial complex varies with institutions, or that Oedipus on the contrary is a nuclear invariant around which families and institutions turn. Culturalists invoke other triangles, for example maternal uncle-aunt-nephew; but Oedipalists have no difficulty in showing that these are imaginary variations for one and the same structural invariant, different figures for one and the same symbolic triangulation, which is confused neither with the characters who come to effectuate it, nor with the attitudes which come to put these characters in relation. But, inversely, the invocation of such a transcendent symbolism makes the structuralists exit in no way from the narrowest familial point of view. It is the same with endless discussions on: is it papa? is it mama? (You neglect the mother! No, it is you who do not see the father, beside, as empty place!) The conflict of culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts has often reduced itself to these evaluations of the respective role of the mother and the father, of the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal, without thereby exiting the family nor even Oedipus, always oscillating between the two famous poles, the maternal pre-Oedipal pole of the imaginary, the paternal Oedipal pole of the structural, both on the same axis, both speaking the same language of a familialized social, of which one designates the customary maternal dialects, and the other, the strong law of the language of the father. The ambiguity of what Kardiner called "primary institution" has been well shown. For it can be in certain cases a matter of the way desire invests the social field, from childhood and under familial stimuli coming from the adult: all conditions would then be given for an adequate (extrafamilial) understanding of libido. But, more often, it is only a matter of familial organization in itself, which one supposes first lived by the child as a microcosm, then projected into adult and social becoming.[133] From this point of view, discussion can only turn in circles between proponents of a cultural interpretation, and proponents of a symbolic or structural interpretation of this same organization.

168Let us add a second postulate common to culturalists and symbolists. All admit that, at least among us, in our patriarchal and capitalist society, Oedipus is certain (even if they emphasize, like Fromm, elements of a new matriarchy). All admit our society as Oedipus's strong point: the point from which an Oedipal structure will be found everywhere, or on the contrary one must make the terms and relations vary in non-Oedipal complexes, but no less "familial" for all that. This is why all our preceding critique has borne on Oedipus as it is supposed to hold and function among us: it is not at the weakest point (the savages) that one must attack Oedipus, but at the strongest point, at the level of the strongest link, by showing what disfigurement it implies and operates on the production of desire, the syntheses of the unconscious, the libidinal investments in our cultural and social milieu. Not that Oedipus is nothing among us: we have not ceased saying that it was demanded, that it was demanded again; and even an attempt as profound as Lacan's to shake off the yoke of Oedipus was interpreted as an unhoped-for means of weighing it down further, and of closing it again over the baby and the schizo. And certainly, it is not only legitimate, but indispensable that ethnological or historical explanation not be in contradiction with our present organization, or that the latter contain in its own way the basic elements of the ethnological hypothesis. This is what he said, recalling the requirements of a universal history; but, he added, on condition that the present organization be capable of criticizing itself. Now the self-critique of Oedipus is what one scarcely sees in our organization, of which psychoanalysis is a part. It is just, in certain respects, to question all social formations starting from Oedipus. But not because Oedipus would be a truth of the unconscious particularly detectable among us; on the contrary, because it is a mystification of the unconscious that succeeded among us only by force of mounting its pieces and its workings through anterior formations. It is universal in this sense. It is therefore indeed in capitalist society, at the strongest level, that the critique of Oedipus must always take up its point of departure and find its point of arrival.

169Oedipus is a limit. But limit has many acceptations, since it can be at the beginning as an inaugural event, having the role of a matrix, or in the middle, as a structural function assuring the mediation of characters and the foundation of their relations, or at the end, as an eschatological determination. Now, we have seen it, it is only in this last acception that Oedipus is a limit. Desiring production also. But, precisely, this acception itself has many diverse senses. First, desiring production is at the limit of social production; decoded fluxes, at the limit of codes and territorialities; the full body, at the limit of the socius. One will speak of absolute limit each time that schizo-fluxes pass through the wall, scramble all codes and deterritorialize the socius: the full body, it is the deterritorialized socius, desert where decoded fluxes of desire flow, end of world, apocalypse. In the second place however, relative limit is only the capitalist social formation, because it machines and makes effectively decoded fluxes flow, but in substituting for codes an accounting axiomatic even more oppressive. So that capitalism, conforming to the movement by which it thwarts its own tendency, ceases not to approach the wall, and to thrust back the wall at the same time. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit. In the third place, there is no social formation that does not have a presentiment or foresee the real form under which the limit risks arriving to it, and that it conjures with all its forces. Hence the obstinacy with which formations anterior to capitalism embed the merchant and the technician, preventing fluxes of money and fluxes of production from taking an autonomy that would destroy their codes. Such is the real limit. And when such societies collide with this real limit, repressed from within, but which returns to them from without, they see in it with melancholy the sign of their imminent death. For example, Bohannan describes the economy of the Tiv which codes three sorts of fluxes, consumption goods, prestige goods, women and children. When money arrives, it can only be coded as a prestige good, and yet merchants use it to seize the sectors of consumption goods traditionally held by women: all codes waver. Certainly, to begin with money and to end with money, it is an operation that cannot be expressed in terms of code; seeing the trucks that depart for exportation, "the oldest Tiv deplore this situation, and know what is happening, but do not know where to place their blame,"134 the hard reality. But, in the fourth place, this limit inhibited from within was already projected into a primordial beginning, a mythic matrix as imaginary limit. How to imagine this nightmare, the invasion of the socius by non-coded fluxes, which slip in the manner of lava? A torrent of irrepressible shit as in the myth of the Trickster, or else the intense germinal influx, the beforehand of incest as in the myth of Yourougou, which introduces disorder into the world by acting as representative of desire. Hence, in the fifth place finally, the importance of the task which consists in displacing the limit: making it pass to the interior of the socius, in the middle, between a beyond of alliance and the beforehand of filiation, between a representation of alliance and the representative of filiation, as one conjures the dreaded forces of a river by digging it an artificial bed, or by diverting a thousand little shallow streams. Oedipus is this displaced limit. Yes, Oedipus is universal. But the wrong is to have believed in the following alternative: either it is a product of the system repression-repression, and then it is not universal; or it is universal and it is position of desire. In truth, it is universal because it is the displacement of the limit that haunts all societies, the displaced represented that disfigures what all societies absolutely dread as their deepest negative, namely the decoded fluxes of desire.

170But this is not to say that this universal Oedipal limit is "occupied," strategically occupied in all social formations. One must give full weight to Kardiner's remark: a Hindu or an Eskimo may dream of Oedipus without being subjected to the complex, without "having the complex."135 For Oedipus to be occupied, a certain number of conditions are indispensable: the field of social production and reproduction must become independent of family reproduction, that is, of the territorial machine that declines alliances and filiations; it must be that, by virtue of this independence, detachable chain fragments convert themselves into a detached transcendent object that crushes their polyvocity; it must be that the detached object (phallus) operates a sort of folding, application, or flattening—flattening of the social field defined as the starting set onto the family field, now defined as the arrival set, and institutes a network of one-to-one relations between the two. For Oedipus to be occupied, it is not enough that it be a limit or a displaced represented in the system of representation; it must migrate within this system and come itself to occupy the place of representative of desire. These conditions, inseparable from the paralogisms of the unconscious, are realized in capitalist formation—though they do imply certain archaisms borrowed from barbarian imperial formations, notably the position of the transcendent object. The capitalist style was well described by Lawrence, "our democratic, industrial order of things, style my-dear-little-cabbage-I-want-to-see-mama." Now, on the one hand, it is evident that primitive formations fulfill none whatsoever of these conditions. Precisely because the family, open to alliances, is co-extensive and adequate to the historical social field, because it animates social reproduction itself, because it mobilizes or passes along detachable fragments without ever converting them into a detached object—no flattening, no application is possible that would answer to the Oedipal formula 3 + 1 (the 4 corners of the field folded into 3, like a tablecloth, plus the transcendent term operating the folding). "To speak, dance, exchange, and let flow, even urinate within the community of men…," says Parin himself to express the fluidity of primitive flux and codes.136 Within primitive society, one always remains at 4 + n, in the system of ancestors and allies. Far from being able to claim that Oedipus here never stops existing, it fails to begin; one is always stopped well before 3 + 1, and if there is a primitive Oedipus, it is a neg-Oedipus, in the sense of a neg-entropy. Oedipus is indeed a limit or displaced represented, but precisely in such a manner that each member of the group is always before or beyond, without ever occupying the position (that is what Kardiner saw so well in the formula we cited). It is colonization that makes Oedipus exist, but an Oedipus felt for what it is, pure oppression, to the extent that it supposes these Savages are deprived of control of their social production, ripe to be flattened onto the only thing that remains for them, and still, family reproduction imposed upon them oedipianized no less than alcoholic or sickly.

171On the other hand, when conditions are effected in capitalist society, one will not for all that believe that Oedipus ceases to be what it is, simple displaced represented that comes to usurp the place of the representative of desire, trapping the unconscious in its paralogisms, crushing all desiring production, substituting for it a system of beliefs. It is never cause: Oedipus depends on a prior social investment of a certain type, apt to fold back onto the determinations of family. One will object that such a principle perhaps holds for the adult, certainly not for the child. But precisely Oedipus begins in the head of the father. And not from an absolute beginning: it forms only from the investments that the father effects from the historical social field. And if it passes to the son, it is not by virtue of a family heredity, but of a much more complex relation that depends on the communication of unconsciouses. So that, even in the child, what is invested through family stimuli is still the social field, and an entire system of cuts and extra-familial flux. That the father is primary in relation to the child, this can be understood analytically only in function of this other primacy, that of social investments and counter-investments in relation to family investments: we will see this later, at the level of an analysis of deliriums. But already, if it appears that Oedipus is an effect, it is because it forms a set of arrival (the family become microcosm) onto which the production and reproduction of capital fold back, whose organs and agents no longer pass at all through a coding of alliance and filiation flux, but through an axiomatic of decoded flux. The formation of capitalist sovereignty has therefore need of an intimate colonial formation that responds to it, on which it applies itself, and without which it would have no hold on the productions of the unconscious.

172What can be said, under these conditions, about the relationship between ethnology and psychoanalysis? Must one be satisfied with an uncertain parallelism where both regard each other with perplexity, opposing two irreducible sectors of symbolism? A social sector of symbols, and a sexual sector that would constitute a sort of private universal, an individual-universal? (Between the two, transversals, since social symbolism can become sexual matter, and sexuality, rite of social aggregation). But the problem thus posed is too theoretical. Practically, the psychoanalyst often presumes to explain to the ethnologist what the symbol means: it means the phallus, castration, Oedipus. But the ethnologist asks something else, and genuinely wonders what use psychoanalytic interpretations can be to him. The duality thus shifts, it is no longer between two sectors, but between two kinds of questions: "What does it mean?" and "What is it good for?" What is it good for not only to the ethnologist, but what is it good for and how does it work in the very formation that makes use of the symbol.{137} What a thing means, it is not certain that it serves any purpose. For example, it is possible that Oedipus serves no purpose, neither to psychoanalysts nor to the unconscious. And what would the phallus serve, inseparable from the castration that deprives us of its use? One says, of course, that one must not confuse the signified and the signifier. But does the signifier get us out of the question "what does it mean," is it anything other than that same barred question? It is still the domain of representation. The real misunderstandings, the practical misunderstandings between ethnologists (or Hellenists) and psychoanalysts, do not come from a non-recognition or recognition of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the phallic nature of symbolism. On this point, everyone in principle could agree: everything is sexual and sexed from one end to the other. Everyone knows it, beginning with the users. The practical misunderstandings come rather from the profound difference between the two kinds of question. Without always formulating it clearly, ethnologists and Hellenists think that a symbol is not defined by what it means, but by what it does and what is done with it. It always means the phallus, or something neighboring, only what it means does not say what it is good for. In short, there is no ethnological interpretation, for the simple reason that there is no ethnographic material: there are only usages and functionings. On this point it is possible that ethnologists have much to teach psychoanalysts: about the unimportance of "what does it mean." When Hellenists oppose Freudian Oedipus, one will avoid believing that they oppose other interpretations to psychoanalytic interpretation. It is possible that ethnologists and Hellenists constrain psychoanalysts to finally make for their own account a similar discovery: namely that there is no unconscious material either nor psychoanalytic interpretation, but only usages, analytic usages of the syntheses of the unconscious, which allow themselves to be defined no more by the assignment of a signifier than by the determination of signifieds. How it works is the only question. Schizo-analysis renounces all interpretation, because it deliberately renounces discovering an unconscious material: the unconscious means nothing. On the other hand, the unconscious makes machines, which are those of desire, and of which schizo-analysis discovers the usage and the functioning in immanence to social machines. The unconscious says nothing, it machines. It is not expressive or representative, but productive. A symbol is uniquely a social machine that functions as a machine of desire, a machine of desire that functions in the social machine, an investment of the social machine by desire.

173It has often been said and shown that an institution, no more than an organ, is explained by its usage. A biological formation, a social formation do not form in the same manner that they function. Thus there is no biological, sociological, linguistic functionalism, etc., at the level of large specified ensembles. But it is not the same with machines of desire as molecular elements: there, usage, functioning, production, formation are one and the same thing. And it is this synthesis of desire that explains, under such or such determined conditions, the molar ensembles with their usage specified in a biological, social or linguistic field. It is that the great molar machines presuppose pre-established connections that their functioning does not explain, since it derives from them. Only machines of desire produce the connections according to which they function, and function by improvising them, inventing them, forming them. A molar functionalism is therefore a functionalism that has not gone far enough, that has not reached those regions where desire machines, independently of the macroscopic nature of what it machines: organic, social, linguistic elements, etc., all put to cook together in the same pot. Functionalism must know no other units-multiplicities than the machines of desire themselves, and the configurations they form in all sectors of a field of production (the "total fact"). A magical chain unites plants, fragments of organs, a bit of clothing, an image of papa, formulas and words: one will not ask what it means, but what machine is thus assembled, what flux and what cuts, in relation to other cuts and other flux. Analyzing the symbolism of the forked branch among the Ndembu, Victor Turner shows that the names given to it form part of a chain that mobilizes equally the species and properties of the trees from which it is drawn, the names of these species in turn, and the technical procedures with which it is treated. One extracts no less from the signifying chains than from material flux. The exegetical sense (what one says of the thing) is only one element among others, and less important than the operative usage (what one does with it) or the positional functioning (the relation to other things in the same complex), according to which the symbol is never in a biunivocal relation with what it would mean to say, but always has a multiplicity of referents, "always multivocal and polyvocal." Analyzing the buti magical object among the Kukuya of Congo, Pierre Bonnafé shows how it is inseparable from the practical syntheses that produce it, record it and consume it: the partial and non-specific connection that composes fragments of the subject's body with those of an animal; the inclusive disjunction that records the object in the subject's body, and transforms the latter into man-animal; the residual conjunction that subjects the "reliquat" to a long voyage before burying or immersing it. If ethnologists today rediscover a keen interest in the hypothetical concept of fetish, it is certainly under the influence of psychoanalysis. But it seems that psychoanalysis gives them as many reasons to doubt the notion as to bring their attention to bear upon it. For never has psychoanalysis said more Phallus-Œdipe-and-Castration than concerning the fetish. Whereas the ethnologist has the feeling that there is a problem of political power, of economic force, of religious power inseparable from the fetish, even when its usage is individual and private. For example, hair, the rites of cutting and coiffure: is it interesting to reduce these rites to the entity phallus as signifying the "separated thing," and to find everywhere the father as the symbolic representative of separation? Is this not to remain at the level of what it means? The ethnologist finds itself before a flux of hair, the cuts of such a flux, what passes from one state to another through the cut. As Leach says, hair as a partial object or separable part of the body does not represent an aggressive and separated phallus; it is a thing in itself, a material piece in an apparatus for aggressing, in a machine for separating.

174Once again, it is not a matter of knowing whether the foundation of a rite is sexual, or whether one must take into account political, economic, and religious dimensions that would exceed sexuality. So long as one poses the problem thus, so long as one imposes a choice between libido and Numen, the misunderstanding can only intensify between ethnologists and psychoanalysts—just as it ceases to grow between Hellenists and psychoanalysts concerning Oedipus. Oedipus, the despot with the club foot, is evidently an entire political history that sets the despotic machine against the old primitive territorial machine (whence both the negation and persistence of autochthony, well marked by Lévi-Strauss). But this is not sufficient to desexualize the drama; on the contrary. In fact, it is a matter of knowing how one conceives sexuality and libidinal investment. Must they be referred to an event or to a "feeling," which remains nonetheless familial and intimate, the intimate Oedipal feeling, even when one interprets it structurally, in the name of pure signifier? Or must one open them onto the determinations of a historical social field, where the economic, the political, the religious are things invested by libido for themselves, and not derivatives of a mama-papa? In the first case, one considers large molar ensembles, large social machines—the economic, the political, etc.—even if it means seeking what they mean by applying them to an abstract familial ensemble supposed to contain the secret of libido; one thus remains within the framework of representation. In the second case, one surpasses these large ensembles, including the family, toward the molecular elements that form the pieces and mechanisms of machines of desire. One seeks how these machines of desire function, how they invest and subdetermine the social machines that they constitute at large scale. One then attains the regions of a productive, molecular, micrological or micropsychic unconscious, which no longer wants to mean anything and represents nothing more. Sexuality is no longer considered as a specific energy that unites persons derived from large ensembles, but as the molecular energy that places in connection partial-object-molecules (libido), that organizes inclusive disjunctions on the giant molecule of the full body (Numen), and distributes states according to domains of presence or zones of intensity (Voluptas). For machines of desire are exactly this: the microphysics of the unconscious, the elements of the micro-unconscious. But, as such, they never exist independently of historical molar ensembles, of macroscopic social formations that they constitute statistically. It is in this sense that there is only desire and the social. Beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, religious formations, etc., there are unconscious sexual investments, micro-investments that testify to the manner in which desire is present in a social field, and how it associates itself with this field as the statistically determined domain linked to it. Machines of desire function in social machines, as if they maintained their own régime in the molar ensemble they form on the other hand at the level of large numbers. A symbol, a fetish, are manifestations of machine of desire. Sexuality is in no way a molar determination representable in a familial ensemble, but the molecular subdetermination functioning in social ensembles, and secondarily familial ones, that trace the field of presence and production of desire: an entire non-Oedipal unconscious, which will produce Oedipus only as one of its secondary statistical formations ("complexes"), at the outcome of a history bringing into play the becoming of social machines, their régime compared to that of machines of desire.

SECTION 4

175If representation is always a repression-refoulement of desiring production, it is nevertheless in very diverse manners, following the social formation considered. The system of representation has three elements in depth, the repressed representant, the repressing representation and the displaced represented. But the instances that come to effectuate them are themselves variable, there are migrations within the system. We have no reason to believe in the universality of a single and same apparatus of socio-cultural refoulement. One can speak of a coefficient of affinity more or less great between social machines and machines of desire, following whether their respective régimes are more or less close, following whether the latter have more or less chance of making their connections and their interactions pass into the statistical régime of the former, following whether the former operate more or less a movement of detachment with respect to the latter, following whether the mortiferous elements remain caught in the mechanism of desire, embedded in the social machine, or conversely reunite themselves in a death drive extended throughout the entire social machine and crushing desire. The principal factor in all these respects is the type or genre of social inscription, its alphabet, its characters: inscription on the socius in effect is the agent of a secondary refoulement or "properly so-called," which finds itself necessarily in relation with the desiring inscription of the body without organs, and with the primary refoulement that the latter already exerts in the domain of desire; now this relation is essentially variable. There is always social refoulement, but the apparatus of refoulement varies, notably according to what plays the role of the representant on which it bears. It is possible in this sense that the primitive codes, at the very moment when they exercise themselves with a maximum of vigilance and extension on the flux of desire, enchaining them in a system of cruelty, retain infinitely more affinity with machines of desire than capitalist axiomatics, which nevertheless liberates decoded flux. This is because desire is not yet trapped, not yet introduced into an ensemble of impasses, the flux have lost nothing of their polyvocity, and the simple represented in representation has not yet taken the place of the representant. To evaluate in each case the nature of the apparatus of refoulement and its effects on desiring production, one must therefore take into account not only the elements of representation as they organize themselves in depth, but the manner in which representation itself organizes itself at the surface, on the surface of inscription of the socius.

176Society is not exchangist; the socius is inscriptor: not to exchange, but to mark the bodies, which are of the earth. We have seen that the régime of debt flowed directly from the exigencies of this savage inscription. For debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flux of desire and that, through debt, makes man a memory of words. It is alliance that represses the great filial memory, intense and mute, the germinal influx as representative of the uncoded flux that would submerge everything. It is debt that composes the alliances with filiations become extended, to form and forge a system in extension (representation) upon the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt responds to what Nietzsche described as the prehistoric work of humanity: to employ the cruelest mnemotech­nics, in the very flesh, to impose a memory of words on the basis of the repression of the old bio-cosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see in debt a direct consequence of primitive inscription, instead of making it (and making the inscriptions themselves) an indirect means of universal exchange. The question that Mauss had at least left open: is debt primary in relation to exchange, or is it only a mode of exchange, a means in service of exchange?—Lévi-Strauss seemed to close it with a categorical answer: debt is only a superstructure, a conscious form in which the unconscious social reality of exchange is coined.{140} It is not a matter of theoretical discussion on the foundations; the entire conception of social practice, and the postulates conveyed by this practice, are engaged here; and the whole problem of the unconscious. For if exchange is the ground of things, why must it not look like an exchange, above all not? Why must it be a gift, or a counter-gift, and not an exchange? And why must the giver, to show well that he does not await an exchange even deferred, be also in the position of one who is stolen from? It is theft that prevents the gift and counter-gift from entering into an exchangist relation. Desire ignores exchange; it knows only theft and gift, sometimes one within the other under the effect of a primary homosexuality. Thus the anti-exchangist amorous machine that Joyce will rediscover in Exiles, and Klossowski in Roberte. "Everything happens as if, in Goumantché ideology, a woman could only be given (and we have the lityuatieli), or ravished, taken, thus in a certain way stolen (and we have the lipwotali); every union which could too manifestly appear as the result of a direct exchange between two lineages or segments of lineages is, in this society, if not prohibited, then largely disapproved of."{141} "Shall one say that, if desire ignores exchange, it is because exchange is the unconscious of desire? Would it be by virtue of the exigencies of generalized exchange? But by what right declare that the cuts of debt are secondary in relation to a totality "more real"? Yet exchange is known, well known—but as what must be conjured, encased, severely gridded, so that no corresponding value develops as a value of exchange that would introduce the nightmare of a market economy. The primitive market proceeds by haggling rather than by fixation of an equivalent, which would entail a decoding of flux and the collapse of the mode of inscription on the socius. We are brought back to the point of departure: that exchange is inhibited and conjured testifies in no way to its primary reality, but demonstrates on the contrary that the essential is, not to exchange, but to inscribe, to mark. And when one makes of exchange an unconscious reality, one may invoke the rights of structure, and the necessary inadequation of attitudes and ideologies in relation to this structure, one merely hypostasizes the principles of an exchangist psychology to account for institutions which one recognizes on the other hand are not of exchange. And above all what does one do with the unconscious itself, if not reduce it explicitly to an empty form, from which desire itself is absent and expelled? Such a form may define a preconscious, surely not the unconscious. For if it is true that the unconscious has no material or content, it is certainly not to the profit of an empty form, but because it is always and already functioning machine, machine of desire and not anorexic structure.

177The difference between machine and structure appears in the postulates that implicitly animate the structural exchangist conception of the socius, with the corrections that must be introduced so that the structure is able to function. First, one can scarcely avoid in kinship structures acting as if alliances flowed from lines of filiation and their relations, although lateral alliances and debt blocks condition extended filiations in the system in extension, and not the inverse. Second, one tends to make of it a logical combinatory, instead of taking it for what it is, a physical system where intensities are distributed, some of which cancel each other out and block a current, others of which allow the current to pass, etc.: the objection according to which the qualities developed in the system are not merely physical objects, "but also dignities, charges, privileges," seems to indicate a misrecognition of the role of incommensurables and inequalities in the conditions of the system. Precisely, in the third place, the structural exchangist conception has a tendency to postulate a sort of price equilibrium, equivalence or equality primary in the principles, even if it means explaining that inequalities introduce themselves necessarily in the consequences. Nothing is more significant in this regard than the polemic between Lévi-Strauss and Leach concerning Kachin marriage; invoking a "conflict between the egalitarian conditions of generalized exchange and its aristocratic consequences," Lévi-Strauss acts as if Leach had believed that the system was in equilibrium. Yet the problem is quite other: it is a matter of knowing whether disequilibrium is pathological and of consequence, as Lévi-Strauss believes, or whether it is functional and of principle, as Leach thinks.{142} Is instability derived with respect to an ideal of exchange, or is it already given in the presuppositions, comprised in the heterogeneity of the terms that compose the prestations and counter-prestations? The more one pays attention to the economic and political transactions that alliances convey, to the nature of the counter-prestations that come to compensate for the disequilibrium of farm prestations, and generally to the original manner in which the entirety of prestations is evaluated in a particular society, the better appears the necessarily open character of the system in extension, as well as the primitive mechanism of surplus-value as surplus-value of code. But—and this is the fourth point—the exchangist conception needs to postulate a closed system, statistically closed, and to bring to the structure the support of a psychological conviction ("the confidence that the cycle will close again"). Not only the essential openness of debt blocks following lateral alliances and successive generations, but above all the relation of statistical formations to their molecular elements are then referred to simple empirical reality as inadequate to the structural model.{143} Now all of this, in the last analysis, depends upon a postulate that burdens exchangist ethnology no less than it has determined bourgeois political economy: the reduction of social reproduction to the sphere of circulation. One retains the apparent objective movement as it is described on the socius, without taking into account the real instance that inscribes it and the forces, economic and political, with which it is inscribed; one does not see that alliance is the form under which the socius appropriates the connexions of labor in the disjunctive régime of its inscriptions. "From the point of view of relations of production in effect, the circulation of women appears as a distribution of labor-power, but, in the ideological representation that society gives itself of its economic base, this aspect is effaced before the relations of exchange which, nevertheless, are simply the form that this distribution takes in the sphere of circulation: in isolating the moment of circulation in the process of reproduction, ethnology ratifies this representation," and gives all its colonial extension to bourgeois economy.{144} It is in this sense that what seemed essential to us was, not exchange and circulation which depend closely on the requirements of inscription, but inscription itself, with its traits of fire, its alphabet in bodies and its debt blocks. Never would the soft structure function, and never would it circulate, without the hard machinic element that presides over inscriptions.

178# Savage formations are oral, vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they have a graphic system independent of the voice, which does not align with it and does not subordinate itself to it, but is connected to it, coordinated "in an organization in some sense radiating" and multidimensional. (And it must be said the opposite of linear writing: civilizations cease to be oral only by dint of losing the independence and proper dimensions of the graphic system; it is by aligning itself with the voice that graphism supplants it and induces a fictive voice). Leroi-Gourhan admirably described these two heterogeneous poles of savage inscription or territorial representation: the couple voice-audition, and hand-graphy.{145} How does such a machine function? — for it functions: the voice is like a voice of alliance, to which without resemblance a graphy is coordinated, on the side of extended filiation. On the body of the young girl is placed the gourd of excision. Furnished by the lineage of the husband, it is the gourd that serves as conductor to the voice of alliance; but the graphism must be traced by a member of the clan of the young girl. The articulation of the two elements is made on the body itself, and constitutes the sign, which is not resemblance or imitation, nor effect of signifier, but position and production of desire: "For the transformation of the young girl to be fully effective, there must occur a direct contact between her belly on one hand, the gourd and the signs inscribed upon it on the other. The young girl must imbue herself physically with the signs of procreation and incorporate them into herself. The signification of the ideograms is never taught to young girls during their initiation. The sign acts through its inscription in the body… The inscription of a mark in the body has not only the value of a message here, but is an instrument of action that acts upon the body itself… The signs command the things they signify, and the artisan of signs, far from being a simple imitator, accomplishes a work that recalls the work divine".{146} But how to explain the role of sight, indicated by Leroi-Gourhan, equally in the contemplation of the face that speaks as in the reading of manual graphism? Or, more precisely: by virtue of what is the eye capable of grasping a terrible equivalence between the voice of alliance that inflicts and obligates, and the body afflicted by the sign that a hand engraves in it? Must we not add a third side to the other two, a third element of the sign: eye-pain, besides voice-audition and hand-graphy? The patient in the rituals of affliction does not speak, but receives speech. He does not act, but is passive under the action of graphism, he receives the stamp of the sign. And his pain, what is it except a pleasure for the eye that regards it, the collective or divine eye which is animated by no idea of vengeance, but alone apt to grasp the subtle relation between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face — between the mark and the mask. Between these two elements of the code, pain is like the surplus-value that the eye draws, grasping the effect of active speech upon the body, but also the reaction of the body as it is acted upon. This is indeed what must be called system of debt or territorial representation: voice that speaks or chants, sign marked in full flesh, eye that draws enjoyment from pain, — these are the three sides of a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and retention, theater of cruelty which implies the triple independence of articulated voice, graphic hand and appreciating eye. This is how territorial representation organizes itself at the surface, still very close to a machine of desire eye-hand-voice. Magic triangle. Everything is active, acted upon or reacted to in this system, the action of the voice of alliance, the passion of the body of filiation, the reaction of the eye appreciating the declination of the two. To choose the stone that will make the young Guayaki a man, with enough pain and suffering, by splitting the length of his back: "It must have a side well sharp" (says Clastres in an admirable text) "but not like the bamboo splinter that cuts too easily. To choose the adequate stone thus requires good eye. The entire apparatus of this new ceremony reduces itself to this: a pebble… Skin furrowed, earth scarified, one and the same mark".{147}

179The great book of modern ethnology is less Mauss's Essay on the Gift than Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. At least it should be. For the Genealogy, the second dissertation, is an attempt and an unequaled success in interpreting primitive economy in terms of debt, in the creditor-debtor relation, by eliminating all consideration of exchange or interest "in the English manner." And if one eliminates them from psychology, it is not to put them in the structure. Nietzsche has only meager material, ancient Germanic law, a bit of Hindu law. But he does not hesitate as Mauss does between exchange and debt (Bataille will not hesitate either, under the Nietzschean inspiration that moves him). Never has the fundamental problem of the primitive socius been posed so acutely, which is that of inscription, of code, of the mark. Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, great bio-cosmic memory that would bring deluge over every attempt at collectivity. But, at the same time, how to give him a new memory, a collective memory that would be that of words and alliances, that declines alliances with extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of extraction and detachment, and that thus operates the coding of the flux of desire as condition of the socius? The answer is simple, it is debt, these are the opened, mobile and finite blocks of debt, this extraordinary compound of the speaking voice, of the marked body and of the eye taking pleasure. All the stupidity and arbitrariness of laws, all the pain of initiations, all the perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons and atrocious procedures have only this meaning, to train man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him in the creditor-debtor relation which, from both sides, happens to be a matter of memory (a memory stretched toward the future). Far from being an appearance that exchange takes on, debt is the immediate effect or the direct means of territorial and corporeal inscription. Debt flows straight from inscription. Once again one will invoke here no vengeance, no resentment (it is not on this earth that they grow, any more than Oedipus). That the innocent undergo all the marks in their body, this comes from the respective autonomy of the voice and of graphism, and also from the autonomous eye that draws pleasure from it. It is not because one suspects each person, in advance, of being a bad future debtor; it would rather be the opposite. It is the bad debtor that one must understand as if the marks had not sufficiently "taken" on him, as if he was or had been unmarked. He merely enlarged beyond the permitted limits the gap that separated the voice of alliance and the body of filiation, to the point that equilibrium must be restored by a surplus of pain. Nietzsche does not say it, but what does it matter? For it is precisely there that he encounters the terrible equation of debt, damage caused = pain to undergo. How to explain, he asks, that the pain of the criminal can serve as "equivalent" to the damage he has caused? How can one "pay oneself" with suffering? One must invoke an eye that draws pleasure from it (nothing to do with vengeance): what Nietzsche himself calls the evaluating eye, or the eye of gods amateur of cruel spectacles, "so much does punishment have the appearance of a festival!" So much does pain form part of an active life and a complacent gaze. The equation damage = pain has nothing exchangist about it, and shows in this limiting case that debt itself had nothing to do with exchange. Simply, the eye draws from the pain it contemplates a surplus-value of code, which compensates for the broken relation between the voice of alliance to which the criminal has failed, and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated his body. Crime, rupture of phono-graphic connection, restored by the spectacle of punishment: primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything.

180She had foreseen everything, coding pain and death — except the manner in which her own death would come to her from without. "They arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without regard, without pretext, they are there with the rapidity of lightning, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too other to be even an object of hatred. Their work consists in creating instinctively forms, in striking imprints, they are the most involuntary and most unconscious artists that exist: where they appear, in little time there is something new, a sovereign gear that is alive, where each part, each function is delimited and determined, where nothing finds place that does not first have its significance in relation to the whole. They do not know, these organizers of birth, what it is that fault, responsibility, deference; in them reigns this frightening egoism of the artist with the brazen gaze, and who knows himself justified in advance in his work, in all eternity, as the mother in her child. It is not with them, one divines, that bad conscience germinated — but without it would not have risen, this horrible plant, it would not exist, if, under the shock of their hammer blows, of their tyranny of artists, a prodigious quantity of freedom had not disappeared from the world, or at least disappeared to all eyes, constrained to pass into a latent state."{148} It is here that Nietzsche speaks of cuts, of rupture, of leap. Who are they, these they arriving like fatality? ("some horde of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters who, with their warlike organization doubled by the force of organizing, lets without scruple fall its formidable claws upon a population perhaps infinitely superior in number, but still inorganic…"). Even the oldest African myths speak to us of these blond men. They are the founders of State. It will happen to Nietzsche to establish other cuts: those of the Greek city, of Christianity, of democratic and bourgeois humanism, of industrial society, of capitalism and socialism. But it is possible that all, at diverse titles, suppose this first great cut, although they also claim to repel and fill it. It is possible that, spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, there has never been but a single State, the dog-State that "speaks in smoke and howlings". And Nietzsche suggests how this new socius proceeds: an unprecedented terror, in relation to which the old system of cruelty, the forms of training and primitive punishment are nothing. A concerted destruction of all primitive codages, or, worse still, their derisory preservation, their reduction to the state of secondary pieces in the new machine, and the new apparatus of repression. What constituted the essential of the primitive inscription machine, the mobile blocks of debt, open and finished, "the parcels of destiny", all of that finds itself taken in an immense gearing that renders debt infinite and forms no more than a single and same crushing fatality: "It will be necessary henceforth that the perspective of a liberation disappear once and for all in pessimistic mist, it will be necessary henceforth that the desperate gaze discourage itself before an iron impossibility…" The earth becomes an asylum of the mad.

SECTION 5

181The establishment of the despotic machine or barbaric socius can be summarized thus: new alliance and direct filiation. The despot rejects the lateral alliances and extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance and places himself in direct filiation with the god: the people must follow. To leap into a new alliance, to break with the old filiation; this is expressed in a strange machine, or rather in a machine of the strange having its place in the desert, imposing the harshest ordeals, the driest, and testifying equally to the resistance of an ancient order and to the authentication of the new order. The machine of the strange is at once the great paranoiac machine, since it expresses the struggle with the old system, and already glorious celibate machine, insofar as it mounts the triumph of the new alliance. The despot is the paranoiac (there is no longer any inconvenience in holding such a proposition, from the moment one has rid oneself of the familialism proper to the conception of paranoia in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and sees in paranoia a type of investment of social formation). And new perverse groups propagate the invention of the despot (perhaps even they fabricated it for him), spread his glory and impose his power in the cities they found or conquer. Wherever a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes, functionaries are part of the cortege. It is as if the old complementarity had slid to form a new socius: no longer the paranoiac of the bush and the perverts of village or encampment, but the paranoiac of the desert and the perverts of the city.

182In principle, the barbaric despotic formation must be thought in opposition to the primitive territorial machine, and is established on its ruins: birth of an empire. But, in reality, one can grasp the movement of this formation equally well when an empire detaches itself from a preceding empire; or even when the dream of a spiritual empire surges forth, there where temporal empires fall into decadence. The enterprise may be above all military and of conquest, it may be religious above all, military discipline being converted into asceticism and internal cohesion. It may be that the paranoiac is himself a gentle creature or an unleashed beast. But always we find again the figure of this paranoiac and his perverts, the conqueror and his elite troops, the despot and his bureaucrats, the holy man and his disciples, the anchorite and his monks, Christ and his saint Paul. Moses flees the Egyptian machine in the desert, installs his new machine there, holy ark and portable temple, and gives his people a religious-military organization. To sum up the enterprise of saint John the Baptist, one says: "John attacks at the base the central doctrine of Judaism, that of the alliance with God through a filiation ascending to Abraham."{149} This is the essential: we speak of barbaric imperial formation or of despotic machine each time the categories of new alliance and direct filiation are found mobilized. And, whatever the context of this mobilization, whether or not in relation to preceding empires, since through these vicissitudes the imperial formation always defines itself by a certain type of code and inscription which opposes by right the primitive territorial codings. It matters little what number the alliance is: new alliance and direct filiation are specific categories which attest to a new socius, irreducible to the lateral alliances and extended filiations that the primitive machine declined. What defines paranoia is this power of projection, this force of starting over from zero, of objectifying a complete transformation: the subject leaps out of the alliance-filiation crossings, installs itself at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that connects it directly to God and connects it to the people. For the first time something has been withdrawn from life and from earth which will permit judging life and overflying the earth, principle of paranoiac knowledge. The whole relative play of alliances and filiations is carried to the absolute in this new alliance and this direct filiation.

183The fact remains that, to understand barbaric formation, one must refer it not to other formations of the same kind that it competes with, temporally or spiritually, following relations that obscure the essential, but to the primitive savage formation that it supplants by right, and which continues to haunt it. It is indeed thus that Marx defines Asiatic production: a superior unity of the State establishes itself on the basis of primitive rural communities, which retain the property of the soil, while the State is its true proprietor in conformity with the apparent objective movement which attributes the surplus to it, returns productive forces to it in grand works, and causes it to appear itself as the cause of the collective conditions of appropriation.{150} The full body as socius has ceased to be the earth; it has become the body of the despot, the despot himself or his god. The prescriptions and interdicts which often render it nearly incapable of acting make of it a body without organs. It is he, the unique quasi-cause, the source and estuary of apparent movement. Instead of mobile detachments of signifying chain, a detached object has leaped out of the chain; instead of extractions of flux, all flux converges in a great river which constitutes the consumption of the sovereign: radical change of régime in the fetish or the symbol. What matters is not the person of the sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited. It is the social machine that has profoundly changed: instead of the territorial machine, the "megamachine" of State, functional pyramid which has the despot at its summit, immobile motor, the bureaucratic apparatus as lateral surface and organ of transmission, the villagers at the base and as working parts. Stocks become the object of an accumulation, blocs of debt become an infinite relation in the form of tribute. All the surplus-value of code is object of appropriation. This conversion traverses all the syntheses, those of production with the hydraulic machine, the mining machine, inscription with the accounting machine, the writing machine, the monumental machine, consumption finally with the upkeep of the despot, of his court and of the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the principle of a territorialization which inscribes people according to their residence, we must see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement of deterritorialization which divides the earth as an object and submits men to the new imperial inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius.

184"They arrive like destiny, … they are there with the speed of lightning, too terrible, too sudden…" It is that the death of the primitive system always comes from without, history is that of contingencies and encounters. Like a cloud come from the desert, the conquerors are there: "Impossible to understand how they penetrated," how they crossed "so many high desert plateaus, so many vast fertile plains… Yet they are there, and each morning seems to increase their number… To converse with them, impossible! They do not know our language."{151} But this death that comes from without, it is also the death that rose from within: the general irreducibility of alliance to filiation, the independence of alliance groups, the manner in which they served as conducting element to economic and political relations, the system of primitive ranks, the mechanism of surplus-value, all of this already sketched out despotic formations and orders of castes. And how to distinguish the way in which the primitive community distrusts its own institutions of chieftaincy, conjures or garottes the image of the possible despot that it would secrete within itself, and that in which it binds the become-derisory symbol of an ancient despot that imposed itself from without, long ago? It is not always easy to know whether it is a primitive community that represses an endogenous tendency, or that finds itself more or less after a terrible exogenous adventure. The play of alliances is ambiguous: are we still short of the new alliance, or already beyond, and as fallen back into a residual and transformed short-of? (Subsidiary question: what is feudality?). We can only assign the precise moment of imperial formation as that of the new exogenous alliance, not only in place of the ancient alliances, but in relation to them. And this new alliance is something entirely other than a treaty, a contract. For, what is suppressed is not the ancient régime of lateral alliances and extended filiations, but only their determining character. They subsist, more or less modified, more or less arranged by the great paranoiac, since they furnish the matter of surplus-value. It is precisely this which makes the specific character of Asiatic production: the indigenous rural communities subsist, and continue to produce, to inscribe, to consume; the State has even to do only with them. The mechanisms of the lineage-territorial machine subsist, but are no longer than the laboring pieces of the State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons and the groups keep at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flux of the ancient régime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates the surplus-value. The ancient inscription remains, but bricked by and within State inscription. The blocs subsist, but have become bricks encased and inset, having no more than a commanded mobility. The territorial alliances are not replaced, but only allied to the new alliance; the territorial filiations are not replaced, but only affiliated to direct filiation. It is like an immense right of primogeniture over all filiation, an immense droit du seigneur over all alliance. The filiative stock becomes the object of an accumulation in the other filiation, the debt of alliance becomes an infinite relation in the other alliance. It is the entire primitive system that finds itself mobilized, requisitioned by a superior power, subjugated by new exterior forces, put to the service of other aims; so true it is, said Nietzsche, that what one calls evolution of a thing is "a constant succession of more or less violent phenomena of subjection, more or less independent, without forgetting the resistances that rise ceaselessly, the attempts at metamorphosis that operate to concur in the defense and the reaction, finally the happy results of actions in contrary sense."

185One has often remarked that the State begins (or begins again) with two fundamental acts, one said to be of territoriality by fixation of residence, the other said to be of liberation by abolition of small debts. But the State proceeds by euphemism. Pseudo-territoriality is the product of an effective deterritorialisation which substitutes abstract signs for signs of the earth, and which makes of the earth itself the object of a State property, or of its richest servants and functionaries (and there is not much change, from this point of view, when the State merely guarantees the private property of a dominant class which distinguishes itself from it). The abolition of debts, when it takes place, is a means of maintaining the distribution of lands, and of preventing the entry onto the scene of a new territorial machine, possibly revolutionary and capable of posing or treating in all its amplitude the agrarian problem. In other cases where a redistribution takes place, the cycle of claims is maintained, under the new form instituted by the State — money. For, certainly, money does not begin by serving commerce, or at least does not have an autonomous commercial model. The despotic machine has this in common with the primitive machine, it shares it with it in this regard: the horror of decoded flux, flux of production, but also commercial flux of exchange and commerce which would escape the State's monopoly, its gridding, its stamp. When Étienne Balazs asks: why was capitalism not born in China in the thirteenth century, where all the scientific and technical conditions nonetheless seemed to be given?, the answer lies in the State which closed the mines as soon as metal reserves were judged sufficient, and which maintained monopoly or tight control of commerce (the merchant as functionary).{152} The role of money in commerce owes less to commerce itself than to its control by the State. The relation of commerce to money is synthetic, not analytic. And fundamentally money is inseparable, not from commerce, but from the tax as maintenance of the State apparatus. There where dominant classes distinguish themselves from this apparatus and serve themselves of it for the profit of private property, the despotic link of money with the tax remains visible. Drawing on Will's research, Michel Foucault shows how, in certain Greek tyrannies, the tax on aristocrats and the distribution of money to the poor are a means of bringing money back to the rich, of singularly enlarging the régime of debts, of rendering it still more strong, by preventing and repressing any re-territorialisation which could take place through the economic data of the agrarian problem.{153} (As if the Greeks had discovered in their way what the Americans would rediscover after the New Deal: that heavy State taxes are propitious to good business.) In short, money, the circulation of money, is the means of rendering debt infinite. And that is what the two acts of the State conceal: the residence or State territoriality inaugurates the great movement of deterritorialisation which subordinates all primitive filiations to the despotic machine (agrarian problem); the abolition of debts or their accounting transformation open the task of an interminable State service which subordinates to itself all primitive alliances (problem of debt). The infinite creditor, infinite claim has replaced the mobile and finite blocks of debt. There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: debt becomes debt of existence, debt of the existence of the subjects themselves. There comes the time when the creditor has not yet lent while the debtor does not stop rendering, for rendering is a duty, but lending, it is a faculty — as in Lewis Carroll's song, the long song of infinite debt:

186"A man can certainly demand what is due to him,"

187but when it is a matter of the loan,

188he can certainly choose

189the time that suits him best».{154}

190The despotic State, as it appears under the purest conditions of so-called Asiatic production, has two correlative aspects: on one hand it replaces the territorial machine, it forms a new deterritorialized full body; on the other hand it maintains the old territorialities, integrating them as pieces or organs of production in the new machine. It achieves its perfection precisely because it functions on the basis of dispersed rural communities, as preexisting autonomous or semi-autonomous machines from the point of view of production; but from that same point of view, it reacts upon them by producing the conditions of grand works that exceed the power of distinct communities. What is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new one, a disjunctive synthesis whereby the old filiations effuse onto the direct filiation, uniting all subjects in the new machine. The essence of the State is therefore the creation of a second inscription by which the new full body, immobile, monumental, immutable, appropriates all forces and agents of production; but this State inscription allows the old territorial inscriptions to subsist, in the capacity of "bricks" on the new surface. There follows finally the manner in which the conjunction of the two parts is effected, the respective shares that devolve upon the superior proprietary unity and the possessing communities, upon overcoding and intrinsic codes, upon appropriated surplus-value and utilized usufruct, upon the State machine and the territorial machines. As in the Great Wall of China, the State is the superior transcendent unity integrating relatively isolated sub-ensembles, functioning separately, to which it assigns a development in bricks and a work of construction by fragments. Partial objects scattered attached to the body without organs. No one like Kafka knew how to show that law had nothing to do with a harmonious natural totality, immanent, but acted as eminent formal unity, and reigned in this capacity over fragments and pieces (the wall and the tower). So the State is not primitive, it is origin or abstraction, it is the originary abstract essence that does not merge with the beginning. "The Emperor is the sole object of all our thoughts. Not the reigning Emperor... He would be its object, I mean to say, if we knew him, if we had on his subject the least precision!... The people do not know which emperor reigns, and the very name of the dynasty remains uncertain to them... In our villages emperors long since dead mount the throne, and one who lives only in legend has just promulgated a decree of which the priest gives reading at the foot of the altar." As for the sub-ensembles themselves, primitive territorial machines, they are indeed the concrete, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments enter here into relations corresponding to essence, they take on precisely this form of bricks that assures their integration into the superior unity, and their distributive functioning, conforming to the collective designs of that same unity (grand works, extraction of surplus-value, tribute, generalized slavery). Two inscriptions coexist in the imperial formation, and are reconciled insofar as one is bricked into the other, the other by contrast cementing the whole and relating producers and products (they have no need to speak the same language). The imperial inscription cuts across all alliances and filiations, extends them, makes them converge on the direct filiation of the despot with the god, the new alliance of the despot with the people. All the coded flux of the primitive machine are now driven to an estuary, where the despotic machine overcodes them. Overcoding, such is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State, and that measures at once its continuity and its rupture with the old formations: the horror of flux of desire that would not be coded, but also the institution of a new inscription that overcodes, and that makes desire the thing of the sovereign, were it death drive. Castes are inseparable from overcoding, and imply "classes" dominating that do not yet manifest themselves as classes, but merge with a State apparatus. Who can touch the full body of the sovereign? There is a problem of caste. It is overcoding that dispossesses the earth to the benefit of the deterritorialized full body, and which, on this full body, renders the movement of debt infinite. The power of Nietzsche, in having marked the importance of such a moment that begins with the founders of States, these "artists with brazen gaze, forging a murderous and pitiless mechanism," erecting before all prospect of liberation an impossibility of iron. Not exactly that this infinitivization can be understood, as Nietzsche says, as a consequence of the play of ancestors, of deep genealogies and extended filiations — but rather when these are short-circuited, captured by the new alliance and the direct filiation: it is there that the ancestor, the master of mobile and finite blocks, finds himself dispossessed by the god, the immobile organizer of bricks and their infinite circuit.

SECTION 6

191Incest with the sister, incest with the mother are very different things. The sister is not a substitute for the mother: one belongs to the connective category of alliance, the other to the disjunctive category of filiation. If one is prohibited, it is insofar as the conditions of territorial coding require that alliance not be confused with filiation; and the other, that descent in filiation not collapse back onto ascendancy. This is why the despote's incest is double, by virtue of the new alliance and direct filiation. It begins by marrying the sister. But this forbidden endogamic marriage, he performs it outside the tribe, insofar as he himself is outside his tribe, outside or at the limits of the territory. This is what Pierre Gordon showed in a strange book: the same rule that proscribes incest must prescribe it to certain ones. Exogamy must result in the position of men outside the tribe who are enabled on their own account to perform an endogamic marriage and, by the dreadful virtue of this marriage, to serve as initiators to the exogamic subjects of both sexes (the "sacred deflowerer," "the ritual initiator" on the mountain or on the other side of water).{155} Desert, land of betrothals. All flux converge toward such a man, all alliances are found recut by this new alliance which overcodes them. The endogamic marriage outside the tribe puts the hero in a position to overcode all exogamic marriages within the tribe. It is clear that incest with the mother has an entirely other sense: it is this time the mother of the tribe, as she exists in the tribe, as the hero finds her in entering the tribe or finds her again in returning to it, after his first marriage. It recuts the extended filiations with a direct filiation. The hero, initiated or initiating, becomes king. The second marriage develops the consequences of the first, it draws out its effects. The hero begins by marrying the sister, then he marries the mother. That the two acts can at varying degrees be agglutinated, assimilated, does not prevent there being two sequences: the union with the princess-sister, the union with the mother-queen. Incest goes by two. The hero is always astride between two groups, one in which he goes to find his sister, the other where he returns to find his mother. This double incest does not aim to produce a flux, even a magical one, but to overcode all existing flux, and to ensure that no intrinsic code, no underlying flux escapes the overcoding of the despotic machine; thus it is by its sterility that it guarantees general fecundity.{156} The marriage with the sister is outside, it is the trial of the desert, it expresses the spatial distance from the primitive machine; it gives a conclusion to ancient alliances; it founds the new alliance by operating a generalized appropriation of all debts of alliance. The marriage with the mother is the return to the tribe; it expresses the temporal distance from the primitive machine (difference of generations); it constitutes the direct filiation that flows from the new alliance, by operating a generalized accumulation of filial stock. Both are necessary to overcoding, as the two ends of a link for the despotic knot.

192Let us stop here: how is such a thing possible? How did incest become "possible," and the manifest property or seal of the despot? What is it, this sister, this mother — those of the despot himself? Or does the question pose itself otherwise? For it concerns the entire system of representation, when it ceases to be territorial in order to become imperial. First, we sense that the elements of representation in depth have begun to move: the cellular migration has begun, which will carry the oedipal cell from one place of representation to another. In the imperial formation, incest has ceased to be the displaced represented of desire in order to become the repressing representation itself. For there is no doubt, this manner that the despot has of committing incest, and of rendering it possible, consists in no way of lifting the apparatus of repression-refoulement; on the contrary, it is part of it, it only changes its pieces, and still it is always in the capacity of displaced represented that incest now comes to occupy the position of repressing representation. One more gain in sum, a new economy in the repressing-repressive apparatus, a new mark, a new hardness. Easy, too easy if it were sufficient to render incest possible, and to effectuate it sovereignly, for the exercise of refoulement and the service of repression to cease. Barbaric royal incest, it is only the means of overcoding the flux of desire, certainly not of liberating them. O Caligula, O Heliogabalus, O mad memory of vanished emperors. Incest having never been desire, but only its displaced represented as it results from refoulement, repression can only gain from it when it comes to the place of representation itself and takes on at this title the repressing function (it is what one already saw in psychosis, where the intrusion of the complex into consciousness, following the traditional criterion, certainly did not lighten the refoulement of desire). With the new place of incest in the imperial formation, we therefore speak only of a migration in the elements in depth of representation, which will render it more foreign, more pitiless, more definitive or more "infinite" with respect to desiring production. But never would this migration be possible if there did not occur correlatively a considerable change in the other elements of representation, those that play on the surface of the inscribing socius.

193What changes singularly in the organization of surface representation is the relation of voice and graphism: the oldest authors saw it well, it is the despot who makes writing, it is the imperial formation that makes graphism into writing properly speaking. Legislation, bureaucracy, accounting, tax collection, state monopoly, imperial justice, the activity of functionaries, historiography, all is written in the retinue of the despot. Let us return to the paradox that emerges from Leroi-Gourhan's analyses: primitive societies are oral, not because they lack graphism, but on the contrary because graphism in them is independent of voice, and marks on bodies signs that respond to voice, that react to voice, but which are autonomous and do not align themselves with it; in contrast, barbarian civilizations are written, not because they have lost voice, but because the graphic system has lost its independence and its own dimensions, has aligned itself with voice, has subordinated itself to voice, even if it extracts from it an abstract deterritorialized flux that it retains and makes resonate in the linear code of writing. In short, it is in a single movement that graphism begins to depend on voice, and induces a mute voice from the heights or from beyond that begins to depend on graphism. It is by force of subordinating itself to voice that writing supplants it. Jacques Derrida is right to say that every language supposes an originary writing, if he means by that the existence and connection of any graphism whatsoever (writing in the broad sense). He is also right to say that one can scarcely establish cuts, in writing in the narrow sense, between pictographic, ideogrammatic and phonetic procedures: there is always already alignment on voice, at the same time as substitution for voice (supplementarity), and "phoneticism is never all-powerful, but also has always already begun to work the mute signifier." He is also right to link mysteriously writing to incest. But we see in this no reason to conclude to the constancy of a repression apparatus on the mode of a graphic machine that would proceed as much by hieroglyphs as by phonemes.{157} For there is indeed a cut that changes everything in the world of representation, between this writing in the narrow sense and writing in the broad sense, that is to say between two régimes of inscription altogether afferent, graphism that leaves voice dominant by force of being independent from it while connecting itself to it, graphism that dominates or supplants voice by force of depending on it through various procedures and of subordinating itself to it. The primitive territorial sign is valid only for itself, it is position of desire in multiple connection, it is not sign of a sign or desire of a desire, it ignores linear subordination and its reciprocity: neither pictogram nor ideogram, it is rhythm and not form, zigzag and not line, artifact and not idea, production and not expression. Let us try to summarize the differences between these two forms of representation, the territorial and the imperial.

194Territorial representation is first made of two heterogeneous elements, voice and graphism: one is like the representation of word constituted in the lateral alliance, the other like the representation of thing (of body) established in extended filiation. One acts on the other, the other reacts to the one, each with its own power which connotes itself with that of the other to operate the great task of intense germinal repression. What is repressed, indeed, is the full body as foundation of intense earth, which must make place for the socius in extension in which the intensities in question may or may not pass. The full body of the earth must take on an extension in the socius and as socius. Primitive socius thus covers itself with a network where one ceases to jump from words to things, from bodies to appellations, following the extensive requirements of the system in length and breadth. What we call régime of connotation is a régime where the word as vocal sign designates something, but where the designated thing is no less sign, because it hollows itself out of a graphism connoted to the voice. The heterogeneity, the solution of continuity, the disequilibrium of the two elements, vocal and graphic, is caught up by a third, the visual element — eye of which one might say it sees the word (it sees it, it does not read it) insofar as it evaluates the pain of graphism. J. F. Lyotard attempted to describe in another context such a system, where the word has only designating function, but does not constitute by itself alone the sign; what becomes sign is rather the thing or body designated as such, insofar as it reveals an unknown face defined upon it, traced by the graphism that answers the word; the gap between the two is found filled by the eye, which "sees" the word without reading it, insofar as it appreciates the pain emanating from graphism in full body: the eye jumps. Régime of connotation, system of cruelty, such has seemed to us to be the magic triangle with its three sides, voice-audition, graphism-body, eye-pain: where the word is essentially designating, but where graphism makes itself a sign with the designated thing, and where the eye goes from one to the other, extracting and measuring the visibility of one to the pain of the other. All is active, acted, reacting in the system, all is in use and in function. So much so that when one considers the ensemble of territorial representation, one is struck to observe the complexity of the networks with which it covers the socius: the chain of territorial signs ceases to jump from one element to another, radiating in all directions, emitting detachments everywhere there are flux to extract, including disjunctions, consuming remainders, extracting surpluses, connecting words, bodies and pains, formulas, things and affects — connoting voices, graphies, eyes, always in a polyvalent use: a manner of jumping which is not gathered in a wanting-to-say, still less in a signifier. And if incest from this point of view has seemed to us impossible, it is that it is nothing other than a jump necessarily missed, that jump which goes from appellations to persons, from names to bodies: on one side, the beneath repressed of appellations which do not yet designate persons, but only germinal intensive states; on the other side, the beyond repressing which applies appellations to persons only by forbidding the persons who answer to the names of sister, mother, father… Between the two, the shallow stream where nothing passes, where appellations do not take on persons, where persons withdraw from graphism, and where the eye has nothing more to see, nothing more to evaluate: incest, simple limit displaced, neither repressed nor repressing, but only displaced represented of desire. It appears indeed from this moment that the two dimensions of representation — its surface organization with the elements voice-graphism-eye, and its organization in depth with the instances representing of desire-repressing representation-displaced represented — have a common fate, such as a complex system of correspondences within a given social machine.

195Now it is all this that finds itself overturned in a new destiny, with the despotic machine and imperial representation. In the first place, graphism aligns itself, folds back onto the voice and becomes writing. And at the same time it induces the voice no longer as that of alliance, but as that of the new alliance, fictive voice from beyond which expresses itself in the flux of writing as direct filiation. These two fundamental despotic categories are equally well the movement of graphism which, all at once, subordinates itself to the voice so as to subordinate the voice, to supplant the voice. There occurs from that point an crushing of the magic triangle: the voice no longer sings, but dictates, enacts; graphism no longer dances and ceases to animate bodies, but writes fixed on tables, stones and books; the eye begins to read (writing does not entrain, but implies a sort of blindness, a loss of vision and appreciation, and now it is the eye that aches, although it also acquires other functions). Or rather we cannot say that the magic triangle is completely crushed: it subsists as base, and as brick, in the sense that the territorial system continues to function within the frame of the new machine. The triangle has become base for a pyramid whose all faces make converge the vocal, the graphic, the visual toward the eminent unity of the despot. If one calls plane of consistency the régime of representation in a social machine, it is evident that this plane of consistency has changed, that it has become that of subordination, no longer of connotation. And here is well the essential in the second place: the folding back of graphism onto the voice has thrown outside the chain a transcendent object, mute voice on which the entire chain now seems to depend, and in relation to which it linearizes itself. The subordination of graphism to the voice induces a fictive voice from the heights which expresses itself no longer, inversely, except through the signs of writing that it emits (revelation). Perhaps it is there the first montage of formal operations that will lead to Oedipus (paralogism of extrapolation): a folding back or an ensemble of bi-univocal relations, which results in the exhaustion of a detached object, and the linearization of the chain that flows from this object. Perhaps it is there that the question "what does it mean?" begins, and that the problems of exegesis prevail over those of usage and efficacy. What did he mean to say, the emperor, the god? In place of segments of chain always detachable, a detached object on which the entire chain depends; in place of a polyvocal graphism at one with the real, a bi-univocization that forms the transcendent from which flows a linearity; in place of non-signifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial chain, a despotic signifier from which uniformly flows all signs, in a deterritorialized flux of writing. One has even seen men drink this flux. Zempléni shows how, in certain regions of Senegal, Islam superimposes a plane of subordination onto the old plane of connotation of animistic values: "Divine or prophetic speech, written or recited, is the foundation of this universe; the transparency of animistic prayer cedes place to the opacity of the rigid Arabic verse, the verb fixes itself in formulas whose power is assured by the truth of Revelation and not by a symbolic and incantatory efficacy… The science of the marabout refers indeed to a hierarchy of names, verses, numbers and corresponding beings" — and if need be, one will put the verse in a bottle filled with pure water, one will drink the water of verse, one will rub one's body with it, one will wash one's hands with it.{159} Writing, first deterritorialized flux, drinkable by this title: it flows from the despotic signifier. For what is the signifier in the first instance? what is it in relation to territorial non-signifying signs, when it leaps outside their chains and imposes, superimposes a plane of subordination onto their plane of immanent connotation? The signifier is the sign become sign of the sign, the despotic sign having replaced the territorial sign, having crossed the threshold of deterritorialization; the signifier is only the deterritorialized sign itself. The sign become letter. Desire no longer dares to desire, become desire of desire, desire of the desire of the despot. The mouth no longer speaks, it drinks the letter. The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer lets itself be engraved as the earth, but prostrates itself before the engravings of the despot, the beyond-earth, the new full body.

196No water will ever wash the signifier of its imperial origin: the master-signifier or "the master signifier." One may well drown the signifier in the immanent system of language, use it to evacuate problems of sense and signification, resolve it in the coexistence of phonematic elements where the signified is no more than the summary of the respective differential value of these elements among themselves; one may well push as far as possible the comparison of language with exchange and money, and submit it to the paradigms of an acting capitalism,—never will one prevent the signifier from reintroducing its transcendence, and from bearing witness to a vanished despot who still functions in modern imperialism. Even when it speaks Swiss or American, linguistics agitates the shadow of oriental despotism. Not only does Saussure insist on this: that the arbitrariness of language grounds its sovereignty, like a servitude or generalized slavery that the "masses" would undergo. But one has been able to show how two dimensions subsist in Saussure, one horizontal where the signified reduces itself to the value of minimal coexisting terms in which the signifier decomposes, but the other, vertical, where the signified rises to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image, that is to say to the voice taken in the maximum of its extension that recomposes the signifier (the "value" as the counterpart of coexisting terms, but also the "concept" as the counterpart of the acoustic image). In short, the signifier appears twice, once in the chain of elements in relation to which the signified is always a signifier for another signifier, and a second time in the detached object on which the entire chain depends and which spreads its effects of signification over it. There is no phonological nor even phonetic code operating on the signifier in the first sense, without an overcoding operated by the signifier itself in the second sense. There is no linguistic field without bi-univocal relations between ideographic and phonetic values, or else between articulations of different levels, monemes and phonemes, which finally assure the independence and linearity of deterritorialized signs; but this field remains defined by a transcendence, even when one considers it as absence or empty place, operating the foldings, the fold-backs and subordinations necessary, and from which flows into the entire system the inarticulate material flux in which it cuts, opposes, selects and combines: the signifier. It is therefore curious that one shows so well the servitude of the masses with respect to the minimal elements of the sign in the immanence of language, without showing how domination exercises itself through and in the transcendence of the signifier. There as elsewhere an irreducible exteriority of conquest affirms itself nonetheless. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the fold-back operations that constitute written language do indeed presuppose two inscriptions that do not speak the same language, two languages of which one is that of the masters, the other of the slaves. Nougayrol describes such a situation: "For the Sumerians, (such a sign), that is water; the Sumerians read this sign a, which means water in Sumerian. An Akkadian arrives and asks his Sumerian master: what is this sign? The Sumerian answers him: it is a. The Akkadian takes this sign for a, there is no longer any relation on this point between the sign and water which, in Akkadian, is said mû… I believe that the presence of the Akkadians determined the phonetization of writing… and that the contact of two peoples is almost necessary for the spark of a new writing to burst forth." One cannot better show how an operation of bi-univocization organizes itself around a despotic signifier, such that there flows from it a phonetic alphabetic chain. Alphabetic writing is not for the illiterates, but by the illiterates. It passes through the illiterates, these unconscious workers. The signifier implies a language that overcodes another, while the other is coded entirely in phonetic elements. And if the unconscious indeed comprises the topical régime of a double inscription, it is not structured like a language, but like two. The signifier does not seem to keep its promise, which is to make us accede to a modern and functional understanding of language. The imperialism of the signifier does not make us exit the question "what does it mean?", it merely bars the question in advance, and renders all answers insufficient by sending them back to the rank of a simple signified. It rejects exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, superior scientificity. Like the young palace dogs too quick to drink the water of verse, and who never cease to cry: the signifier, you have not attained the signifier, you remain with signifieds! The signifier, there is only that which makes them jouir. But this master-signifier remains what it is in the distant ages, transcendent stock that distributes lack to all elements of the chain, something common for a common absence, instituter of all cuts-flux in a single and same place of a single and same cut: detached object, phallus-and-castration, bar that subjects depressive subjects to the great paranoiac king. O signifier, terrible archaism of the despot where one still seeks the empty tomb, the dead father and the mystery of the name. And perhaps it is this that animates today the anger of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of the adherents: the force and serenity with which Lacan conducts the signifier back to its source, to its true origin, the despotic age, and sets up an infernal machine that welds desire to law, because, all things considered, he thinks, it is indeed under this form that the signifier agrees with the unconscious and produces effects of signified there. The signifier as repressing representation, and the new displaced represented it induces, the famous metaphors and metonymy, all of this constitutes the despotic overcoding and deterritorialized machine.

197The despot signifier has the effect of overcoding the territorial chain. The signified is precisely the effect of the signifier (not what it represents, nor what it designates). The signified is the sister of the confines and the mother of the interior. Sister and mother are the concepts that correspond to the great acoustic image, to the voice of the new alliance and direct filiation. Incest is the operation itself of overcoding at both ends of the chain throughout the entire territory where the despot reigns, from the confines to the center: all alliance debts converted into the infinite debt of the new alliance, all extended filiations subsumed by direct filiation. Incest or royal trinity is therefore the whole of repressing representation insofar as it proceeds to overcoding. The system of subordination or signification has replaced the system of connotation. Insofar as graphism is reduced to voice (this graphism that was inscribed formerly on the bodies themselves), the representation of body is subordinated to the representation of word: sister and mother are the signifieds of voice. But insofar as this reduction induces a fictive voice from the heights that expresses itself only in linear flux, the despot himself is the signifier of the voice that operates, with its two signifieds, the overcoding of the entire chain. What rendered incest impossible — namely that sometimes we had the appellations (mother, sister), but not the persons or bodies, sometimes we had the bodies, but the appellations withdrew as soon as we infringed the interdicts they carried — has ceased to exist. Incest has become possible in the marriages of kinship bodies and parental appellations, in the union of the signifier with its signifieds. The question is therefore in no way whether the despot unites with his "true" sister and his true mother. For his true sister is in any case the sister of the desert, as his true mother is in any case the mother of the tribe. As soon as incest is possible, it matters little whether it is simulated or not, since in any case something else still is simulated through incest. And following the complementarity we encountered previously, of simulation with identification, if identification is that of the object of the heights, simulation is indeed the writing that corresponds to it, the flux that flows from this object, the graphic flux that flows from voice. Simulation does not replace reality, it does not stand in for it, but appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces it on the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of the real by a quasi-cause. In incest, it is the signifier that makes love with its signifieds. System of simulation, such is the other name of signification and subordination. And what is simulated, thus produced, through incest itself simulated, thus produced — all the more real in that it is simulated and inversely — these are like the extreme states of an intensity reconstituted, recreated. With his sister, the despot simulates "a zero state from which phallic power would surge," as a promise "whose hidden presence must be situated at the extreme within the very body"; with his mother, a surpower where the two sexes would be at the maximum of their proper characteristics externalized: the B-A Ba of the phallus as voice. It is therefore always something else at stake in royal incest: bisexuality, homosexuality, castration, transvestism, as so many gradients and passages in the cycle of intensities. This is because the despotic signifier proposes to reconstitute what the primitive machine had repressed, the full body of the intense earth, but on new bases or new conditions given in the deterritorialized full body of the despot himself. This is why incest changes meaning or place, and becomes repressing representation. For this is what is at stake in overcoding through incest: that all the organs of all subjects, all eyes, all mouths, all penises, all vaginas, all ears, all anuses, cling to the despot's full body as to the tail of a peacock train, and have their intensive representatives there. Royal incest is inseparable from the intense multiplication of organs and their inscription on the new full body (Sade clearly saw this ever-royal role of incest). The apparatus of repression-repudiation, repressing representation is now determined as a function of a supreme danger that expresses the representative on which it bears: that a single organ flows out of the despotic body, detaches itself or withdraws from it, and the despot sees rise before him, against him, the enemy from whom death will come to him — an eye with too fixed a gaze, a mouth with too rare a smile, each organ is a possible protestation. It is at the same time that Caesar half-deaf complains of an ear that no longer hears, and sees weighing upon him the gaze of Cassius, "lean and starving," and the smile of Cassius "that seems to smile at his own smile." Long history that will lead the body of the assassinated despot, disorganized, dismembered, filed down, into the city latrines. Was it not already the anus that detached the object of the heights and produced the eminent voice? Did not the transcendence of the phallus depend on the anus? But this reveals itself only at the end, as the last survival of the disappeared despot, the underside of his voice: the despot is no more than this "tail of a dead rat suspended from the ceiling of heaven." The organs began by detaching themselves from the despotic body, organs of the citizen raised against the tyrant. Then they will become those of private man, they will privatize themselves on the model and memory of the deposed anus, placed outside the social field, haunting fear of smelling bad. All the history of primitive coding, of despotic overcoding, of the decoding of private man is held in these movements of flux: the intense germinal influx, the superflux of royal incest, the efflux of excrement that leads the dead despot to the latrines, and leads us all to the "private man" of today — the history sketched by Artaud in the masterpiece Heliogabalus. All the history of graphic flux goes from the flux of sperm at the tyrant's cradle, to the flux of shit in his tomb-sewer, — "all writing is piggery," all writing is this simulation, sperm and excrement.

198One might believe that the system of imperial representation is nevertheless milder than that of territorial representation. Signs are no longer inscribed in living flesh, but on stones, parchments, coins, lists. Following Wittfogel's law of "decreasing administrative profitability," vast sectors are left semi-autonomous, insofar as they do not compromise State power. The eye no longer draws surplus-value from the spectacle of pain, it has ceased to appreciate; it has rather begun to "prevent" and surveil, to prevent surplus-value from escaping the overcoding of the despotic machine. For all organs and their functions undergo an exhaustion that reports them and makes them converge on the full body of the despot. In truth, the régime is not milder, the system of terror has replaced that of cruelty. The old cruelty subsists, notably in autonomous or quasi-autonomous sectors; but it is now bricked into the State apparatus, which sometimes organizes it, sometimes tolerates or limits it, to make it serve its ends and subsume it under the superior and superimposed unity of a more terrible law. It is late indeed that law opposes or appears to oppose despotism (when the State presents itself as an apparent conciliator between classes that distinguish themselves from it, and must consequently remodel the form of its sovereignty).{164} Law does not begin by being what it will become or will later claim to become: a guarantee against despotism, an immanent principle that reunites the parts into a whole, that makes this whole the object of general knowledge and will, whose sanctions merely flow from judgment and application to rebellious parts. Barbarian imperial law rather has two characteristics that oppose those—the two characteristics that Kafka developed so forcefully: the paranoid-schizoid trait of law (metonymy), according to which it governs non-totalizable and non-totalized parts, partitioning them, organizing them like bricks, measuring their distance and forbidding their communication, acting henceforth in the capacity of a formidable Unity, but formal and empty, eminent, distributive and not collective; the manic-depressive trait (metaphor) according to which law makes nothing known and has no knowable object, the verdict not preexisting the sanction, and the statement of law not preexisting the verdict. Ordeal presents these two traits in vivid form. As in the machine of the Penal Colony, it is the sanction that writes both the verdict and the rule. The body may have freed itself from the graphism that was proper to it in the system of connotation, it becomes now the stone and paper, the table and coin on which the new writing can mark its figures, its phoneticism and its alphabet. To overcode, such is the essence of law, and the origin of the body's new pains. Punishment has ceased to be a celebration, from which the eye draws surplus-value in the magical triangle of alliance and filiations. Punishment becomes vengeance, vengeance of the voice, of the hand and of the eye now reunited on the despot, vengeance of the new alliance, whose public character does not alter the secret: "I will bring against you the avenging sword of the vengeance of alliance…" For, once again, law, before being a feigned guarantee against despotism, is the invention of the despot himself: it is the juridical form that infinite debt takes. Even among the late Roman emperors, one will see the jurist in the cortege of the despot, and the juridical form accompany imperial formation, the legislator with the monster, Gaius and Commodus, Papinian and Caracalla, Ulpian and Elagabal, "the delirium of the twelve Caesars and the golden age of Roman law" (taking the part of the debtor against the creditor if necessary to establish infinite debt).

199Vengeance, and like a vengeance exercised in advance, the barbarous imperial law crushes all the primitive play of action, of the acted and of reaction. Henceforth passivity must become the virtue of subjects connected to the despotic body. As Nietzsche says, when he shows precisely how punishment becomes vengeance in imperial formations, it is necessary that "a prodigious quantity of freedom have disappeared from the world, or at least disappeared from all eyes, forced to pass into a latent state, under the shock of their hammer blows, of their tyranny as artists…". There occurs an exhaustion of the death drive, which ceases to be coded in the play of wild actions and reactions where fatalism was still something acted, to become the somber agent of overcoding, the detached object that hovers over each one, as if the social machine had taken off from the machines of desire: death, desire of desire, desire of the desire of the despot, latence inscribed in the deepest reaches of the apparatus of State. Not a single survivor nor a single organ flows from this apparatus, or slips out from the despotic body. It is that there is no other necessity (no other fatum) than that of the signifier in its relations with its signifieds: such is the régime of terror. What the law is supposed to signify, one will know only later, when it will have evolved and taken the new figure that seems to oppose it to despotism. But, from the start, it expresses the imperialism of the signifier which produces its signifieds as effects all the more efficacious and necessary that they escape knowledge and owe everything to their eminent cause. It still happens that young dogs demand the return to the despotic signifier, without exegesis or interpretation, when the law wants nevertheless to explain what it signifies, to assert an independence of its signified (against the despot, it says). For dogs, following Kafka's observations, love that desire marry closely the law in the pure exhaustion of the death drive, rather than hear, it is true, hypocritical doctors explain what all that means. But all that, the development of the democratic signified or the winding of the despotic signifier, nonetheless forms part of the same question, sometimes open and sometimes barred, even continued abstraction, machinery of repression which always distances us from the machines of desire. For there was never but a single State. What is it good for? grows ever fainter, and disappears into the mist of pessimism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada! And, in effect, there is something in common in the régime of law as it appears under the imperial formation, and as it will evolve later: indifference to designation. It is the proper nature of law to signify without designating anything. The law designates nothing nor no one (the democratic conception of law will make of it a criterion). The complex relation of designation, as we saw it elaborate itself in the system of primitive connotation bringing into play the voice, the graphic and the eye, disappears here in the new relation of barbarous subordination. How could designation subsist when the sign has ceased to be position of desire, to become this imperial sign, universal castration that welds desire to the law? It is the crushing of the old code, it is the new relation of signification, it is the necessity of this new relation founded in overcoding, which send designations back to the arbitrary (or which leave them subsisting in the maintained bricks of the old system). Why do linguists never cease to rediscover the truths of the despotic age? And could it be finally that this arbitrariness of designations, as the reverse of a necessity of signification, bears not only on the subjects of the despot nor even on his servants, but on the despot himself, his dynasty and his name ("The people know not which emperor reigns, and the name of the dynasty remains uncertain to them")? Which would signify that the death drive is even more profound in the State than one believed, and that latence does not work there only the subjects, but in the highest mechanisms. Vengeance becomes that of the subjects against the despot. In the system of latence of terror, what is no longer active, acted or reacted, "what is rendered latent by force, tightened, repressed, turned inward," that very thing is now felt: the eternal ressentiment of the subjects answers to the eternal vengeance of despots. The inscription is "felt" when it is no longer acted or reacted. When the deterritorialized sign becomes signifier, a formidable quantity of reaction passes into a latent state, it is all resonance, all retention that changes in volume and in time ("the after-effect"). Vengeance and ressentiment, there you have not certainly the commencement of justice, but its becoming and its destiny in the imperial formation as Nietzsche analyzes it. And, following his prophecy, would the State itself be this dog that would wish to die? But also that is reborn from its ashes. For it is all this ensemble of the new alliance or of infinite debt — the imperialism of the signifier, the metaphorical or metonymical necessity of the signifieds, with the arbitrariness of designations — which assures the maintenance of the system, and which makes that a name succeeds to a name, a dynasty to another, without the signifieds changing, nor the wall of the signifier being pierced. This is why the régime of latence, in African, Chinese, Egyptian empires, etc., was that of constant rebellions and secessions, and not of revolution. There again it will be necessary that death be felt from within, but that it come from without.

200They made everything pass into latent state, the empire builders; they invented vengeance and aroused resentment, this counter-vengeance. And yet Nietzsche still says of them what he was already saying of the primitive system: it is not among them that "bad conscience"—understand Oedipus—took root and began to grow, the horrible plant. Simply, one more step was taken in this direction: Oedipus, bad conscience, interiority, they made it possible…{165} What does Nietzsche mean to say, he who dragged with him Caesar as despotic signifier, and his two signifieds, his sister and his mother, and felt them increasingly heavy as he approached madness? It is true that Oedipus began his cellular, ovular migration in imperial representation: from represented displaced of desire, it became the repressing representation itself. The impossible became possible; the unoccupied limit finds itself now occupied by the despot. Oedipus received his name, the despot with the club foot, operating the double incest through overcoding, with his sister and his mother as the representations of bodies subjected to verbal representation. Moreover, Oedipus is in the process of setting up each of the formal operations that will make it possible: the extrapolation of a detached object; the double bind of overcoding or royal incest; the bi-univocalization, the application and linearization of the chain between masters and slaves; the introduction of law into desire, and of desire under law; the terrible latency with its after-effect or its afterwardsness. All the pieces of the five paralogisms thus seem prepared. But we remain very far from psychoanalytic Oedipus, and the Hellenists are right not to grasp well the history that psychoanalysis tells them at all costs in the ear. It is indeed the history of desire, and its sexual history (there is no other). But all the pieces here function as gears of the State. Desire surely does not play between a son, a mother, and a father. Desire proceeds to a libidinal investment of a State machine, which overcodes territorial machines, and, by one further turn of the screw, represses machines of desire. Incest flows from this investment and not the inverse, and initially involves only the despot, the sister and the mother: it is he, the overcoding and repressing representation. The father intervenes only as the representative of the old territorial machine, but the sister is the representative of the new alliance, the mother, the representative of direct filiation. Father and son are not yet born. All sexuality happens between machines, struggle between them, superposition, bricking. Let us be amazed once more at the account reported by Freud. In Moses and Monotheism, he senses well that latency is a matter of State. But then it must not succeed the "Oedipus complex," mark the repression of the complex or even its suppression. It must result from the repressing action of the incestuous representation which is not at all yet a complex as repressed desire, since on the contrary it exercises its repressing action on desire itself. The Oedipus complex, as psychoanalysis names it, will be born from latency, after latency, and signifies the return of the repressed under conditions that disfigure, displace and even decode desire. The Oedipus complex appears only after latency; and when Freud recognizes two times separated by it, it is only the second time that deserves the name of complex, while the first expresses only its pieces and its gears functioning from an entirely different point of view, in an entirely different organization. This is the mania of psychoanalysis with all its paralogisms: to present as resolution or attempt at resolution of the complex what is its definitive institution or its interior installation, and to present as complex what is still its contrary. For what will it take for Oedipus to become Oedipus, the Oedipus complex? Many things in truth—those very same things that Nietzsche partially had a presentiment of in the evolution of infinite debt.

201The Oedipal cell must complete its migration, must not be content to pass from the state of displaced representation to the state of repressing representation, but must, from repressing representation, finally become the representative of desire itself. And must become so in the capacity of displaced represented. The debt must become not only infinite debt, but must be internalized and spiritualized as infinite debt (Christianity and what follows). Father and son must form themselves, that is to say the royal triad must "masculinize itself," and this as a direct consequence of infinite debt now internalized.{166} Oedipus-despot must be replaced by Oedipuses-subjects, Oedipuses-submitted, Oedipuses-fathers and Oedipuses-sons. All formal operations must be taken up again in a decoded social field, and resonate in the pure element and deprived of interiority, of interior reproduction. The apparatus repression-refoulement must undergo a complete reorganization. Desire, therefore, having completed its migration, must know this extreme misery: being turned back against itself, the turning back against itself, bad conscience, guilt, which attaches it to the most decoded social field as to the most sickly interiority, the trap of desire, its poisonous plant. So long as the history of desire does not know this end, Oedipus haunts all societies, but as the nightmare of what has not yet happened to them — his hour has not come. (And is it not always Lacan's strength, to have saved psychoanalysis from the frenzied oedipianization to which it bound its destiny, to have effected this salvation, even at the price of a regression, even at the price of maintaining the unconscious under the weight of the despotic apparatus, of reinterpreting it from that apparatus, the law and the signifier, phallus and castration yes, Oedipus no!, the despotic age of the unconscious.)

SECTION 7

202City of Ur, point of departure for Abraham or the new covenant. The State did not form progressively, but surged forth fully armed, masterful stroke all at once, originary Urstaat, eternal model of what every State wants to be and desires. The so-called Asiatic production, with the State that expresses it or constitutes its objective movement, is not a distinct formation; it is the basic formation, it horizons all of history. From all sides we recover the discovery of imperial machines that preceded traditional historical forms, and which are characterized by the property of the State, communal possession bricked and collective dependence. Each more "evolved" form is like a palimpsest: it covers a despotic inscription, a Mycenaean manuscript. Beneath each Black and each Jew, an Egyptian, a Mycenaean beneath the Greeks, an Etruscan beneath the Romans. And yet what oblivion falls upon the origin, latency that turns upon the State itself, and where sometimes writing disappears. It is under the blows of private property, then of commodity production, that the State experiences its decay. The earth enters into the sphere of private property and into that of commodities. Classes appear, insofar as the dominants no longer confuse themselves with the State apparatus, but are distinct determinations that make use of this transformed apparatus. First adjacent to common property, then component or conditioning, then increasingly determinant, private property brings about an interiority of the creditor-debtor relation in antagonistic class relations. But how to explain at once this latency into which despotic State enters, and this power with which it reforms itself on modified bases, to bounce back more "lying," more "cold," more "hypocritical" than ever? This oblivion and this return. On one hand the ancient city, the Germanic commune, feudality presuppose the great empires, and can only be understood in function of the Urstaat that serves as their horizon. On the other hand the problem of these forms is to reconstitute the Urstaat as much as possible, accounting for the exigencies of their new distinct determinations. For what do private property, wealth, commodity, classes signify? The failure of codes. The appearance, the surging forth of fluxes now decoded that flow over the socius and traverse it entirely. The State can no longer content itself with overcoding already-coded territorial elements, it must invent specific codes for increasingly deterritorialized fluxes: put despotism in the service of the new relation of classes; integrate the relations of wealth and poverty, of commodity and labor; reconcile merchant money with fiscal money; everywhere insufflate anew the Urstaat into the new state of things. And everywhere the latent model one will no longer be able to equal, but will not be able to refrain from imitating. There resounds the melancholic warning of the Egyptian to the Greeks: "You Greeks, you will never be anything but children!"

203This special situation of the State as category, forgetting and return, must be explained. It is that the originary despotic State is not a cut like the others. Of all institutions, it is perhaps the only one to surge forth fully armed in the brain of those who institute it, "the artists with brazen gaze." This is why, in Marxism, one scarcely knew what to do with it: it does not enter into the famous five stages, primitive communism, ancient city, feudality, capitalism, socialism. It is not a formation among the others, nor the passage from one formation to another. One would say that it is set back in relation to what it cuts and in relation to what it recutS, as if it testified to another dimension, cerebral ideality that adds itself to the material evolution of societies, regulative idea or principle of reflection (terror) that organizes into a whole the parts and the flux. What the despotic State cuts, recuts or overcodes, is what comes before, the territorial machine, which it reduces to the state of bricks, of working pieces henceforth subjected to the cerebral idea. In this sense, the despotic State is indeed the origin, but the origin as abstraction that must understand its difference from the concrete beginning. We know that myth always expresses a passage and a gap. But the primitive territorial myth of the beginning expressed the gap of an energy properly intensive (what Griaule called "the metaphysical part of mythology," the vibratory spiral) in relation to the social system in extension that it conditioned, and what passed from one to the other — alliance and filiation. But the imperial myth of the origin expresses something else: the gap of this beginning with the origin itself, of extension with the idea, of genesis with order and power (new alliance), and what passes back from the second to the first, what is taken up again by the second. J. P. Vernant shows thus that imperial myths cannot conceive a law of organization immanent to the universe: they need to pose, and to internalize, this difference between the origin and the beginnings, the sovereign power and the genesis of the world; "the myth constitutes itself in this distance, it makes it the very object of its narrative, retracing through the sequence of divine generations the avatars of sovereignty until the moment when a supremacy, definitive that one, puts an end to the dramatic elaboration of the dunesteia." So that, at the limit, one no longer truly knows what is first, and whether the lineageal territorial machine does not presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or which it segmentarizes in turn. And, in a certain manner, one must say as much of what comes after the originary State, of what this State recutS. It recuts what comes before, but recutS the subsequent formations. There too it is like the abstraction that belongs to another dimension, always set back and struck with latency, but which rebounds and returns all the better in the subsequent forms that give it concrete existence. State in many forms, but there was never but one State. Whence the variations, all the variants of the new alliance, nevertheless under the same category. For example, not only does feudality presuppose an abstract despotic State which it segmentarizes according to the régime of its private property and the rise of its merchant production, but these in turn induce the concrete existence of a properly feudal State, where the despot returns as absolute monarch. For it is a double error to believe that the development of merchant production suffices to cause feudality to burst forth (on many points on the contrary it reinforces it, it gives it new conditions of existence and survival) and to believe that feudality by itself opposes the State which, on the contrary, as feudal State, is capable of preventing the commodity from introducing the decoding of flux that would alone be ruinous for the system in view. And in more recent examples, we must follow Wittfogel when he shows to what extent modern capitalist and socialist States participate in the originary despotic State. Democracies, how not to recognize in them the despot become more hypocritical and more cold, more calculating, since he must himself count and code instead of overcode the accounts? It serves no purpose to make a list of the differences, in the manner of conscientious historians: village communities here, and there industrial societies, etc. The differences would be determinative only if the despotic State were a concrete formation among the others, to be treated comparatively. But it is the abstraction, which realizes itself certainly in imperial formations, but which realizes itself there only as abstraction (eminent overcoding unity). It takes its concrete immanent existence only in the subsequent forms that make it return under other figures and in other conditions. Common horizon of what comes before and what comes after, it conditions universal history only on condition of being, not outside, but always beside, the cold monster that represents the manner in which history is in the "head," in the "brain," the Urstaat.

204Marx recognized that there was indeed a way in which history went from the abstract to the concrete: "simple categories express relations in which the insufficiently developed concrete perhaps realized itself, without yet having posited the relation or the more complex rapport that expresses itself theoretically in the most concrete category; while the more developed concrete allows this same category to subsist as a subordinate relation."[171] The State was first this abstract unity integrating sub-sets functioning separately; it is now subordinated to a field of forces whose flux it coordinates, and whose autonomous rapports of domination and subordination it expresses. It no longer contents itself with overcoding maintained and bricked territorialities, it must constitute, invent codes for the deterritorialized flux of money, of merchandise and of private property. It no longer forms by itself one or several dominant classes, it is itself formed by these classes become independent who delegate it to the service of their power and their contradictions, their struggles and their compromises with the dominated classes. It is no longer transcendent law that governs fragments; it must draw out as best it can a whole to which it renders its immanent law. It is no longer the pure signifier that orders its signifieds, it appears now behind them and depends on what it signifies. It no longer produces an overcoding unity, it is itself produced in the field of decoded flux. As machine, it no longer determines a social system, it is determined by the social system to which it incorporates itself in the play of its functions. In short, it ceases not to be artificial, but it becomes concrete, it "tends toward concrétization," at the same time that it subordinates itself to dominant forces. One could show the existence of an analogous evolution for the technical machine when it ceases to be abstract unity or intellectual system reigning over separate sub-sets, to become subordinate rapport to a field of forces exerting itself as concrete physical system.[172] But, precisely, this tendency toward concrétization in the technical or social machine, is it not here the very movement of desire? We always fall back on the monstrous paradox: the State is desire that passes from the head of the despot to the heart of subjects, and from intellectual law to the entire physical system that disengages or frees itself from it. Desire of the State, the most fantastic machine of repression is still desire, subject that desires and object of desire. Desire, such is the operation that consists always in re-breathing the originary Urstaat into the new state of things, in rendering it as much as possible immanent to the new system, interior to it. And, for the rest, start anew: found a spiritual empire, there and in the forms where the State can no longer function as such in the physical system. When the Christians seized the empire, this complementary duality found itself anew between those who wanted to reconstruct the Urstaat as much as possible with the elements they found in the immanence of the Roman objective world, and then the pure, who wanted to go back to the desert, begin a new alliance, rediscover the Egyptian and Syrian inspiration of a transcendent Urstaat. What strange marines surged forth, on the columns and in the tree trunks! Christianity knew how to develop in this sense an entire play of paranoiac and bachelor machines, an entire train of paranoiacs and perverts who, also, are part of the horizon of our history and populate our calendar.[173] These are the two aspects of a becoming of the State: its interiorizaton in a field of increasingly decoded social forces forming a physical system; its spiritualization in an increasingly overcoding supra-terrestrial field, forming a metaphysical system. It must be at the same time that infinite debt interiorizes and spiritualizes itself, the hour of bad conscience approaches, it will be also the hour of the greatest cynicism. "this turned-inward cruelty of animal-man repressed in his interior life, withdrawing with dread into his individuality; locked up in the State to be domesticated…"

SECTION 8

205The first great movement of deterritorialization appeared with the overcoding of the despotic State. But it is nothing yet compared to the other great movement, the one that will occur through decoding of flux. Yet it is not enough for decoded flux to strike the new cut across and transform the socius, that is to say for capitalism to be born. Decoded flux strikes the despotic State with latency, immerses the tyrant, but also causes it to return under unexpected forms — democratizes it, oligarchizes it, segmentarizes it, monarchizes it, and always internalizes and spiritualizes it, with at the horizon the latent Urstaat from whose loss we cannot console ourselves. It is now up to the State to recode as best it can, through regular or exceptional operations, the product of decoded flux. Let us take the example of Rome: the decoding of land flux through privatization of property, the decoding of monetary flux through formation of great fortunes, the decoding of commercial flux through development of commodity production, the decoding of producers through expropriation and proletarianization, everything is there, everything is given, without producing capitalism properly speaking, but a slavery régime.{174} Or the example of feudality: here again private property, commodity production, monetary influx, extension of the market, development of cities, appearance of seigneurial rent in money or contractual hiring of labor produce no capitalist economy whatsoever, but a reinforcement of feudal charges and relations, sometimes a return to more primitive stages of feudality, sometimes even the reestablishment of a sort of slavery. And it is well known that monopolist action in favor of guilds and companies favors, not the flourishing of capitalist production, but the insertion of the bourgeoisie into an urbanism of vile and State, which consists in remaking codes for flux decoded as such, and in maintaining the merchant, following Marx's formula, "in the very pores" of the old full body of the social machine. It is therefore not capitalism that brings about the dissolution of the feudal system, but rather the inverse: which is why time was needed between the two. There is a great difference in this regard between the despotic age and the capitalist age. For they arrive like lightning, the founders of State; the despotic machine is synchronic while the time of the capitalist machine is diachronic, capitalists surge forth one after another in a series that founds a sort of creativity of history, strange menagerie: schizoid time of the new creative cut.

206Dissolutions are defined by a simple decoding of flux, always compensated by survivals or transformations of the State. One feels death rising from within, and desire itself being death drive, latency, but also passing over to the side of those flux that virtually carry a new life. Decoded flux, who will name this new desire? Flux of properties that sell, flux of money that flows, flux of production and means of production that prepare themselves in shadow, flux of workers that deterritorialize: it will take the encounter of all these decoded flux, their conjunction, their reaction upon one another, the contingency of this encounter, of this conjunction, of this reaction that occur once, for capitalism to be born, and for the old system to die this time from without, at the same time that new life is born and desire receives its new name. There is universal history only of contingency. Let us return to this eminently contingent question that modern historians know how to pose: why Europe, why not China? Concerning high-seas navigation, Braudel asks: why not Chinese or Japanese ships, or even Muslim ones? Why not Sindbad the Sailor? It is not technique that is lacking, the technical machine. Is it not rather desire that remains caught in the nets of the despotic State, entirely invested in the machine of the despot? "Then the merit of the West, blocked on its narrow cape of Asia, would it be to have had need of the world, need to leave home?" There is voyage only as schizophrenic (later, the American sense of frontiers: something to surpass, limits to cross, flux to make pass, uncoded spaces to penetrate). Decoded desires, desires of decoding, there have always been some, history is full of them. But now the decoded flux form a desire, desire that produces instead of dreaming or lacking, machine of desire, social and technical at once, only by their encounter in a place, their conjunction in a space that takes time. This is why capitalism and its cut do not define themselves simply by decoded flux, but by the generalized decoding of flux, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flux. It is the singularity of this conjunction that made capitalism's universality. Greatly simplifying, we can say that the wild territorial machine proceeded from connections of production, and that the barbaric despotic machine was founded on disjunctions of inscription proceeding from the eminent unity. But the capitalist machine, the civilized one, first establishes itself on conjunction. Then conjunction no longer designates solely remains that would escape coding, nor consumptions-consummations as in primitive feasts, or even the "maximum of consumption" in the luxury of the despot and his agents. When conjunction passes to the first rank in the social machine, it appears on the contrary that it ceases to be linked to enjoyment as to the excess consumption of a class, that it makes luxury itself a means of investment, and folds back all decoded flux onto production, in a "producing to produce" that rediscovers the primitive connections of labor on the condition, on the sole condition of linking them to capital as to the new deterritorialized full body, the true consumer from which they seem to emanate (as in the devil's pact described by Marx, "the industrial eunuch": so it is for you if…).

207At the heart of Capital, there appears the encounter of two "principal" elements: on one side the deterritorialized worker, become free worker and naked, having to sell his labor-power, on the other side decoded money, become capital and capable of buying it. That these two elements proceed from the segmentarization of the despotic State into feudality, and from the decomposition of the feudal system itself and its State, does not yet give us the extrinsic conjunction of these two flux, flux of producers and flux of money. The encounter could have not taken place, free workers and money-capital existing "virtually" on both sides. One of the elements depends on a transformation of the agrarian structures constitutive of the old social body, the other, on a wholly different series passing through the merchant and the usurer as they exist marginally in the pores of this old body. Moreover, each of these elements sets in play several processes of decoding and deterritorialization of very different origin: for the free worker, deterritorialization of the soil by privatization; decoding of instruments of production by appropriation; privation of means of consumption by dissolution of the family and the corporation; decoding finally of the worker to the profit of work itself or of the machine — and, for capital, deterritorialization of wealth by monetary abstraction; decoding of flux of production by merchant capital; decoding of States by financial capital and public debts; decoding of means of production by the formation of industrial capital, etc. Let us see still more in detail how the elements encounter one another, with conjunction of all their processes. It is no longer the age of cruelty nor of terror, but the age of cynicism, which is accompanied by a strange piety (the two constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social field, and piety, the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as means of extorting surplus-labor, but piety is this same capital as capital-God from which all labor-forces seem to emanate). This age of cynicism is that of the accumulation of capital, it is what implies time, precisely for the conjunction of all decoded and deterritorialized flux. As Maurice Dobb has shown, there must be in a first moment an accumulation of titles of property, of land for example, in a favorable conjuncture, at a moment when these goods cost little (disintegration of the feudal system); and a second moment when these goods are sold at a moment of rise, and in conditions that render particularly interesting the investment industrial ("revolution of prices," abundant reserve of labor-power, formation of a proletariat, easy access to sources of raw materials, conditions favorable to the production of tools and machines). All sorts of contingent factors favor these conjunctions. What encounters, for the formation of the thing, the unnameable! But the effect of the conjunction is indeed the control increasingly profound of production by capital: the definition of capitalism or of its cut, the conjunction of all decoded and deterritorialized flux, are not defined by commercial capital nor by financial capital, which are only flux among the others, elements among the others but by industrial capital. Without doubt the merchant had very quickly an action on production, either by making himself industrialist in trades founded on commerce, either by making artisans his own intermediaries or employees (struggles against the guilds and the monopolies). But capitalism begins, the capitalist machine is mounted, only when capital appropriates directly production, and when financial capital and merchant capital are no longer but specific functions corresponding to a division of labor in the capitalist mode of production in general. One finds then again the production of productions, the production of recordings, the production of consumptions — but precisely in this conjunction of decoded flux which makes of capital the new social full body, whereas commercial and financial capitalism under their primitive forms installed itself only in the pores of the old socius whose anterior mode of production it did not change.

208Even before the capitalist production machine was set up, the commodity and money operate a decoding of flux by abstraction. But not in the same manner. First, simple exchange inscribes market products as particular quanta of an abstract unit of labor. It is the abstract labor posited in the exchange ratio that forms the disjunctive synthesis of the apparent movement of the commodity, since it divides itself in the qualified labors to which corresponds such or such a determined quantum. But it is only when a "general equivalent" appears as money that one accedes to the reign of quantitas, which can have all sorts of particular values or be worth all sorts of quanta. This abstract quantity must nonetheless have some particular value whatever, so that it still appears only as a ratio of magnitude between quanta. It is in this sense that the exchange relation formally unites partial objects produced and even inscribed independently of it. Commercial and monetary inscription remains overcoded, and even repressed by the characters and modes of prior inscription of a socius considered under its specific mode of production, which knows and recognizes not abstract labor. As Marx says, the latter is indeed the simplest and most ancient ratio of productive activity, but appears as such and becomes practically true only in the modern capitalist machine. This is why, beforehand, commercial monetary inscription does not have a body proper, and inserts itself only in the intervals of the preexisting social body. The merchant ceases not to play maintained territorialities to buy where it is cheap, and sell where it is dear. Before the capitalist machine, merchant or financial capital is only in a relation of alliance with non-capitalist production, it enters into this new-alliance that characterizes precapitalist States (hence the alliance of merchant and banking bourgeoisie with feudality). In short, the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases to be a capital of alliance to become filiative. Capital becomes filiative capital when money engenders money, or value a surplus-value, "progressive value, money always budding, pushing, and as such capital… Value presents itself all at once as a self-moving substance, and for which commodity and money are only pure forms. It distinguishes in itself its primitive value and its surplus-value, in the same way that God distinguishes in his person the father and the son, and that both are but one and of the same age, for it is only through the surplus-value of ten pounds that the first hundred pounds advanced become capital". It is only under these conditions that capital becomes the full body, the new socius or the quasi-cause which appropriates all productive forces. We are no longer in the domain of quantum or quantitas, but in that of the differential ratio as conjunction, which defines the immanent social field proper to capitalism and gives to abstraction as such its effectively concrete value, its tendency toward concretization. Abstraction has not ceased to be what it is, but it no longer appears in simple quantity as a variable ratio between independent terms, it is it itself which has taken upon itself the independence, the quality of terms and the quantity of ratios. The abstract posits itself the more complex relation in which it will develop "as" something concrete. It is the differential ratio Dy/Dx, where Dy derives from the force of labor and constitutes the fluctuation of variable capital, and where Dx derives from capital itself and constitutes the fluctuation of constant capital ("the notion of constant capital in no way excludes a change in value of its constitutive parts"). It is from the fluxion of decoded flux, from their conjunction, that there flows the filiative form of capital x + dx. What the differential ratio expresses is the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of the transformation of surplus-value of code into surplus-value of flux. That a mathematical appearance replaces here the ancient codes signifies simply that one witnesses a bankruptcy of codes and subsisting territorialities to the profit of a machine of another species, functioning entirely otherwise. It is no longer the cruelty of life, nor the terror of one life against another, but a post-mortem despotism, the despot become anus and vampire: "Capital is dead labor which, like the vampire, animates itself only by sucking living labor, and its life is all the more cheerful as it pumps more of it". Industrial capital thus presents a new-new filiation, constitutive of the capitalist machine, in relation to which merchant capital and financial capital will now take the form of a new-new alliance in assuming specific functions.

209The famous problem of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, that is to say of surplus-value in relation to total capital, can only be understood within the whole field of immanence of capitalism, and in the conditions under which a surplus-value of code is transformed into surplus-value of flux. First it appears (in accordance with Balibar's remarks) that this tendency toward the fall of the rate of profit has no end, but reproduces itself by reproducing the factors that counteract it. But why has it no end? Undoubtedly for the same reasons that make capitalists and their economists laugh, when they observe that surplus-value is not mathematically determinable. Yet they have little reason to rejoice. They should rather conclude from it what they hold to conceal: namely that it is not the same money that enters the pocket of the salaried worker and that is inscribed in the balance sheet of an enterprise. In one case, monetary signs impotent of exchange-value, a flux of means of payment relative to consumption goods and to use-values, a bi-univocal relation between money and an imposed range of products ("what I have a right to, what is owed to me, so it is mine..."); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, fluxes of financing, a system of differential coefficients of production that testify to a prospective force or to a long-term evaluation, not realizable hic et nunc, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract quantities. In one case, money represents a possible cut-extraction on a flux of consumption; in the other case, a possibility of cut-detachment and of rearticulation of economic chains in the sense where fluxes of production appropriate themselves to the disjunctions of capital. One has been able to show the importance in the capitalist system of banking duality between the formation of means of payment and the structure of financing, the management of money and the financing of capitalist accumulation, exchange-money and credit-money. That the bank participates in both, or is at the hinge of the two, financing and payment, only shows their multiple interactions. Thus, in credit-money, which comprises all commercial or banking claims, purely commercial credit has its roots in simple circulation where money develops as a means of payment (the bill of exchange at determined maturity, which constitutes a monetary form of finite debt). Inversely, bank credit operates a demonetization or dematerialization of money, and rests on the circulation of drafts in place of the circulation of money, traverses a particular circuit where it takes and then loses its value as instrument of exchange, and where the conditions of the flux imply those of reflux, giving to infinite debt its capitalist form; but the State as regulator assures a convertibility in principle of this credit-money, either directly by attachment to gold, or indirectly by a mode of centralization that comprises a guarantor of credit, a single rate of interest, a unity of capital markets, etc. One is therefore right to speak of a profound dissimulation of the duality of the two forms of money, payment and financing, the two aspects of banking practice. But this dissimulation depends less on a misrecognition than it expresses the field of capitalist immanence, the apparent objective movement where the inferior and subordinated form is no less necessary than the other (it is necessary that money play on both tables), and where no integration of dominated classes could be effected without the shadow of this principle of unconverted convertibility, which is nonetheless sufficient to make that the Desire of the most disadvantaged creature invest with all its forces, independent of all economic knowledge or misrecognition, the capitalist social field in its entirety. Fluxes, who does not desire fluxes, and relations between fluxes, and cuts of flux? — that capitalism has known how to make flow and cut under these conditions of money unknown before it. If it is true that capitalism in its essence or mode of production is industrial, it functions only as merchant capitalism. If it is true that it is in its essence industrial filial capital, it functions only through its alliance with commercial and financial capital. In a certain manner, it is the bank that holds the whole system, and the investment of desire. One of Keynes's contributions was to reintroduce desire into the problem of money; it is that which must be submitted to the exigencies of Marxist analysis. It is why it is unfortunate that Marxist economists too often remain with considerations on the mode of production, and on the theory of money as general equivalent such as it appears in the first section of Capital, without attaching sufficient importance to banking practice, to financial operations and to the specific circulation of credit-money (such would be the sense of a return to Marx, to Marxist theory of money).

210Let us return to the duality of money, to the two tables, to the two inscriptions, one in the employee's account, the other in the company's balance sheet. Measuring the two orders of magnitude by the same analytical unit is pure fiction, cosmic fraud, as if one were measuring inter-galactic or intra-atomic distances with meters and centimeters. There is no common measure between the value of enterprises and that of the labor-power of employees. This is why the tendential fall has no term. A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a question of the limit of variation of production fluxes from the point of view of full output, but is not if it is a question of the production flux and the labor flux on which surplus-value depends. Then the difference does not cancel itself in the ratio that constitutes it as a difference of nature, the "tendency" has no term, it has no external limit that it could attain or even approach. The tendency has a limit only internal, and ceases not to exceed it, but by displacing it, that is to say by reconstituting it, by finding it again as an internal limit to be exceeded anew by displacement: thus the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this cut of cut always displaced, that is to say in this unity of schize and flux. It is already under this aspect that the field of social immanence, as it is discovered under the withdrawal and transformation of the Urstaat, ceases not to enlarge itself, and takes on a consistency quite particular, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part has known how to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only on the condition that they break down, crisis as "immanent means to the capitalist mode of production." If capitalism is the external limit of every society, it is because it has no external limit for its part, but only an internal limit which is capital itself, and which it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it.{183} Jean-Joseph Goux analyzes exactly the mathematical phenomenon of the curve without tangent, and the sense it is susceptible to take in economy no less than in linguistics: "If the movement tends toward no limit, if the quotient of differentials is not calculable, the present has no more sense… The quotient of differentials does not resolve itself, the differences no longer cancel themselves in their ratio. No limit opposes itself to the breaking, to the breaking of this breaking. The tendency finds no term, the mobile never comes to the end of what the immediate future holds in store for it; it is ceaselessly delayed by accidents, deviations… Complex notion of a continuity in absolute breaking."{184} In the enlarged immanence of the system, the limit tends to reconstitute in its displacement what it tended to make fall in its primitive placement.

211Now this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the deterritorialization of capitalism. As Samir Amin has shown, the procedure of deterritorialization goes here from center to periphery, that is to say from developed countries to underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a world apart, but an essential piece of the worldwide capitalist machine. Still it must be added that the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reserves and shantytowns like interior peripheries (Pierre Moussa defined the United States as a fragment of the third world that had succeeded and kept its immense zones of underdevelopment). And if it is true that at the center exercises at least partially a tendency toward the fall or equalization of the rate of profit, which carries the economy toward the most progressive and most automated sectors, a veritable "development of underdevelopment" at the periphery assures a rise in the rate of surplus-value as an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center. For it would be a great error to believe that the exports of the periphery come above all from traditional sectors or archaic territorialities: they come on the contrary from modern industries and plantations, generators of strong surplus-value, to the point that it is not the developed countries that furnish capital to underdeveloped countries, but quite the opposite. So true is it that primitive accumulation does not occur once at the dawn of capitalism, but is permanent and ceases never to reproduce itself. Capitalism exports filial capital. At the same time that capitalist deterritorialization is made from center to periphery, the decoding of flux at the periphery is made by a "disarticulation" that assures the ruin of traditional sectors, the development of extravert economic circuits, a specific hypertrophy of tertiary, an extreme inequality in the distribution of productivities and revenues. It is each passage of flux that is a deterritorialization, each displaced limit, a decoding. Capitalism schizophrenizes more and more at the periphery. It remains no less, one will say, that, at the center, the tendential fall keeps its restricted sense, that is to say the relative diminution of surplus-value in relation to total capital, assured by the development of productivity, of automation, of constant capital.

212This problem has been recently restated by Maurice Clavel in a series of decisive and deliberately incompetent questions. That is, questions addressed to Marxist economists by someone who does not understand well how one can maintain human surplus-value at the base of capitalist production, while acknowledging that machines also "work" or produce value, that they have always worked, and work increasingly more in relation to man, who thus ceases to be a constitutive part of the process of production to become adjacent to this process.{186} There is therefore a machinic surplus-value produced by constant capital, which develops with automation and productivity, and which cannot be explained by the factors that counteract the tendential fall (increasing intensity of the exploitation of human labor, diminution of prices of the elements of constant capital, etc.), since these factors depend on it on the contrary. It seems to us, with the same indispensable incompetence, that these problems can only be considered in the conditions of the transformation of code surplus-value into flux surplus-value. For, as long as we defined precapitalist régimes by code surplus-value, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted it into flux surplus-value, we presented things summarily, we acted as if the matter was settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that would have lost all value of code. But it is not so. On one hand, codes subsist, even as archaism, but which take a function perfectly current and adapted to the situation in capitalist personified (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker…). But, on the other hand and more profoundly, every technical machine supposes fluxes of a particular type: fluxes of code at once interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even of a science. It is these fluxes of code that are themselves also embedded, coded or overcoded in precapitalist societies in such a manner that they never take on independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer…). But the generalized decoding of fluxes in capitalism liberated, deterritorialized, decoded the fluxes of code in the same way as others — to the point that the automatic machine has always more interiorized them in its body or its structure as a field of forces, at the same time that it depended on a science and a technology, on so-called cerebral labor distinct from the manual labor of the worker (evolution of the technical object). It is not machines that made capitalism, in this sense, but capitalism on the contrary that makes machines, and which ceases not to introduce new cuts by which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production.

213Still, several corrections must be introduced in this regard. For these cuts take time and extend over great width. Never does the diachronic capitalist machine allow itself to be revolutionized by one or several synchronous technical machines, never does it confer upon its scientists and technicians an independence unknown in preceding régimes. Without doubt it can allow scientists, mathematicians for example, to "schizophrenize" in their corner, and let pass flows of code socially decoded that these scientists organize in axiomatics of so-called fundamental research. But the true axiomatic is not there (the scientists are left alone up to a certain point, they are allowed to make their own axiomatic; but there comes the moment of serious things: for example indeterministic physics, with its corpuscular flows, must reconcile itself with "determinism"). The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which substitutes for the old codings, and which organizes all decoded flows, including flows of scientific and technical code, to the profit of the capitalist system and in service of its ends. This is why it has often been remarked that the industrial revolution combined a high rate of technical progress with the maintenance of a great quantity of "obsolescent" material, with great distrust toward machines and sciences. An innovation is adopted only from the rate of profit that its investment gives by lowering production costs; otherwise, the capitalist maintains existing equipment, even if investing parallelly to it in another domain.{187} Human surplus-value thus retains decisive importance, even at the center and in highly industrialized sectors. What determines the lowering of costs and the elevation of the rate of profit by machinic surplus-value is not the innovation itself, whose value is no more measurable than that of human surplus-value. It is not even the profitability of the new technique considered in isolation, but its effect on the overall profitability of the enterprise in its relations with the market, and with commercial and financial capital. What implies diachronic encounters and overlaps, as one sees from the century for example, between the steam machine and textile machines or techniques of iron production. In general, the introduction of innovations always tends to be delayed beyond the scientifically necessary time, until the moment when market forecasts justify its exploitation on a large scale. Here again, alliance capital exerts strong selective pressure on machinic innovations in industrial capital. In short, where flows are decoded, particular flows of code that have taken technological and scientific form are subject to a properly social axiomatic far more severe than all scientific axiomatics, but far more severe also than all old codes or surcodings that have disappeared: the axiomatic of the world capitalist market. In short, flows of code "liberated" in science and technique by the capitalist régime engender machinic surplus-value that does not depend directly on science and technique themselves, but on capital, and which comes to add itself to human surplus-value, to correct its relative decline, both constituting the ensemble of surplus-value of flux that characterizes the system. Knowledge, information and qualified formation are no less parts of capital ("capital of knowledge") than the most elementary work of the worker. And just as, on the side of human surplus-value insofar as it resulted from decoded flows, we found an incommensurability or a fundamental asymmetry (no assignable external limit) between manual labor and capital, or between two forms of money, so here, on the side of machinic surplus-value resulting from flows of scientific and technical code, we find no commensurability nor external limit between scientific or technical work, even highly remunerated, and the profit of capital that inscribes itself in another writing. The flux of knowledge and the flux of labor find themselves in this regard in the same situation determined by decoding or capitalist deterritorialization.

214But if it is true that innovation is received only insofar as it entails a rise in profit through a lowering of production costs, and if there exists a volume of production sufficiently elevated to justify it, the corollary that follows is that investment in innovation never suffices to realize or absorb the surplus-value of flux produced on one side as on the other.{188} Marx well demonstrated the importance of the problem: the ever-enlarged circle of capitalism closes, in reproducing at an ever-larger scale its immanent limits, only if surplus-value is not only produced or extorted, but absorbed, realized.{189} If the capitalist does not define himself through enjoyment, it is not only because his aim is "producing for producing" generative of surplus-value, but the realization of this surplus-value: a surplus-value of unrealized flux is as if unproduced, and incarnates itself in unemployment and stagnation. One easily accounts for the principal modes of absorption outside consumption and investment: advertising, civil government, militarism and imperialism. The role of the State in this regard, within capitalist axiomatic, appears all the better because what it absorbs does not detract from the surplus-value of enterprises, but adds itself to it by bringing the capitalist economy closer to its full yield within given limits, and by enlarging in turn these limits, especially in an order of military expenditures that make no competition with private enterprise, on the contrary (only war succeeded in what the New Deal had failed). The role of a politico-military-economic complex is all the more important because it guarantees the extraction of human surplus-value at the periphery and in the appropriated zones of the center, but because it engenders itself an enormous machinic surplus-value by mobilizing the resources of capital of knowledge and information, and because it finally absorbs the greater part of the produced surplus-value. The State, its police and its army form a gigantic enterprise of anti-production, but within production itself, and conditioning it. We find here a new determination of the field of immanence proper to capitalism: not only the play of differential relations and coefficients of decoded flux, not only the nature of the sequences that capitalism reproduces at an ever-larger scale as interior limits, but the presence of anti-production within production itself. The apparatus of anti-production is no longer a transcendent instance that opposes production, limits it or brakes it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine, and embraces it closely in order to regulate its productivity and realize its surplus-value (hence, for example, the difference between despotic bureaucracy and capitalist bureaucracy). The effusion of the apparatus of anti-production characterizes the entire capitalist system; capitalist effusion is that of anti-production within production at all levels of the process. On one hand, it alone is capable of realizing the supreme aim of capitalism, which is to produce lack within large ensembles, to introduce lack where there is always too much, through the absorption it operates of overabundant resources. On the other hand, it alone doubles capital and the flux of knowledge with a capital and an equivalent flux of stupidity, which themselves operate its absorption or realization, and which assure the integration of groups and individuals into the system. Not only lack within the too-much, but stupidity within knowledge and science: one will see notably how it is at the level of the State and the army that the most progressive sectors of scientific or technological knowledge are conjoined with the feeblest archaisms most laden with present functions.

215Takes on its full meaning the double portrait that André Gorz traces of the "scientific and technical worker," master of a flux of knowledge, information and formation, but so well absorbed into capital that there coincides with it the reflux of an organized stupidity, axiomatized, such that, in the evening, returning home, he rediscovers his little machines of desire by tinkering on a television set, O despair.{190} Certainly, the scientist as such has no revolutionary power whatsoever, he is the first integrated agent of integration, refuge of bad conscience, forced destroyer of his own creativity. Let us take the still more striking example of an "American-style" career, with abrupt mutations, as we imagine it: Gregory Bateson begins by fleeing the civilized world by becoming an ethnologist, by following primitive codes and savage flux; then he turns toward increasingly decoded flux, those of schizophrenia, from which he draws an interesting psychiatric theory; then again in search of a beyond, of another wall to pierce, he turns toward dolphins, the language of dolphins, toward flux still stranger and more deterritorialized. But what is there at the end of the dolphin flux, if not the fundamental research of the American army which brings us back to the preparation of war and to the absorption of surplus-value? With respect to the capitalist State, the socialist States are children (and still children who learned something from their father, on the axiomatizing role of the State). But the socialist States have greater difficulty plugging up the unexpected leaks of flux, except through direct violence. What is called on the contrary the power of recuperation of the capitalist system, is that its axiomatic is by nature, not more flexible, but broader and more encompassing. No one in such a system fails to be associated with the activity of anti-production that animates the entire productive system. "Those who operate and supply the military apparatus are not the only ones engaged in an anti-human enterprise. The millions of workers who produce (which creates a demand for) useless goods and services are equally, and to varying degrees, concerned. The various sectors and branches of the economy are so interdependent that almost everyone finds himself implicated in one way or another in an anti-human activity; the farmer supplying food products to troops fighting against the Vietnamese people, the manufacturers of the complex instruments necessary to the creation of a new automobile model, the manufacturers of paper, ink or television sets whose products are used to control and poison the minds of people, and so on."{191} Thus are closed the three segments of always-expanded capitalist reproduction, which define equally well the three aspects of its immanence: 1°) that which extracts human surplus-value starting from the differential relation between decoded flux of labor and production, and which displaces itself from center to periphery, while nevertheless maintaining vast residual zones at the center; 2°) that which extracts machinic surplus-value, starting from an axiomatic of the flux of scientific and technical code, at the "cutting-edge" sites of the center; 3°) that which absorbs or realizes these two forms of flux surplus-value, in guaranteeing the emission of the two, and in perpetually injecting anti-production into the apparatus to produce. One schizophrenizes at the periphery, but no less at the center and in the middle.

216The definition of surplus-value must be reworked in terms of the machinic surplus-value of constant capital, which is distinguished from the human surplus-value of variable capital, and from the non-measurable character of this whole set of flux surplus-values. It cannot be defined by the difference between the value of labor-power and the value created by labor-power, but by the incommensurability between two fluxes nonetheless immanent to one another, by the disparity between two aspects of the money that express them, and by the absence of external limit to their rapport, one measuring true economic power, the other measuring a purchasing power determined as "income." The first is the immense deterritorialized flux that constitutes the full body of capital. An economist like Bernard Schmitt finds strange lyrical words to characterize this flux of infinite debt: instantaneous creative flux, which banks create spontaneously as a debt upon themselves, creation ex nihilo which, instead of transmitting a prior money as means of payment, hollows out at one extremity of the full body a negative money (debt inscribed on the liability side of banks) and projects at the other extremity a positive money (claim of productive economy upon banks), "flux with mutant power" which does not enter into income and is not destined for purchases, pure availability, non-possession and non-wealth.{192} The other aspect of money represents the reflux, that is, the rapport it takes with goods as soon as it acquires purchasing power through its distribution to workers or factors of production, through its apportionment in incomes, and which it loses as soon as these are converted into real goods (then everything begins again through new production that will be born first under the first aspect…). Now the incommensurability of the two aspects, of flux and reflux, shows that nominal wages may encompass the totality of national income, yet wage-earners allow a great quantity of incomes to escape, captured by enterprises, and which form in turn by conjunction an afflux, a flux this time continued of gross profit, constituting "in a single jet" an undivided quantity flowing over the full body, whatever the diversity of its allocations (interest, dividends, management salaries, purchase of means of production, etc.).{193} The incompetent observer has the impression that this entire economic schema, this whole history is profoundly schizo. One sees clearly the aim of the theory, which nonetheless defends itself against all moral reference. Who is robbed? is the serious question implied, which echoes the ironic question of Clavel "Who is alienated?" Now robbed, no one is nor can be (just as Clavel said we no longer know at all who is alienated nor who alienates). Who robs? Surely not the financial capitalist as representative of the great instantaneous creative flux, which is not even possession and has no purchasing power. Who is robbed? Surely not the worker who is not even bought, since it is the reflux or distribution in wages that creates purchasing power, rather than supposing it. Who could rob? Surely not the industrial capitalist as representative of the afflux of profit, since "profits flow not in the reflux, but side by side, in deviation and not in sanction of the creative flux of incomes." What flexibility in the axiomatic of capitalism, always ready to enlarge its own limits in order to add a new axiom to a previously saturated system. You want an axiom for wage-earners, the working class and unions, but let us see then, and henceforth profit will flow beside wages, both side by side, reflux and afflux. One will even find an axiom for the language of dolphins. Marx often alluded to the golden age of the capitalist where he did not gloss over his own cynicism: at the beginning at least he could not ignore what he was doing, extorting surplus-value. But how this cynicism has grown when it comes to declare: no, no one is robbed. For everything rests then on the disparity between two sorts of flux, as in an unfathomable abyss where profit and surplus-value engender themselves: the flux of economic power of merchant capital and the flux named by derision "purchasing power," truly impotent flux which represents the absolute impotence of the wage-earner as the relative dependence of the industrial capitalist. It is money and the market, the true police of capitalism.

217In a certain way, capitalist economists are not wrong to present the economy as perpetually "to be monetized," as though money must always be insufflated into it from without following an offer and a demand. For it is indeed thus that the whole system holds together and functions, and perpetually fills its own immanence. It is indeed thus that it is the global object of an investment of desire. Desire of the salaried worker, desire of the capitalist, everything beats with one same desire founded on the differential rapport of flux without assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits at an ever-enlarged scale, ever more encompassing. It is therefore at the level of a generalized theory of flux that one can respond to the question: how does one come to desire power, but also one's own impotence? How could such a social field have been invested by desire? And how much does desire exceed the so-called objective interest, when it is a matter of flux to be made to flow and to be cut. No doubt the Marxists recall that the formation of money as a specific rapport in capitalism depends on the mode of production that makes of the economy a monetary economy. It remains that the apparent objective movement of capital, which is in no way a misrecognition or an illusion of consciousness, shows that the productive essence of capitalism can itself only function under this necessarily commercial or monetary form that commands it, and of which the flux and the rapports between flux contain the secret of the investment of desire. It is at the level of flux, and of monetary flux, not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire takes place. Then, what solution, what revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little recourse, in its most intimate rapports with money, it which records while guarding itself from recognizing it an entire system of economic-monetary dependencies at the heart of the desire of each subject it treats, and which constitutes for its account a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus-value. But what revolutionary path, is there one? — To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises the countries of the third world, in a curious renewal of the fascist "economic solution"? Or else to go in the contrary direction? That is to say to go still further in the movement of the market, of decoding and of deterritorialization? For perhaps the flux are not yet sufficiently deterritorialized, not sufficiently decoded, from the point of view of a theory and a practice of flux of high schizophrenic content. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, "to accelerate the process," as Nietzsche said: in truth, in this matter, we have yet seen nothing.

SECTION 9

218Writing has never been the thing of capitalism. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the father, it was accomplished long ago, even though the event takes a long time to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of signs that have disappeared with which we always write. The reason is simple: writing implies an usage of language in general according to which graphism aligns itself with the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a fictive voice from the heights functioning as signifier. The arbitrariness of the designated, the subordination of the signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally its subsequent decomposition into minimal elements in a field of immanence laid bare by the withdrawal of the despot, all of this marks the belonging of writing to imperial despotic representation. From then on, when one announces the bursting of the "Gutenberg galaxy," what exactly does one mean to say? Certainly, capitalism has made much use of writing and makes use of it; not only does writing agree with money as general equivalent, but the specific functions of money in capitalism passed through writing and printing, and in part continue to pass through there. It nonetheless remains that writing typically plays the role of an archaism in capitalism, Gutenberg printing being then the element that gives to archaism a current function. But the capitalist usage of language is by right of another nature, and realizes itself or becomes concrete in the field of immanence proper to capitalism itself, when there appear the technical means of expression that correspond to the generalized decoding of flux, instead of still referring back in direct or indirect form to despotic overcoding. Such seems to us the meaning of McLuhan's analyses: to have shown what a language of decoded flux was, as opposed to a signifier that strangles and overcodes flux. First everything is good for nonsignifying language: no phonetic, graphic, gestural flux, etc., is privileged in this language that remains indifferent to its substance or its support as amorphous continuum; the electric flux can be considered as the realization of such a flux whatsoever as such. But a substance is said to be formed when a flux enters into relation with another flux, the first then defining a content, and the second, an expression. The deterritorialized flux of content and expression are in a state of conjunction or mutual presupposition, which constitutes figures as ultimate units of one and the other. These figures are in no way signifier, nor even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are non-signs, or rather non-signifying signs, multi-dimensional point-signs, cuts of flux, schizes that form images by their reunion in a set, but that maintain no identity from one set to another. The figures, that is to say, the schizes or cuts-flux, are therefore not at all "figurative"; they become so only in a particular constellation that undoes itself to the profit of another. Three million points per second transmitted by television, of which only a few are retained. Electric language does not pass through voice or writing; informatics dispenses with it, or this well-named discipline fluidics operating by jets of gas; the computer is a machine of instantaneous and generalized decoding. Michel Serres defines in this sense the correlation of the cut and the flux in the signs of the new technical machines of language, there where production is narrowly determined by information: "Take a highway interchange… It is a quasi-point that analyzes, through multiple overlaps, along a dimension normal to the space of the network, the lines of flux of which it is the receptor. On it one can go from any afferent direction to any efferent direction, and in any sense, without ever encountering any of the other directions… I will never return, if I wish, to the same point, even though it is the same… Topological knot where all is connected without confusion, where all confluences and distributes… It is that a knot is a point if one wishes, but in multiple dimensions," which contains and makes flux pass far from annulling it. This gridding of production by information manifests once more that the productive essence of capitalism functions or "speaks" only in the language of signs that mercantile capital or the axiomatic of the market impose upon it.

219There are great differences between such a linguistics of flux and the linguistics of the signifier. Saussurean linguistics for example does indeed discover a field of immanence constituted by "value," that is to say by the system of relations between ultimate elements of the signifier; but, besides the fact that this field of immanence still presupposes the transcendence of the signifier, which discovers it if only through its withdrawal, the elements that populate this field have as criterion a minimal identity that they owe to their relations of opposition, and that they retain across variations of every type that affect them. The elements of the signifier as distinctive units are regulated by "coded gaps" that the signifier overcodes in turn. It results in various consequences, but always convergent: the comparison of language with a game; the signified-signifier relation, where the signified finds itself by nature subordinated to the signifier; figures defined as effects of the signifier itself; the formal elements of the signifier determined in relation to a phonetic substance to which writing itself confers a secret privilege. We believe that, from all these viewpoints and despite certain appearances, Hjelmslev's linguistics opposes itself profoundly to the Saussurean and post-Saussurean enterprise. Because it abandons all privileged reference. Because it describes a pure field of algebraic immanence that no longer lets itself be overflown by any transcendent instance, even in withdrawal. Because it makes form and substance, content and expression flux collide in this field. Because it substitutes for the subordination relation signifier-signified the relation of reciprocal presupposition expression-content. Because the double articulation is no longer made between two hierarchized levels of language, but between two deterritorialized convertible planes, constituted by the relation between the form of content and the form of expression. Because in this relation one attains figures that are no longer effects of signifier, but schizes, point-signs or cuts of flux that burst through the wall of the signifier, pass through it and go beyond. Because these signs have crossed a new threshold of deterritorialization. Because these figures have definitively lost the conditions of minimal identity that defined the elements of the signifier itself. Because the order of elements there is secondary in relation to the axiomatics of flux and figures. Because the model of money, in the point-sign or the figure-cut devoid of identity, having only a floating identity, tends to replace the model of the game. In short, the very particular situation of Hjelmslev in linguistics, and the reactions he provokes, seem to us to be explained by this: that he tends to make a purely immanent theory of language, which breaks the double game of voice-writing domination, which makes form and substance, content and expression flow according to flux of desire, and cuts these flux according to point-signs or schize-figures. Far from being an overdetermination of structuralism, and of its attachment to the signifier, Hjelmslev's linguistics indicates its concerted destruction, and constitutes a decoded theory of languages of which one can say just as well, ambiguous homage that it is the only one adapted at once to the nature of capitalist and schizophrenic flux: up to now the only modern (and not archaic) theory of language.

220The extreme importance of J. F. Lyotard's recent book is that it is the first generalized critique of the signifier. In its most general proposition, indeed, it shows that the signifier is surpassed both outwardly by figurative images and, inwardly, by the pure figures that compose them, or better "the figural" which comes to overturn the coded gaps of the signifier, introduce itself between them, work under the conditions of identity of their elements. In language and writing itself, now letters as cuts, burst partial objects, now words as undivided flux, indecomposable blocks or full bodies of tonic value constitute asignifying signs that render themselves to the order of desire, breaths and cries. (Notably the formal researches of handwritten or printed writing change meaning depending on whether the characters of letters and the qualities of words are in the service of a signifier whose effects they express following exegetical rules, or on the contrary cross this wall to make flux flow, establish cuts that overflow or break the conditions of identity of the sign, that make as many books flow and burst in "the book," entering into multiple configurations already attested by Mallarmé's typographic exercises — always pass beneath the signifier, file away the wall: which still shows that the death of writing is infinite, as long as it rises and comes from within). Similarly, in the plastic arts, pure figural formed by the active line and the multidimensional point, and, on the other side, the multiple configurations formed by the passive line and the surface it engenders, so as to open, as in Paul Klee, these "between-worlds that are perhaps visible only to children, the mad, the primitives." Or in the dream, Lyotard shows in very beautiful pages that what works is not the signified, but a figural beneath, making configurations of images surge forth that make use of words, make them flow and cut them according to flux and points that are not linguistic, and do not depend on the signifier nor on its regulated elements. Everywhere then Lyotard reverses the order of the signifier and the figure. It is not the figures that depend on the signifier and its effects, it is the signifying chain that depends on figural effects, itself made of asignifying signs, crushing signifiers as much as signifieds, treating words as things, fabricating new units, making from non-figurative figures configurations of images that make and unmake themselves. And these constellations are like flux that refer back to the cut of points, as these refer back to the fluxion of what they make flow or ooze: the only unity without identity, it is that of flux-schize or cut-flux. The element of pure figural, the "matrix-figure," Lyotard rightly names desire, which conducts us to the gates of schizophrenia as process. But whence comes nonetheless the reader's impression that Lyotard never ceases to arrest the process, and fold the schizes back onto the shores he has just left, coded or overcoded territories, spaces and structures, where they do nothing but bring "transgressions," troubles and deformations nonetheless secondary, instead of forming and carrying further the machines of desire that oppose structures, the intensities that oppose spaces? It is that, despite his attempt to bind desire to a fundamental yes, Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire, maintains it under the law of castration at the risk of bringing back with it all the signifier, and discovers the matrix of the figure in fantasy, the simple fantasy that comes to occlude desiring production, all of desire as effective production. But at least for an instant the mortgage of the signifier has been lifted: this enormous despotic archaism that makes so many of us groan and bend, and of which others make use to establish a new terrorism, detonating Lacan's imperial discourse into a university discourse of pure scientificity, this "scientificity" scarcely good for anything but to refuel our neuroses, to garrotte once more the process, to overcode Oedipus by castration, enchaining us to the current structural functions of a vanished archaic despot. For, assuredly, neither capitalism, nor revolution, nor schizophrenia pass by the ways of the signifier, even and especially in their extreme violences.

221Civilization defines itself by the decoding and deterritorialization of flux in capitalist production. All procedures are good for ensuring this universal decoding: the privatization bearing on goods, the means of production, but also on the organs of "private man" himself; the abstraction of monetary quantities, but also of the quantity of labor; the illimitedness of the relation between capital and labor-force, and also between the flux of financing and the flux of revenues or means of payment; the scientific and technical form taken by the flux of code themselves; the formation of floating configurations from lines and points without discernable identity. Recent monetary history, the role of the dollar, short-term migrant capitals, the floating of currencies, the new means of financing and credit, special drawing rights, the new form of crises and speculations, mark out the path of decoded flux. Our societies present a keen taste for all codes, foreign or exotic codes, but it is a destructive and mortuary taste. If decoding doubtless means understanding a code and translating it, it is even more destroying it as code, assigning it an archaic, folkloric or residual function, which makes psychoanalysis and ethnology two disciplines appreciated in our modern societies. And yet it would be a great error to identify capitalist flux and schizophrenic flux, under the general theme of a decoding of desire-flux. Certainly, their affinity is great: everywhere capitalism sets schizo-flux in motion that animate "our" arts and "our" sciences, just as they freeze in the production of "our" sick ones, the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relation of schizophrenia to capitalism far surpassed the problems of way of life, environment, ideology, etc., and had to be posed at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one and the same process of production. Our society produces schizos as it produces Dop shampoo or Renault autos, with the sole difference that they are not saleable. But precisely, how to explain that capitalist production ceases to stop the schizophrenic process, transforms its subject into a clinical entity shut away, as if it saw in this process the image of its own death coming from within? Why does it make the schizophrenic sick, not only in word but in reality? Why does it shut away its madmen instead of seeing in them its own heroes, its own accomplishment? And where it can no longer recognize the figure of a simple sickness, why does it watch with such care its artists and even its scientists, as if they risked making dangerous flux flow for it, charged with revolutionary potentiality, so long as they are not recovered or absorbed by the laws of the market? Why does it form in turn a gigantic machine of repression-refoulement with respect to what nonetheless constitutes its own reality, decoded flux? It is because, as we have seen, capitalism is indeed the limit of all society, in that it operates the decoding of flux that other social formations coded and overcoded. However it is the limit of relative cuts, because it substitutes for codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of flux in a bound state on the body of capital as deterritorialized socius, but also and even more pitiless than any other socius. Schizophrenia on the contrary is indeed the absolute limit, which sets flux in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. One can thus say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the term of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism functions only on condition of inhibiting this tendency, or of pushing back and displacing this limit, by substituting its own relative immanent limits that it ceases to reproduce on an enlarged scale. What it decodes with one hand, it axiomatizes with the other. Such is the way in which the Marxist law of the thwarted tendency must be reinterpreted. So much so that schizophrenia permeates the entire capitalist field from one end to the other. But for it it is a matter of binding its charges and energies in a worldwide axiomatic that always opposes new interior limits to the revolutionary power of decoded flux. And it is impossible in such a régime to distinguish, even in two moments, the decoding and the axiomatization that comes to replace the disappeared codes. It is at the same time that flux are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism. Schizophrenia is therefore not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its gap and its death. Monetary flux are perfectly schizophrenic realities, but which exist and function only in the immanent axiomatic that conjures and pushes back this reality. The language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a middle or high-ranking manager, a minister, is a perfectly schizophrenic language, but which functions only statistically in the flattening axiomatic of binding that puts it in service of the capitalist order. (At the superior level of linguistics as science, Hjelmslev can only operate a vast decoding of languages by setting in motion from the start an axiomatic machine founded on the supposed finite number of figures considered.) What then becomes of "truly" schizophrenic language, and of "truly" decoded, unbound flux, which manage to pass the wall or the absolute limit? The capitalist axiomatic is so rich, one adds one more axiom, for the books of a great writer whose accounting characteristics of vocabulary and style can always be studied by electronic machine, or for the discourse of the mad that one can always listen to within the framework of a hospital, administrative and psychiatric axiomatic. In short, the notion of schizo-flux or flux-cut appeared to us to define capitalism just as well as schizophrenia. But it is not at all in the same way, and they are not at all the same things, depending on whether decodings are taken up again in an axiomatic or not, depending on whether one remains with large functional ensembles operating statistically or whether one crosses the barrier that separates them from unbound molecular positions, depending on whether the flux of desire attain this absolute limit or content themselves with displacing a relative immanent limit that reconstitutes itself further on, depending on whether the processes of deterritorialization are doubled or not by re-territorializations that control them, depending on whether money burns or blazes.

222Why not simply say that capitalism replaces one code with another, that it performs a new type of coding? For two reasons, one of which represents a sort of moral impossibility, the other a logical impossibility. In precapitalist formations are encountered all the cruelties and terrors, fragments of signifying chain are struck by secrecy, secret societies or initiation groups — but there is never anything truly unavowable. It is with the thing, capitalism, that the unavowable begins: there is not an economic or financial operation that, supposed translated into terms of code, would not cause its unavowable character to burst forth, that is to say its intrinsic perversion or its essential cynicism (the age of bad conscience is also that of pure cynicism). But precisely it is impossible to code such operations: a code in the first place determines the respective quality of the flux that pass through the socius (for example, the three circuits of goods of consumption, of goods of prestige, of women and children); the proper object of code is therefore to establish necessarily indirect relations between these qualified flux and, as such, incommensurable. Such relations certainly imply quantitative extractions on flux of different sorts, but these quantities do not enter into equivalences that would suppose "something" unlimited, they form only compounds themselves qualitative, essentially mobile and limited, whose difference of elements compensates the imbalance (thus the relation of prestige and consumption in the block of finite debt). All these characters of the relation of code, indirect, qualitative and limited, suffice to show that a code is never economic, and cannot be: it expresses on the contrary the apparent objective movement according to which economic forces or productive connections are attributed, as if they emanated from it, to an extra-economic instance that serves as support and agent of inscription. This is what Althusser and Balibar show so well: how juridical and political relations are determined to be dominant, in the case of feudality for example, because surplus labor as form of surplus-value constitutes a flux qualitatively and temporally distinct from that of labor, and must enter from then on into a compound itself qualitative implying non-economic factors. Or else how autochthonous relations of alliance and filiation are determined to be dominant in so-called primitive societies, where economic forces and flux inscribe themselves on the full body of the earth and are attributed to it. In short, there is code only where a full body as instance of anti-production folds back upon the economy it appropriates. This is why the sign of desire, insofar as it is an economic sign consisting in making flux couler and cut, is doubled by a sign of power necessarily extra-economic, although it has in the economy its causes and its effects (for example, the sign of alliance in relation to the power of the creditor). Or, which amounts to the same thing, surplus-value is here determined as surplus-value of code. The relation of code is therefore not only indirect, qualitative, limited, it is by that very fact also extra-economic, and operates as such the couplings between qualified flux. It implies from then on a system of appreciation or of collective evaluation, an ensemble of organs of perception, or better of belief as condition of existence and survival of the society considered: thus the collective investment of organs, which brings it about that men are directly coded, and the appreciating eye, such as we analyzed it in the primitive system. It will be remarked that these general traits that characterize a code are found precisely in what is called today genetic code; not because it would depend on an effect of signifier, but on the contrary because the chain that it constitutes is itself signifying only secondarily, insofar as it brings into play couplings between qualified flux, interactions exclusively indirect, compounds qualitative essentially limited, organs of perception and extra-chemical factors that select and appropriate cellular connections.

223So many reasons to define capitalism by a social axiomatic, which opposes codes in all respects. First, money as general equivalent represents an abstract quantity indifferent to the qualified nature of flux. But equivalence itself refers back to the position of an unlimited: in the formula A-M-A, "the circulation of money as capital possesses its aim in itself, because it is only through this ever-renewed movement that value continues to assert itself; the movement of capital therefore has no limits."{200} Bohannan's studies on the Tiv of Niger, or Salisbury's on the Siane of New Guinea, showed how much the introduction of money as equivalent, which permits starting with money and finishing with money, thus never ending, suffices to disturb the circuits of qualified flux, to decompose the finite blocks of debt and to destroy the very basis of codes. It remains in the second place that money as unlimited abstract quantity is not separable from a becoming-concrete without which it would not become capital and would not appropriate production. We have seen that this becoming-concrete appeared in the differential relation; but precisely the differential relation is not an indirect relation between qualified or coded flux, it is a direct relation between decoded flux whose respective quality does not preexist it. The quality of flux results only from their conjunction as decoded flux; they would remain purely virtual outside this conjunction; this conjunction is equally the disjunction of abstract quantity by which it becomes something concrete. Dx and dy are nothing independently of their relation, which determines one as pure quality of the labor flux, the other as pure quality of the capital flux. It is therefore the inverse procedure from that of a code, and which expresses the capitalist transformation of code surplus-value into flux surplus-value. Hence the fundamental change in the régime of power. For, if one of the flux finds itself subordinated and enslaved to the other, it is precisely because they are not at the same power (x and y2 for example), and because the relation is established between a power and a given magnitude. This is what appeared to us in pursuing the analysis of capital and labor at the level of the differential relation between financing flux and flux of means of payment or revenues; such an extension merely whistled that there is no industrial essence of capital that does not function as merchant, financial and commercial capital, and where money does not take on functions other than its form as equivalent. But thus the signs of power cease altogether to be what they were from the perspective of a code: they become directly economic coefficients, instead of doubling the economic signs of desire and expressing on their own account non-economic factors determined to be dominant. That the financing flux be at an altogether different power than the flux of means of payment signifies that power has become directly economic. And, on the other side, on the side of paid labor, it is evident that there is no longer need for a code to assure surplus-labor when the latter finds itself confused qualitatively and temporally with labor itself in a single and same simple magnitude (condition of flux surplus-value).

224Capital as socius or full body thus distinguishes itself from every other, in that it is worth through itself as a directly economic instance, and folds back onto production without bringing in extra-economic factors that would inscribe themselves in a code. With capitalism the full body becomes truly naked, like the worker himself, hooked onto this full body. It is in this sense that the apparatus of anti-production ceases to be transcendent, penetrates all production and becomes coextensive with it. In the third place, these developed conditions of the destruction of every code in becoming-concrete mean that the absence of limit takes on a new meaning. It no longer designates simply the unlimited abstract quantity, but the effective absence of limit or term for the differential rapport where the abstract becomes something concrete. Of capitalism we say both that it has no external limit, and that it has one: it has one which is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of flux, but it functions only by pushing back and conjuring away this limit. And also it has internal limits and it has none: it has them in the specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that is, in capital itself, but it functions only by reproducing and enlarging these limits on an ever vaster scale. And this is precisely the power of capitalism, that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the preceding axioms. Capitalism defines a field of immanence, and ceases not to fill this field. But this deterritorialized field is determined by an axiomatic, contrary to the territorial field determined by primitive codes. The differential rapports as they are filled by surplus-value, the absence of external limits as it is "filled" by the enlargement of internal limits, the effusion of anti-production into production as it is filled by the absorption of surplus-value, constitute the three aspects of the immanent axiomatic of capitalism. And everywhere monetarization comes to fill the abyss of capitalist immanence, introducing into it, as Schmitt says, "a deformation, a convulsion, an explosion, in short a movement of extreme violence." There ensues finally a fourth character, which opposes the axiomatic to codes. It is that the axiomatic has no need whatsoever to write in living flesh, to mark bodies and organs nor to fabricate memory in men. Contrary to codes, the axiomatic finds in its different aspects its own organs of execution, of perception, of memorization. Memory has become a bad thing. Above all, there is no longer need for belief, and it is only with the corner of his lips that the capitalist grieves that one no longer believes in anything, today. "For this is how you speak: we are whole, real, without belief nor superstition; this is how you puff yourselves up without even having a throat!" Language no longer signifies something that must be believed, but indicates what is going to be done, and what the cunning or the competent know how to decode, understand half-said. More than that, despite the abundance of identity cards, files and means of control, capitalism has no need even to write in books to supply for the disappeared marks on bodies. These are only survivals, archaisms with present function. The person has truly become "private," insofar as it derives from abstract quantities and becomes concrete in the becoming-concrete of these same quantities. It is these which are marked, no longer the persons themselves: your capital or your labor-power, the rest matters not, you will always be found within the enlarged limits of the system, even if it takes an axiom just for you. There is no longer need to invest collectively the organs, they are sufficiently filled by the floating images that cease not to be produced by capitalism. Following a remark of Henri Lefebvre, these images proceed less to a publication of the private than to a privatization of the public: the entire world unfolds as family, without having to leave your television. Which gives to private persons, as we shall see, a very particular role in the system: a role of application, and no longer of implication in a code. The hour of Oedipus draws near.

225If capitalism proceeds thus by an axiomatic, and not by code, one must not believe that it replaces the socius, the social machine, with a set of technical machines. The difference in nature between the two types of machines subsists, although they are both machines properly speaking, without metaphor. The originality of capitalism is rather that the social machine has as its pieces the technical machines as constant capital which clings to the full body of the socius, and no longer men, become adjacent to the technical machines (whence the inscription no longer bears, or at least would no longer need to bear directly on men in principle). But an axiomatic is in no way by itself a simple technical machine, even automatic or cybernetic. Bourbaki says it well of scientific axiomaticsː they do not form a Taylor system, nor a mechanical play of isolated formulas, but imply "intuitions" linked to the resonances and conjunctions of structures, and which are only aided by "the powerful levers" of technique. How much more true is this still of the social axiomatic: the manner in which it fills its own immanence, in which it repels or enlarges its limits, in which it adds yet more axioms while preventing the system from being saturated, in which it functions well only by grinding, breaking down, catching itself, all this implies social organs of decision, of management, of reaction, of inscription, a technocracy and a bureaucracy which do not reduce to the functioning of technical machines. In short, the conjunction of decoded flux, their differential relations and their multiple schizes or cuts, demand an entire regulation of which the principal organ is the State. The capitalist State is the regulator of decoded flux as such, insofar as they are taken up in the axiomatic of capital. In this sense it accomplishes well the becoming-concrete which seemed to us to preside over the evolution of the abstract despotic Urstaat: from transcendent unity, it becomes immanent to the field of social forces, passes into their service and serves as regulator of decoded and axiomatized flux. It accomplishes it so well that, in another sense, it represents alone a true rupture, a cut with it, contrary to the other forms which had been established on the ruins of the Urstaat. For the Urstaat defined itself by overcoding; and its derivatives, from the ancient city to the monarchic State, found themselves already in the presence of decoded flux or flux in the process of decoding, which rendered the State doubtless increasingly immanent and subordinate to the field of effective forces; but, precisely because circumstances were not given for these flux to enter into conjunction, the State could content itself with saving fragments of overcoding and codes, inventing others, even preventing with all its forces the conjunction from occurring (and for the rest resurrecting the Urstaat as much as possible). The capitalist State is in a different situation: it is produced by the conjunction of decoded or deterritorialized flux, and, if it carries to the highest degree the becoming-immanent, it is insofar as it ratifies the generalized bankruptcy of codes and overcodings, insofar as it evolves entirely within this new axiomatic of the conjunction of a nature unknown until then. Once again, this axiomatic, it does not invent, since it is identical with capital itself. It is born from it on the contrary, it results from it, it only assures its regulation, it rules or even organizes its misfires as conditions of functioning, it monitors or directs its progresses of saturation and the corresponding enlargements of limit. Never has a State so lost power, in order to place itself with so much force in the service of the sign of economic power. And this role, the capitalist State had it very early, whatever one says, from the beginning, from its gestation under forms still half feudal or monarchic: from the point of view of the flux of "free" workers, control of labor-power and of wages; from the point of view of the flux of industrial and mercantile production, granting of monopolies, conditions favorable to accumulation, struggle against overproduction. There has never been a liberal capitalism: action against monopolies refers first to a moment when commercial and financial capital still makes alliance with the old system of production, and where nascent industrial capitalism can only assure itself production and market by obtaining the abolition of these privileges. That there is no struggle here against the principle itself of a state control, provided it be the State which is fitting, one sees clearly in mercantilism, insofar as it expresses the new commercial functions of a capital which has assured itself direct interests in production. As a general rule, state controls and regulations tend to disappear or fade only in case of abundance of labor-power and unusual expansion of markets. That is to say when capitalism functions with a very small number of axioms within sufficiently broad relative limits. This situation ceased long ago, and one must consider as a decisive factor of this evolution the organization of a powerful working class demanding a stable and high level of employment, and forcing capitalism to multiply its axioms at the same time as it had to reproduce its limits at an ever-enlarged scale (axiom of displacement of center to periphery). Capitalism could only digest the Russian revolution by ceaselessly adding new axioms to the old ones, axiom for the working class, for the syndicates, etc. But axioms, it is always ready to add, it adds them for other things still, and much more minuscule, quite derisory, it is its proper passion which changes nothing essential. The State is then determined to play an increasingly important role in the regulation of axiomatized flux, both as regards production and its planning as regards economy and its "monetarization," of surplus-value and its absorption (by the State apparatus itself).

226The regulatory functions of the State imply no sort of arbitration between classes. That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called dominant class is a practical evidence, but one that does not yet deliver its theoretical reasons. These reasons are simple: it is that, from the point of view of capitalist axiomatics, there is only one class, with universalist vocation, the bourgeoisie. Plekhanov remarks that the discovery of class struggle and its role in history belongs to the French school of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Saint-Simon; now precisely those very ones who sing of the struggle of the bourgeois class against nobility and feudality, stop short before the proletariat and deny that there can be class difference between the industrialist or banker and the worker, but only fusion in a single flux as between profit and wage.{202} There is something other than blindness or ideological disavowal at work here. Classes are the negative of castes and ranks, classes are orders, castes and ranks decoded. To reread all of history through class struggle is to read it in function of the bourgeoisie as decoding class and decoded. It is the only class as such, insofar as it wages struggle against codes and merges with the generalized decoding of flux. By this title it suffices to fill the field of capitalist immanence. And indeed, something new comes about with the bourgeoisie: the disappearance of enjoyment as an end, the new conception of conjunction according to which the sole end is abstract wealth, and its realization in forms other than that of consumption. The generalized slavery of the despotic State implied at least masters, and an apparatus of anti-production distinct from the sphere of production. But the field of bourgeois immanence, as it is defined by the conjunction of decoded flux, the negation of all transcendence or exterior limit, the effusion of anti-production into production itself, establishes an incomparable slavery, an unprecedented subjection: there is no longer even a master, only now slaves command slaves, there is no longer need to load the beast from without, it loads itself. Not that man is ever the slave of the technical machine; but slave of the social machine, the bourgeois gives the example, he absorbs surplus-value for ends which, taken as a whole, have nothing to do with his enjoyment: more slave than the last of slaves, first servant of the hungry machine, beast of reproduction of capital, internalization of infinite debt. I too am a slave, such are the new words of the master. "The capitalist is respectable only insofar as he is capital made man. In this role he is, like the hoarder, dominated by his blind passion for abstract wealth, value. But what in one appears to be an individual mania is in the other the effect of the social mechanism of which he is only a cog."‌{203} One will say that there is nonetheless a dominant class and a dominated class, defined by surplus-value, the distinction of capital flux and labor flux, of financing flux and wage-income flux. But this is true only in part, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two in differential relationships, and integrates them both in the ceaselessly enlarged reproduction of its own limits. So that the bourgeois is right to say, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of his axiomatics: there is only one machine, that of the great decoded mutant flux, cut from goods, and a single class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the one that decodes castes and ranks, and that draws from the machine an undivided flux of income, convertible into goods of consumption or production, and where wages and profits merge. In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the "negative" of codes, which implies there is only one. The theoretical opposition is elsewhere: it is between decoded flux as it enters into an axiomatics of class on the full body of capital, and decoded flux which free itself no less from this axiomatics than from despotic signification, which cross this wall and this wall of the wall, and begin to flow on the full body without organs. It is between class and the out-of-class. Between the servants of the machine and those who make it jump or make the cogs jump. Between the régime of the social machine and that of machines of desire. Between relative interior limits and absolute exterior limit. If one wishes: between capitalists and schizos, in their fundamental intimacy at the level of decoding, in their fundamental hostility at the level of axiomatics (hence the resemblance, in the portrait that nineteenth-century socialists make of the proletariat, between this and a perfect schizo).

227This is why the problem of a proletarian class belongs first to praxis. To organize a bipolarization of the social field, a bipolarity of classes, was the task of the revolutionary socialist movement. Of course, one can conceive a theoretical determination of the proletarian class at the level of production (those from whom surplus-value is extracted) or at the level of money (wage income). But not only are these determinations sometimes too narrow and sometimes too broad; the objective being they define as class interest remains purely virtual so long as it does not incarnate itself in a consciousness, which certainly does not create it, but actualizes it in an organized party, apt to propose to itself the conquest of the state apparatus. If the movement of capitalism, in the play of its differential relations, is to evade every fixed assignable limit, to exceed and displace its interior limits and to always operate cuts of cuts, the socialist movement seems necessarily led to fix or assign a limit that distinguishes the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, a great cut that will animate a struggle not only economic and financial, but political. Now, precisely, what such a conquest of the state apparatus signifies has always been and remains problematic. A supposedly socialist State implies a transformation of production, of productive units and of economic calculation. But this transformation can only take place starting from an already-conquered State that finds itself before the same axiomatic problems of extraction of a surplus or of surplus-value, of accumulation, of absorption, of market and of monetary calculation. Thenceforth, either the proletariat prevails in accordance with its objective interest, but these operations are carried out under the domination of its vanguard of consciousness or of party, that is, to the profit of a bureaucracy and a technocracy that count for the bourgeoisie as the "great-absent"; or the bourgeoisie retains control of the State, going so far as to secrete its own techno-bureaucracy, and above all to add some further axioms for the recognition and integration of the proletariat as second class. It is accurate to say that the alternative is not between market and planning, inasmuch as planning necessarily introduces itself into the capitalist State, and inasmuch as the market subsists in the socialist State, if only as a monopolist State market. But precisely, how to define the true alternative without supposing all problems resolved? The immense work of Lenin and the Russian revolution was to forge a class consciousness conforming to being or to objective interest, and as a consequence to impose on capitalist countries a recognition of class bipolarity. But this great Leninist cut did not prevent the resurrection of a State capitalism within socialism itself, any more than it prevented classical capitalism from circumventing it by continuing its true mole-work, always cuts of cuts that allowed it to integrate into its axiomatic sections of the recognized class, while casting further off, to the periphery or in enclaves, the uncontrolled revolutionary elements (no more controlled by official socialism than by capitalism). Then the choice appeared to be only between the new terroristic and rigid axiomatic, quickly saturated, of the socialist State, and the old cynical axiomatic, all the more dangerous for being supple and never saturated, of the capitalist State. But in truth, the most direct question is not whether an industrial society can do without surplus, without absorption of surplus, without a planning and merchant State, and even without an equivalent of bourgeoisie: both it is evident that no, but also that the question posed in these terms is not well posed. Nor is it a question of knowing whether class consciousness, incarnated in a party, in a State, betrays or does not betray the objective class interest to which one would lend a sort of possible spontaneity, stifled by the instances that claim to represent it. Sartre's analysis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason seems to us profoundly just, according to which there is no spontaneity of class, but only of "group": whence the necessity of distinguishing "groups in fusion" and the class which remains "serial", represented by the party or the State. And the two are not on the same scale. It is that class interest remains of the order of great molar ensembles; it defines only a collective preconscious, necessarily represented in a distinct consciousness of which there is not even occasion to ask at this level whether it betrays it or not, alienates it or not, deforms it or not. The true unconscious, on the contrary, is in group desire, which puts into play the molecular order of machines of desire. It is there that the problem lies, between the unconscious desires of the group and the preconscious interests of class. It is only from there that we will see one can pose the questions that flow indirectly from it, on the preconscious of class and the representative forms of class consciousness, on the nature of interests and the process of their realization. Always Reich returns, with his innocent exigencies that claim the rights of a prior distinction of desire and interest: "The leadership (must not have) a more pressing task, beyond precise knowledge of the objective historical process, than that of understanding: a) what progressive ideas and desires exist according to layers, professions, age-classes and sexes; b) what desires, anxieties and ideas obstruct the development of the progressive aspect — traditional fixations". (204) (The leadership has rather a tendency to respond: when I hear the word desire, I draw my revolver.)

228It is that desire is never deceived. Interest can be deceived, misrecognized or betrayed, but not desire. Whence Reich's cry: no, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what must be explained… It happens that one desires against one's interest: capitalism profits from it, but so do socialism, the party and party leadership. How to explain that desire delivers itself to operations that are not misrecognitions, but perfectly reactionary unconscious investments? And what does Reich mean when he speaks of "traditional fixations"? They are also part of the historical process, and lead us back to the modern functions of the State. Modern civilized societies resign themselves through processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize on one side, they re-territorialize on the other. These neo-territorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; only, they are archaisms with perfectly current function, our modern manner of "bricking," of gridding, of reintroducing fragments of code, of resurrecting old ones, of inventing pseudo-codes or jargons. Neo-archaisms, according to Edgar Morin's formula. They are extremely complex and varied, these modern territorialities. Some are rather folkloric, but represent no less social and possibly political forces (from lawn bowlers to moonshine distillers passing through war veterans). Others are enclaves, whose archaism can nourish a modern fascism just as well as release a revolutionary charge (ethnic minorities, the Basque problem, Irish Catholics, Indian reserves). Some form as if spontaneously, in the very current of the movement of deterritorialization (neighborhood territorialities, territorialities of large housing blocks, "gangs"). Others are organized or favored by the State, even if they turn against it and pose serious problems for it (regionalism, nationalism). The fascist State was undoubtedly in capitalism the most fantastic attempt at economic and political re-territorialization. But the socialist State also has its own minorities, its own territorialities, which reform against it, or which it provokes and organizes (Russian nationalism, party territoriality: the proletariat could only constitute itself as a class on the basis of artificial neo-territorialities; in parallel, the bourgeoisie re-territorializes itself under sometimes the most archaic forms). The limping personalization of power is like a territoriality that comes to double the deterritorialization of the machine. If it is true that the function of the modern State is the régulation of decoded, deterritorialized flux, one of the principal aspects of this function consists in re-territorializing, to prevent decoded flux from leaking out everywhere from the axiomatics of the social. One sometimes has the impression that capital flux would willingly send itself to the moon, if the capitalist State were not there to bring it back to earth. For example: deterritorialization of financing flux, but re-territorialization by purchasing power and means of payment (role of central banks). Or the movement of deterritorialization that goes from center to periphery accompanies itself with a peripheral re-territorialization, a sort of economic and political self-centering of the periphery, either under the modernist forms of a socialism or State capitalism, or under the archaic form of local despots. At the limit, it is impossible to distinguish deterritorialization and re-territorialization, which are caught in one another or are like the reverse and obverse of a single process.

229This essential aspect of regulation by the State is explained even better if one sees that it is directly founded in the economic and social axiomatic of capitalism as such. It is the very conjunction of deterritorialized flux that sketches archaic or artificial neo-territorialities. Marx showed what the foundation of political economy properly speaking was: the discovery of an abstract subjective essence of wealth, in labor or production — one could equally say in desire ("It was an immense progress when Adam Smith rejected every determination of the creative activity of wealth and considered only labor plain and simple: neither manufacturing labor, nor commercial labor, nor agriculture, but all activities without distinction… the abstract universality of the creative activity of wealth").{205} There is the great movement of decoding or deterritorialization: the nature of wealth is no longer sought on the side of the object, in external conditions, territorial machine or despotic machine. But Marx immediately adds that this essentially "cynical" discovery is found corrected by a new territorialization, like a new fetishism or a new "hypocrisy". Production as abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the forms of property that objectify it anew, that alienate it by re-territorializing it. Not only did the mercantilists, while sensing the subjective nature of wealth, determine it as a particular activity still bound to a despotic machine "making money"; not only did the physiocrats, pushing this sensing even further, bind subjective activity to a territorial or re-territorialized machine, in the form of agriculture and landed property. But even Adam Smith discovers the great essence of wealth, abstract and subjective, industrial and deterritorialized, only by re-territorializing it immediately in the private property of means of production. (And one cannot say in this regard that so-called common property changes the meaning of this movement). Even more, if it is no longer a matter of making the history of political economy, but the real history of the corresponding society, one understands even better why capitalism ceases never to re-territorialize what it deterritorialized in the first place. It is in Capital that Marx analyzes the true reason for the double movement: on one hand, capitalism can only proceed by ceaselessly developing the abstract subjective essence of wealth, produce in order to produce, that is to say "production as an end in itself, the absolute development of the social productivity of labor"; but on the other hand and at the same time, it can only do so within the framework of its own limited aim, as a determined mode of production, "production for capital", "valorization of existing capital".{206} Under the first aspect, capitalism ceases never to exceed its own limits, deterritorializing always further, "investing itself in a universal cosmopolitan energy that overturns every barrier and every bond"; but, under the second aspect, strictly complementary, capitalism ceases never to have limits and barriers that are interior to it, immanent, and which, precisely because they are immanent cannot be exceeded except by reproducing themselves on an enlarged scale (always more re-territorialization, local, worldwide and planetary). This is why the law of the tendential fall, that is to say of limits never reached because always exceeded and always reproduced, seemed to us to have for corollary, and even for direct manifestation, the simultaneity of the two movements of deterritorialization and re-territorialization.

230An important consequence emerges from this. It is that the social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and ceases not to oscillate from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialisation, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resurrect as an overcoding and re-territorialising unity, and the unleashed flux that carries them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with a vengeance, through blows of worldwide dictatorship, of local dictators and all-powerful police, while they decode or allow to be decoded the flowing quantities of their capitals and their populations. They are caught between two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They waver between two poles: the paranoid despotic sign, the signifying-sign of the despot that they attempt to reanimate as a unity of code; the figure-sign of the schizo as a unity of decoded flux, schiz, point-sign or cut-flux. On the one they apply a tourniquet, but they flow or pour out through the other. They cease neither to be behind nor ahead of themselves. How to reconcile the nostalgia and necessity of the Urstaat with the exigency and inevitability of the fluxion of flux? How to do it so that the decoding and deterritorialisation, constitutive of the system, do not make it flee by one end or another that would escape the axiomatic and fleece the machine (a Chinese on the horizon, a Cuban launching missiles, an Arab plane hijacker, a consul kidnapper, a Black Panther, a May 68, or even drugged hippies, angry queers, etc.). One oscillates between reactionary paranoiac surcharges and underground charges, schizophrenic and revolutionary. What is more, one does not quite know how it turns one way or the other: the two ambiguous poles of delirium, their transformations, the manner in which an archaism or a folklore, in such or such circumstance, can suddenly be charged with a dangerous progressive value. How it turns fascist or revolutionary, that is the problem of universal delirium on which everyone keeps silent, first and foremost the psychiatrists (they have no idea about it; why would they?). Capitalism, and also socialism, are as if torn between the despotic signifiant, which they adore, and the schizophrenic figure, which carries them along. Then we are entitled to maintain two preceding conclusions that seemed to oppose one another. On the one hand, the modern State forms a true cut in advance, with respect to the despotic State, in function of its accomplishment of a becoming-immanent, of its decoding of generalised flux, of its axiomatic that comes to replace the codes and overcodings. But, on the other hand, there has never been and there is only one single State, the Urstaat, the Asian despotic formation, which constitutes in retreat the only cut for all of history, since even modern social axiomatic can only function by resurrecting it as one of the poles between which its own cut is exercised. Democracy, fascism or socialism, which is not haunted by the Urstaat as an incomparable model? The chief of police of the dictator Duvallier was called Desyr.

231Simply, it is not by the same procedures that a thing is resurrected and was incited. We have distinguished three great social machines that corresponded to savages, barbarians, and the civilized. The first is the underlying territorial machine, which consists in coding the flux on the full body of the earth. The second is the transcendent imperial machine which consists in overcoding the flux on the full body of the despot and his apparatus, the Urstaat: it operates the first great movement of deterritorialization, but because it adds its eminent unity to the territorial communities it preserves by gathering them together, overcoding them, appropriating the surplus labor. The third is the modern immanent machine, which consists in decoding the flux on the full body of capital-money: it has realized immanence, it has made concrete the abstract as such, naturalized the artificial, replacing the territorial codes and despotic overcoding by an axiomatic of decoded flux, and a régulation of these flux; it operates the second great movement of deterritorialization, but this time because it leaves nothing subsisting of codes and overcodes. Yet what it does not leave subsisting, it rediscovers by its own original means; it re-territorializes where it has lost the territorialities, it creates new archaisms where it destroys the old ones — and the two marry each other. The historian says: no, the modern State, its bureaucracy, its technocracy, do not resemble the ancient despotic state. Obviously, since it is a matter of re-territorializing decoded flux in one case, while in the other case it is a matter of overcoding territorial flux. The paradox is that capitalism makes use of the Urstaat to operate its re-territorializations. But, unperturbed, the modern axiomatic in the depths of its immanence reproduces the transcendent Urstaat, as its limit become interior, or one of its poles between which it is determined to oscillate. And, beneath its unperturbed and cynical character, great forces work it, which form the other pole of the axiomatic, its accidents, its failures and its chances of jumping, of passing what it decodes beyond the wall of its immanent régulations as of its transcendental resurrections. Each type of social machine produces a certain kind of representation, whose elements organize themselves on the surface of the socius: the system of connotation-connexion in the savage territorial machine, which corresponds to the coding of flux; the system of subordination-disjunction in the barbarian despotic machine, corresponding to overcoding; the system of coordination-conjunction in the civilized capitalist machine, corresponding to the decoding of flux. Deterritorialization, axiomatic and re-territorialization, such are the three surface elements of the representation of desire in the modern socius. We fall back then upon the question: what is in each case the rapport of social production and of desire production, once it is said that there is always between the two identity of nature, but also difference of régime? Could it be that the identity of nature is at the highest point in the régime of modern capitalist representation, because it is realized there "universally" in immanence, and in the fluxion of decoded flux? But also that the difference of régime is the greatest there, and that this representation exercises upon desire an operation of repression-refoulement more forceful than any other, because, by favor of immanence and decoding, anti-production has spread throughout all production, instead of remaining localized in the system, releasing a fantastic death drive that now impregnates and crushes desire? And what is this death that always rises from within, but which must arrive from without — and which, in the case of capitalism, rises with all the more power in that one does not yet see clearly what is this without that will make it arrive? In short, the general theory of society is a generalized theory of flux; it is in function of this that one must estimate the rapport of social production and of desire production, the variations of this rapport in each case, the limits of this rapport in the capitalist system.

232In the territorial machine or even the despotic machine, the reproduction of social economy is never independent of human reproduction, of the social form of this human reproduction. The family is therefore an open praxis, a strategy coextensive with the social field; relations of filiation and alliance are determinant, or rather "determined to be dominant." What is marked, inscribed on the socius, in effect, is immediately the producers (or non-producers) according to the rank of their family and their rank within the family. The process of reproduction is not directly economic, but passes through the non-economic factors of kinship. This is true not only of the territorial machine, and of the local groups that determine each one's place in social economic reproduction according to their rank from the point of view of alliances and filiations, but also of the despotic machine which doubles these through the relations of the new alliance and of direct filiation (hence the role of the sovereign's family in despotic overcoding, and of the "dynasty," whatever its mutations, its uncertainties, which are always inscribed in the same category of new alliance). It is no longer at all the same in the capitalist system. Representation no longer relates to a distinct object, but to the productive activity itself. The socius as full body has become directly economic as capital-money; it tolerates no other presupposition. What is inscribed or marked is no longer the producers or non-producers, but the forces and means of production as abstract quantities that become effectively concrete in their bringing into relation or conjunction: labor-power or capital, constant capital or variable capital, capital of filiation or of alliance… It is capital that has taken upon itself the relations of alliance and filiation. There follows a privatization of the family, according to which it ceases to give its social form to economic reproduction: it is as it were disinvested, put out of field; to speak as Aristotle, it is nothing more than the form of matter or of human material that finds itself subordinated to the autonomous social form of economic reproduction, and that comes to the place which this latter assigns to it. That is to say, the elements of production and anti-production do not reproduce themselves as men themselves do, but find in them a simple material that the form of economic reproduction preorganizes in a manner entirely distinct from that which it has as human reproduction. Precisely because it is privatized, put out of field, the form of material or of human reproduction engenders men one has no trouble supposing all equal to one another; but, within the field itself, the form of social economic reproduction has already preformed the form of material to engender where it must the capitalist as a function derived from capital, the worker as a function derived from labor-power, etc., in such a way that the family finds itself already cut across by the order of classes (it is precisely in this sense that segregation is the sole origin of equality…)

233This putting of the family outside the social field is also its greatest social chance. For it is the condition under which the entire social field will be able to apply itself to the family. Individual persons are first social persons, that is to say derived functions of abstract quantities; they become themselves concrete in the bringing into relation or the axiomatics of these quantities, in their conjunction. They are exactly configurations or images produced by point-signs, cut-flux, the pure "figures" of capitalism: the capitalist as personified capital, that is to say as derived function of the flux of capital, the worker as personified labor-power, derived function of the flux of labor. Capitalism thus fills its field of immanence with images: even misery, despair, revolt, and on the other side the violence and oppression of capital become images of misery, despair, revolt, violence or oppression. But starting from the non-figurative figures or the cut-flux that produce them, these images will themselves be only figurative and reproductive in informing a human material, whose specific form of reproduction falls outside the social field that nonetheless determines it. Private persons are thus second-order images, images of images, that is to say simulacra which receive thus the aptitude to represent the first-order image of social persons. These private persons are formally determined in the place of the restricted family as father, mother, child. But, instead of this family being a strategy which, through alliances and filiations, opens onto the entire social field, is coextensive with it and intersects its coordinates, it is now, one would say, only a simple tactic upon which the social field closes back, to which it applies its autonomous exigencies of reproduction, and which it intersects in all its dimensions. Alliances and filiations no longer pass through men, but through money; then the family becomes microcosm, apt to express what it no longer dominates. In a certain way, the situation has not changed; for what is invested through the family is always the economic, political and cultural social field, its cuts and its flux. Private persons are an illusion, images of images or derivatives of derivatives. But in another way everything has changed, because the family, instead of constituting and developing the dominant factors of social reproduction, contents itself with applying and enveloping these factors in its own mode of reproduction. Father, mother, child thus become the simulacrum of the images of capital ("Mister Capital, Madame Earth" and their child, the Worker…), so that these images are no longer recognized at all in the desire determined to invest only the simulacrum. Family determinations become the application of social axiomatics. The family becomes the subset to which the ensemble of the social field applies. As each has a father and a mother in private capacity, it is a distributive subset which simulates for each the collective ensemble of social persons, which closes its domain in a loop and scrambles its images. Everything folds back onto the father-mother-child triangle, which resonates by answering "papa-mama" each time it is stimulated with the images of capital. In short, Oedipus arrives: it is born in the capitalist system of the application of first-order social images to second-order private family images. It is the arriving ensemble that responds to a socially determined departing ensemble. It is our intimate colonial formation that responds to the form of social sovereignty. We are all little colonies, and it is Oedipus that colonizes us. When the family ceases to be a unit of production and reproduction, when the conjunction recovers in itself the sense of a simple unit of consumption, it is from father-mother that we consume. In the departing ensemble there is the boss, the chief, the priest, the cop, the tax collector, the soldier, the worker, all the machines and territorialities, all the social images of our society; but in the arriving ensemble, at the limit, there remains only papa, mama and me, the despotic sign gathered by papa, the residual territoriality assumed by mama, and the me divided, cut, castrated. This operation of folding back, of folding or of application, is this not what leads Lacan to say, willingly betraying the secret of psychoanalysis as applied axiomatics: what appears to "play more freely in what is called analytic dialogue depends in fact on a foundation perfectly reducible to a few essential and formalizable articulations." Everything is preformed, arranged in advance. The social field where each acts and suffers as collective agent of enunciation, agent of production and anti-production, folds back onto Oedipus, where each now finds itself trapped in its corner, cut along the line that divides it into individual subject of statement and individual subject of enunciation. The subject of statement, it is the social person, and the subject of enunciation, the private person. It is "therefore" your father, it is therefore your mother, it is therefore you: the family conjunction results from the capitalist conjunctions, insofar as they apply to privatized persons. Papa-mama-me, we are sure to find them everywhere, since we have applied everything to them. The reign of images, such is the new manner in which capitalism uses schizes and diverts flux: composite images, images folded back onto images, in such a way that at the outcome of the operation, the little me of each, referred to its father-mother, is truly the center of the world. Much more insidious than the underground reign of the fetishes of the earth, or the celestial reign of the idols of the despot, here is the advent of the Oedipal-narcissistic machine: "No more glyphs nor hieroglyphics, … we want objective reality, real, … that is to say the Kodak-idea… For each man, each woman, the universe is only what surrounds his or her absolute little image of himself or herself… An image! A Kodak snapshot in a universal film of snapshots." Each as little triangulated microcosm, the narcissistic me coincides with the Oedipal subject.

234Oedipus at last…, it is ultimately a very simple operation, easily formalizable indeed. Yet it engages universal history. We have seen in what sense schizophrenia was the absolute limit of every society, insofar as it causes decoded and deterritorialized flux to pass through, which it returns to desiring production, "at the limit" of all social production. And capitalism, the relative limit of every society, insofar as it axiomatizes decoded flux, and re-territorializes deterritorialized flux. Thus capitalism finds in schizophrenia its own exterior limit, which it ceaselessly pushes back and conjures away, while it produces its own immanent limits which it displaces and enlarges ceaselessly. But an interior limit displaced, capitalism still needs it in another way: precisely in order to neutralize or push back the absolute exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit, it needs to internalize it, this time by restricting it, by making it pass no longer between social production and the desiring production that detaches from it, but within social production itself, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction upon which the former folds back, between the social ensemble and the private sub-ensemble to which it applies itself. Oedipus is this limit displaced or internalized, desire lets itself be caught there. The oedipal triangle is the intimate and private territoriality that corresponds to all the efforts of social re-territorialization of capitalism. Limit displaced, since it is the displaced represented of desire, Oedipus was always this for every formation. But in primitive formations this limit remains unoccupied, precisely insofar as flux are coded and the play of alliances and filiations maintains large families at the scale of determinations of the social field, preventing any secondary folding back of the latter upon the former. In despotic formations, the oedipal limit is occupied, symbolically occupied, but not lived or inhabited, insofar as imperial incest operates an over-coding that in turn flies over the entire social field (repressing representation): the formal operations of folding back, of extrapolation, etc., which will belong later to Oedipus, already take shape, but in a symbolic space where the object of the heights constitutes itself. It is only in the capitalist formation that the oedipal limit is found not only occupied, but inhabited and lived, in the sense that the social images produced by decoded flux actually fold back onto restricted familial images invested by desire. It is at this point of the imaginary that Oedipus constitutes itself, at the same time that it completes its migration into the deep elements of representation: the displaced represented has become as such the representative of desire. It goes without saying that this becoming or this constitution does not take place under the forms imagined in social formations anterior to it, since the imaginary Oedipus results from such a becoming, and not the reverse. It is not by a flux of shit or a flow of incest that Oedipus arrives, but by the decoded flux of capital-money. The flows of incest and shit derive from it only secondarily, insofar as they carry along those private persons upon whom the flux of capital fold back or apply themselves (whence the genesis complex altogether deformed in the psychoanalytic equation shit = money: in fact, it is a system of encounters or of conjunctions, of derivatives and resultants between decoded flux).

235There is in Oedipus a recapitulation of the three states or the three machines. For it prepares itself in the territorial machine, as empty unoccupied limit. It forms itself in the despotic machine as limit occupied symbolically. But it is only filled and effectuated in becoming the imaginary Oedipus of the capitalist machine. The despotic machine preserved primitive territorialities, and the capitalist machine resurrects the Urstaat as one of the poles of its axiomatic, it makes of the despot one of its images. This is why Oedipus gathers everything, everything is found again in Oedipus which is indeed the result of universal history, but in the singular sense in which capitalism already is. Here the entire series, fetishes, idols, images and simulacra: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, everything is retaken by the images of capitalism which push them and reduce them to the oedipal simulacrum. The representative of the local group with Laius, the territoriality with Jocasta, the despot with Oedipus himself: "motley painting of everything that has ever been believed." It is not surprising that Freud sought in Sophocles the central image of Oedipus-despot, the myth become tragedy, to make it radiate in two opposite directions, the primitive ritual direction of Totem and Taboo, the private direction of modern man who dreams (Oedipus can be a myth, a tragedy, a dream: it always expresses the displacement of the limit). Oedipus would be nothing if the symbolic position of an object of the heights, in the despotic machine, did not first render possible the operations of folding and bringing down that will constitute it in the modern field: the cause of triangulation. Hence the extreme importance, but also the indetermination, the undecidability of the thesis of the most profound innovator in psychoanalysis, which makes the displaced limit pass between the symbolic and the imaginary, between symbolic castration and imaginary Oedipus. For castration in the order of the despotic signifier, as law of the despot or effect of the object of the heights, is in truth the formal condition of oedipal images, which will deploy themselves in the field of immanence that the withdrawal of the signifier leaves uncovered. I arrive at desire when I succeed in reaching castration…! What does the equation desire-castration signify, except a prodigious operation indeed, which consists in placing desire again under the law of the despot, in introducing into it at the deepest level lack and in saving us from Oedipus by a fantastic regression. Fantastic and ingenious regression: it had to be done, "no one helped me," as Lacan says, to shake off the yoke of Oedipus and lead it to the point of its self-critique. But it is like the story of resisters who, wanting to topple a pylon, balanced the plastic charges so well that the pylon jumped and fell back into its hole. From the symbolic to the imaginary, from castration to Oedipus, from the despotic age to capitalism, there is inversely the progress which makes the object of the heights, overflying and overcoding, withdraw, make way for a social field of immanence where the decoded flux produce images, and bring them down. Hence the two aspects of the signifier, transcendent barred object caught in a maximum that distributes lack, and immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the field put uncovered (a bit like, following tradition, one passes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus).

236A transcendent object increasingly spiritualized, for a field of forces increasingly immanent, increasingly interiori­zed: such is the evolution of infinite debt — through Catholicism, then the Reformation. The extreme spiritualization of the despotic State, the extreme interiori­zation of the capitalist field define bad conscience. This is not the opposite of cynicism; it is, in private persons, the correlate of the cynicism of social persons. All the cynical procedures of bad conscience, as Nietzsche, then Lawrence and Miller, have analyzed them to define the European man of civilization, — the reign of images and hypnosis, the torpor they propagate, — hatred against life, against all that is free, that passes and that flows; the universal effusion of the death drive, — depression, guilt used as a means of contagion, the vampire's kiss: are you not ashamed to be happy? take my example, I will not let you go until you also say "it is my fault," oh the ignoble contagion of the depressed, neurosis as the only illness, which consists in making others sick, — the permissive structure: that I may deceive, steal, cut throats, kill! but in the name of social order, and that mom-dad be proud of me, — the double direction given to ressentiment, turning back against oneself and projection against the other: the father is dead, it is my fault, who killed him? it is your fault, it is the Jew, the Arab, the Chinese, all the resources of racism and segregation, — the abject desire to be loved, the whining of not being loved enough, of not being "understood," at the same time as the reduction of sexuality to the "dirty little secret," all this psychology of the priest, — there is not a single one of these procedures that does not find in Oedipus its nourishing ground and its sustenance. Not a single one of these procedures either that does not serve and develop in psychoanalysis: this as a new avatar of the "ascetic ideal." Once again, it is not psychoanalysis that invents Oedipus: it merely gives him a last territoriality, the divan, as a last law, the despot analyst and extractor of money. But the mother as simulacrum of territoriality, and the father as simulacrum of despotic law, with the self cut, split, castrated, are the products of capitalism insofar as it sets up an operation that has no equivalent in other social formations. Everywhere else the family position is only a stimulus for the investment of the social field by desire: family images function only by opening onto social images to which they couple or confront themselves in the course of struggles and compromises; so that, what is invested through the cuts and segments of families, are the economic, political, cultural cuts of the field in which they are immersed (cf. ndembu schizo-analysis). It is thus even in the peripheral zones of capitalism, where the effort made by the colonizer to oedipialize the indigenous, African Oedipus, is contradicted by the bursting of the family along the lines of social exploitation and oppression. But it is at the soft center of capitalism, in the temperate bourgeois regions, that the colony becomes intimate and private, interior to each one: then the flux of investment of desire, which goes from the family stimulus to the (or disorganization) social organization, is in some sort covered by a reflux that folds the social investment back onto family investment as pseudo-organizer. The family has become the place of retention and resonance of all social determinations. It belongs to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all social images to the simulacra of a restricted family, in such a way that, everywhere one turns, one finds only mom-dad: this Oedipal rot that sticks to our skin. Yes, I desired my mother and wanted to kill my father; a single subject of enunciation, Oedipus, for all capitalist statements, and between the two, the cut of folding-back, castration.

237Marx said: Luther's merit was to have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object, but as inner religiosity; the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have determined the essence or nature of wealth, no longer as objective nature, but as abstract subjective essence and deterritorialized, activity of production in general. But, since this determination takes place under the conditions of capitalism, they objectify essence anew, alienate it and re-territorialize it, this time in the form of private property of the means of production. So that capitalism is without doubt the universal of all society, but only insofar as it is capable of conducting its own critique up to a certain point, that is to say, the critique of the procedures by which it re-chains what, in it, tended to liberate itself or to appear freely. One must say the same thing of Freud: his greatness is to have determined the essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to objects, aims and even sources (territories), but as abstract subjective essence, libido or sexuality. Only, this essence, he still relates to the family as the last territoriality of man deprived (hence the situation of Oedipus, first marginal in the Three Essays, then which closes more and more upon desire). Everything happens as if Freud were having himself forgiven for his profound discovery of sexuality, by telling us: at least it will not leave the family! The dirty little secret, instead of the vast horizon glimpsed. The familial reduction instead of the drift of desire. Instead of great decoded flux, small streams recoded in the bed of mama. Interiority instead of a new relation with the outside. Through psychoanalysis, it is always the discourse of bad conscience and guilt that rises and finds its nourishment (what is called healing). And, on at least two points, Freud absolves the real external family of all fault, the better to internalize them, fault and family, in the smallest member, the child. The manner in which he posits an autonomous repression, independent of repression; the manner in which he renounces the theme of the seduction of the child by the adult, to substitute for it the individual fantasy that makes real parents so many innocents or even victims. For the family must appear in two forms: one where it is certainly guilty, but only in the way the child lives it intensely, interiorly, and which merges with its own guilt; the other where it remains an instance of responsibility, before which one is guilty as a child and in relation to which one becomes responsible as an adult (Oedipus as illness and as health, the family as factor of alienation and as agent of de-alienation, if only by the manner in which it is reconstituted in the transference). This is what Foucault showed in such beautiful pages: the familialism inherent in psychoanalysis destroys classical psychiatry less than it crowns it. After the madman of the earth and the madman of the despot, the madman of the family; what nineteenth-century psychiatry had wanted to organize in the asylum — "the imperative fiction of the family," the father-reason and the minor-madman, the parents who are themselves sick only from their childhood — all of this finds its completion outside the asylum, in psychoanalysis, and the analyst's office. Freud is the Luther and Adam Smith of psychiatry. He mobilizes all the resources of myth, tragedy, dream, to re-chain desire, this time from within: an intimate theater. Yes, however, Oedipus is the universal of desire, the product of universal history — but on a condition that is not fulfilled by Freud: that Oedipus be capable, at least up to a certain point, of mutating its self-critique. Universal history is only a theology if it does not conquer the conditions of its contingency, its singularity, its irony and its own critique. And what are these conditions, this point of self-critique? To discover beneath the familial reduction the nature of the social investments of the unconscious. To discover beneath the individual fantasy the nature of group fantasies. Or, which amounts to the same thing, to push the simulacrum to the point where it ceases to be image of image to find the abstract figures, the flux-schizes, that it conceals while hiding them. To substitute, for the private subject of castration, split into subject of enunciation and subject of enunciated referring only to the two orders of personal images, the collective agents that refer on their own account to machinic arrangements. To overturn the theater of representation in the order of desiring production: the entire task of schizo-analysis.

CHAPTER 4 - Introduction to Schizo-Analysis

SECTION 1

238Who comes first, the chicken or the egg, but also the father and mother or the child? Psychoanalysis acts as if it were the child (the father is sick only from his own childhood), but it is at the same time forced to postulate a parental preexistence (the child is only such in relation to a father and mother). We see this clearly in the originary position of a father of the horde. Oedipus himself would be nothing without the identifications of the parents with the children; and one cannot hide that everything begins in the father's head: is that what you want, to kill me, to sleep with your mother?… It is first an idea of the father: thus Laius. It is the father who makes a terrible racket, and who brandishes the law (the mother is rather complacent: one must not make a story of it, it is a dream, a territoriality…). Lévi-Strauss says it very well: "The initial motif of the myth of reference consists in an incest with the mother of which the hero renders himself guilty. Yet, this culpability seems to exist above all in the mind of the father, who desires the death of his son and devises himself to provoke it… In the end, the father alone appears guilty: guilty of having wanted to avenge himself. And it is he who will be killed. This curious detachment with respect to incest appears in other myths".{214} Oedipus is first an idea of a paranoid adult, before being a feeling of a neurotic child. Thus psychoanalysis extricate itself poorly from an infinite regression: the father had to be a child, but could only be so in relation to a father, who was himself a child, in relation to another father.

239How does a delirium begin? It may be that cinema is apt to grasp the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence. A film by Nicolas Ray, supposed to represent the formation of a delirium at cortisone: an overworked father, a secondary school teacher, who works overtime at a radio-taxi station, treated for heart troubles. He begins to delirate over the system of education in general, the necessity of restoring a pure race, the salvation of moral and social order, then passes to religion, the opportunity of a return to the Bible, Abraham… But what did he do, Abraham? Well, precisely he killed or wanted to kill his son, and perhaps God's only fault was to stop his arm. But doesn't the hero of the film himself have a son? Well, well… What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first an investment of a social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, religious field: the delirious applies to his family and his son a delirium that overflows them from all sides. Joseph Gabel, presenting a paranoid delirium with strong politico-erotic content and high social reform, believes it possible to say that such a case remains rare and that, moreover, its origins are not reconstitutable.{215} Yet it is evident that there is not a single delirium that does not possess eminently this character, and that is not originally economic, political, etc., before being crushed in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic mill. President Schreber will not deny it (nor his father, inventor of the Pangymnasticon and a general pedagogical system). Then everything changes: infinite regression forced us to posit a primacy of the father, but a primacy always relative and hypothetical that made us go to infinity, unless we leap into the position of an absolutely first father; but it is clear that the point of view of regression is the fruit of abstraction. When we say: the father is first in relation to the child, this proposition in itself devoid of sense means concretely: social investments are first in relation to familial investments, which are born only from the application or the reduction of those. To say that the father is first in relation to the child is to say in truth that the investment of desire is in the first place that of a social field in which the father and the child are plunged, simultaneously plunged. Let us return to the example of the Marquesians, analyzed by Kardiner: he distinguishes an adult food anxiety linked to an endemic scarcity, and an infantile food anxiety linked to the deficiency of maternal care.{216} Not only can one not derive the first from the second, but one cannot even consider, as Kardiner does, that the social investment corresponding to the first comes after the infantile familial investment of the second. For what is invested in the second is already a determination of the social field, namely the scarcity of women which explains that adults no less than children "distrust them." In short, what the child invests through infantile experience, the maternal breast and the familial structure, is already a state of the cuts and flux of the social field in its entirety, flux of women and food, registrations and distributions. Never is the adult an after of the child, but both in the family aim at the determinations of the field in which she and they bathe simultaneously.

240Hence the necessity of maintaining three conclusions. 1°) From the point of view of regression, which has only hypothetical sense, it is the father who is first in relation to the child. It is the paranoid father who oedipianizes the son. Guilt is an idea projected by the father before being an inner feeling experienced by the son. The first fault of psychoanalysis is to proceed as if things began with the child. This leads psychoanalysis to develop an absurd theory of fantasy, according to which the father, the mother, their real actions and passions, must first be understood as "fantasies" of the child (Freudian abandonment of the theme of seduction). — 2°) If regression taken absolutely proves inadequate, it is because it encloses us in simple reproduction or generation. And yet, with organic bodies and organized persons, it attains only the object of reproduction. Only the point of view of the cycle is categorical and absolute, because it attains production as subject of reproduction, that is to say the process of auto-production of the unconscious (unity of history and of Nature, of Homo natura and of Homo historia). It is certainly not sexuality that is in service to generation, it is progressive or regressive generation that is in service to sexuality as cyclic movement by which the unconscious, remaining always "subject," reproduces itself. There is no longer reason, then, to ask who is first between father and child, because such a question is posed only within the framework of familialism. What is first is the father in relation to the child, but only because what is first is the social investment in relation to the familial investment, it is the investment of the social field in which the father, the child, the family as subset, are simultaneously immersed. The primacy of the social field as term of the investment of desire defines the cycle, and the states through which a subject passes. The second fault of psychoanalysis, at the very moment when it was completing the separation of sexuality from reproduction, is to have remained prisoner of an unrepentant familialism which condemned it to evolve in the sole movement of regression or progression (even the psychoanalytic conception of repetition remains prisoner of such a movement). — 3°) Finally, the point of view of the community, which is disjunctive or accounts for disjunctions in the cycle. It is not only generation that is secondary in relation to the cycle, it is transmission that is secondary in relation to information or communication. The genetic revolution occurred when it was discovered that there is no transmission of flux properly speaking, but communication of a code or an axiomatic, a combinatory informing the flux. It is the same with the social field: its coding or its axiomatic first define in it a communication of unconsciouses. This phenomenon of communication that Freud encountered in marginal fashion, in his remarks on occultism, constitutes in fact the norm, and relegates to second place the problems of hereditary transmission that agitated the Freud-Jung polemic.{217} It appears that, in the common social field, the first thing that the son represses, or has to repress, or attempts to repress, is the unconscious of the father and of the mother. The failure of this repression, such is the basis of neuroses. But this communication of unconsciouses has not at all the family as its principle, it has for principle the community of the social field as object of the investment of desire. In all respects, the family is never determinant, but only determined, first as stimulus of departure, then as set of arrival, finally as intermediary or interception of communication.

241If the family investment is only a dependence or an application of the unconscious investments of the social field — and if this is true of the child no less than the adult; if it is true that the child, through the territoriality-mama and the law-papa, already aims at the schizes and the fluxes encoded or axiomatized of the social field —, we must shift the essential difference within this domain. Delirium is the matrix in general of every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delusional play of disinvestments, counter-investments, overinvestments. But we have seen in this sense that there were two great types of social investment, segregative and nomadic, as two poles of delirium: a type or paranoiac fascizing pole, which invests the formation of central sovereignty, overinvests it by making it the eternal final cause of all the other social forms of history, counter-invests the enclaves or the periphery, disinvests every free figure of desire — yes, I am of yours, and of the superior class and race. And a type or schizo-revolutionary pole, which follows the lines of flight of desire, passes the wall and makes the fluxes pass, assembles its machines and its groups in fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery, proceeding inverse to the preceding: I am not of yours, I am eternally of the inferior race, I am a beast, a negro. Decent people say it must not be, it is not good, that it is ineffective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that flight is revolutionary, withdrawal, freaks, provided it carries along the sheet or makes a piece of the system flee. Pass the wall, even if one must make oneself negro in the manner of John Brown. George Jackson: "It may be that I flee, but throughout my flight I seek a weapon!" Doubtless there are astonishing oscillations of the unconscious, from one to the other of the poles of delirium: the manner in which an unexpected revolutionary power emerges, sometimes even within the worst archaisms; inversely, the manner in which it turns or closes off fascist, in which it falls back into archaism. To remain with literary examples: the case of Céline, the great delirant who evolves in communicating more and more with the paranoia of the father. The case of Kerouac, the artist with the most sober means, he who made a "flight" revolutionary, and who finds himself in the midst of the great dream of America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race. Is it not the destiny of American literature to cross limits and frontiers, to make the deterritorialized fluxes of desire pass, but also always to make them carry fascizing territorialities, moralizing, puritanical and familial ones? These oscillations of the unconscious, these underground passages from one type to the other in libidinal investment, often the coexistence of both, form one of the principal objects of schizo-analysis. The two poles united by Artaud in the magical formula: Heliogabalus-anarchist, "the image of all human contradictions, and of contradiction in the principle." But no passage prevents or suppresses the difference in nature between the two, nomadism and segregation. If we can define this difference as that which separates paranoia and schizophrenia, it is on the one hand because we have distinguished the schizophrenic process ("the breakthrough") from the accidents and relapses that impede or interrupt it ("the collapse"), on the other hand because we have posited paranoia no less than schizophrenia as independent of all pseudo-etiology familial, to make them bear directly on the social field: the names of history, and not the name of the father. It is the nature of family investments that depends on the contrary on the cuts and fluxes of the social field as they are invested under one or under another, at one pole or the other. And the child does not wait to be an adult to grasp beneath father-mother the economic, financial, social, cultural problems that traverse a family: his belonging or his desire to belong to a "superior" or inferior "race," the reactionary or revolutionary tenor of a family group with which he already prepares his ruptures and his conformities. What soup, what coacervate, the family, stirred by eddies, carried in one direction or another, in such a way that the oedipal bacillus takes or does not take, imposes its mould or fails to impose it following directions of a wholly other nature that traverse it from outside. We mean to say that Oedipus is born from an application or a reduction onto personalized images, which supposes a social investment of paranoiac type (which is why Freud discovers the family romance, and Oedipus, first of all with respect to paranoia). Oedipus is a dependence of paranoia. Whereas schizophrenic investment commands a wholly other determination of the family, gasping, torn apart according to the dimensions of a social field that neither closes nor reduces: family-matrix for depersonalized partial objects, which plunge and replunge into the torrential or rarefied fluxes of a historical cosmos, of a historical chaos. Matricial fissure of schizophrenia, against paranoiac castration; and the line of flight against the "blue line."

242() mother

243goodbye

244with a long black shoe

245goodbye

246with the Communist Party and a laddered stocking…

247with your big sagging belly

248with your fear of Hitler

249with your mouth of bad jokes…

250with your belly of strikes and factory chimneys

251with your Trotsky chin and Spanish Civil War

252with your voice singing for the exhausted workers in putrefaction…

253with your eyes

254with your eyes of Russia

255with your eyes of lack of money…

256with your eyes of famished India…

257with your eyes of attacked Czechoslovakia by robots…

258with your eyes taken away by the cops in an ambulance

259with your eyes bound on an operating table

260with your eyes of amputated pancreas

261with your eyes of abortions

262with your eyes of electroshocks

263with your eyes of lobotomy

264with your eyes of a divorced woman…{218}

265Why these words, paranoia and schizophrenia, like talking birds and the names of young girls? Why do social investments follow this line of division that gives them a properly delirious content (to delire history)? And what does this line consist of, how to define on it schizophrenia and paranoia? We suppose that everything takes place on the full body; but this one has as if two faces. Elias Canetti showed well how the paranoiac organized masses and "packs". The paranoiac combines them, opposes them, maneuvers them. The paranoiac machines masses, he is the artist of great molar ensembles, statistical formations or gregarity, organized crowd phenomena. He invests everything under the species of great numbers. On the evening of the battle, Colonel Lawrence aligns the young naked cadavers on the full body of the desert. President Schreber agglutinates on his body the little men by thousands. One would say that, of the two directions of physics, the molar direction that goes toward great numbers and crowd phenomena, and the molecular direction that sinks instead into singularities, their interactions and their liaisons at distance or of different orders, the paranoiac has chosen the first: he does macro-physics. And the schizo on the contrary goes in the other direction, that of micro-physics, of molecules insofar as they no longer obey statistical laws; waves and corpuscles, flux and partial objects that are no longer tributary to great numbers, infinitesimal lines of flight instead of perspectives of great ensembles. And doubtless it would be an error to oppose these two dimensions as collective and individual. On one hand, the micro-unconscious presents no less arrangements, connections and interactions, although these arrangements are of an original type; on the other hand, the form of individualized persons does not belong to it, since it knows only partial objects and flux, but on the contrary belongs to the laws of statistical distribution of the molar unconscious or macro-unconscious. Freud was Darwinian, neo-Darwinian, when he said that in the unconscious everything was a problem of population (likewise, he saw a sign of psychosis in the consideration of multiplicities). It is therefore rather a question of the difference between two sorts of collections or of populations: great ensembles and micro-multiplicities. In both cases, investment is collective, it is that of a collective field; even a single particle has an associated wave as flux that defines the nonexistent space of its presences. All investment is collective, all fantasy is of the group, and, in this sense, position of reality. But the two types of investment distinguish themselves radically, according to whether one bears on the molar structures that subordinate molecules to themselves, and the other, on the contrary, on the molecular multiplicities that subordinate structured crowd phenomena to themselves. One is an investment of subjected group, as much in the form of sovereignty as in the colonial formations of the gregarious ensemble, which represses and represses the desire of persons; the other, an investment of subject-group in the transversal multiplicities that bear desire as molecular phenomenon, that is to say partial objects and flux, in opposition with ensembles and persons.

266It is true that social investments are made on the socius itself as a full body, and that their respective poles necessarily relate to the character or the "map" of this socius, earth, despot or capital-money (for each social machine, the two poles, paranoid and schizophrenic, distribute themselves in variable manner). Whereas the paranoid properly speaking, the schizophrenic properly speaking, do not operate on the socius, but on the body without organs in pure state. Then it would seem that the paranoid, in the clinical sense of the word, makes us witness the imaginary birth of the mass phenomenon, and this, at a still microscopic level. The body without organs is like the cosmic egg, the giant molecule where swarm worms, bacilli, lilliputian figures, animalcules and homunculi, with their organization and their machines, minuscule strings, cordages, teeth, nails, levers and pulleys, catapults: thus in Schreber the millions of spermatozoids in the rays of heaven, or the souls that lead on his body a brief existence of little men. Artaud says: this world of microbes which is only coagulated nothingness. The two faces of the body without organs are thus that where organize themselves, at a microscopic scale, the mass phenomenon and the corresponding paranoid investment, the other, sub-microscopic scale, where arrange themselves the molecular phenomena and their schizophrenic investment. It is on the body without organs, as hinge, frontier between the molar and the molecular, that the partition paranoia-schizophrenia is made. Must we believe then that social investments are secondary projections, as if a great schizoparanoiac with two faces, father of the primitive horde, was at the base of the socius in general? We have seen that it was not so. The socius is not a projection of the body without organs, but rather the body without organs is the limit of the socius, its tangent of deterritorialization, the ultimate residue of a deterritorialized socius. The socius: the earth, the body of the despot, capital-money, are full bodies clothed, like the body without organs, a naked full body; but this one is at the limit, at the end, not at the origin. And doubtless the body without organs haunts all forms of socius. But in this very sense, if social investments can be said to be paranoid or schizophrenic, it is insofar as they have paranoia and schizophrenia as ultimate products in the determined conditions of capitalism. From the point of view of a universal clinic, one can present paranoia and schizophrenia as the two edges of amplitude of a pendulum oscillating around the position of a socius as full body and, at the limit, of a body without organs of which one face is occupied by molar ensembles, the other, peopled with molecular elements. But one can also present a single line on which thread themselves the different socius, their plane and their grand ensembles; on each of these planes, a paranoid dimension, another perverse, a type of familial position, and a line of flight in dotted form or of schizoid breakthrough. The great line leads to the body without organs, and there, either it passes the wall, opens onto the molecular elements where it becomes in truth what it was from the beginning, schizophrenic process, pure schizophrenic process of deterritorialization. Or it founders, it rebounds, falls back on the most wretched territorialities of the modern world insofar as simulacra of the preceding planes, glues itself in the asylum ensemble of paranoia and schizophrenia as clinical entities, in the ensembles or artificial societies instituted by perversion, in the familial ensemble of oedipal neuroses.

SECTION 2

267What does this distinction between two régimes signify, one molecular and the other molar, one micropsychic or micrological, the other statistical and gregarious? Is there anything here other than a metaphor applying to the unconscious a distinction founded in physics, when one opposes intra-atomic phenomena and crowd phenomena through statistical accumulation, obeying laws of ensemble? But in truth, the unconscious is physics; it is not by metaphor at all that the body without organs and its intensities are matter itself. We do not pretend either to resurrect the question of an individual psychology and a collective psychology, and the anteriority of one or the other; this distinction, as it appears in Collective Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, remains entirely taken up in Oedipus. In the unconscious, there are only populations, groups, and machines. When we posit in one case an involuntary of social and technical machines, in the other case an unconscious of machines of desire, it is a question of a necessary rapport between forces inextricably linked, the ones being elementary forces by which the unconscious produces itself, the others being resultants that react upon the first, statistical ensembles through which the unconscious represents itself, and already undergoes refoulement and repression of its elementary productive forces.

268But how can we speak of machines in this microphysic or micropsychic region, where there is desire, that is to say not only functioning, but formation and self-production? A machine functions according to the prior connections of its structure and the order of position of its parts, but does not set itself in place any more than it forms or produces itself. It is even this which animates the ordinary polemic of vitalism and mechanism: the machine's aptitude to account for the functionings of the organism, but its fundamental inaptitude to account for its formations. Mechanism abstracts a structural unity of machines according to which it explains the functioning of the organism. Vitalism invokes an individual and specific unity of the living, which every machine supposes insofar as it subordinates itself to organic persistence and extends outward its autonomous formations. But one will remark that, in one way or another, the machine and desire thus remain in an extrinsic relation, either because desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is itself a system of means in function of the ends of desire. The link remains secondary and indirect between the two, as much in the new means that desire appropriates for itself as in the derived desires that machines awaken. A profound text of Samuel Butler, "The Book of the Machines," nonetheless allows us to surpass these points of view. It is true that this text seems at first only to oppose the two ordinary theses, one according to which organisms are for the moment only more perfect machines ("The very things which we believe to be purely spiritual are nothing but disturbances of equilibrium in a series of levers, beginning with those levers which are too small to be perceived under the microscope"), the other according to which machines are never anything but prolongations of organism ("The lower animals keep their members with them, in their own body, whilst most of the members of man are free, and lie detached now here, now there in different parts of the world"). But there is a Butlerian way of carrying each thesis to an extreme point where it can no longer oppose the other, a point of indifference or of dispersion. On the one hand, Butler does not content himself with saying that machines prolong the organism, but that they are really members and organs lying on the body without organs of a society, which men appropriate according to their power and their wealth, and of which poverty deprives them as if they were mutilated organisms. On the other hand, he does not content himself with saying that organisms are machines, but that they contain such an abundance of parts that they must be compared to very different pieces of distinct machines referring back to one another, machined upon one another. This is the essential thing, a double passage to the limit effected by Butler. He causes the vitalist thesis to burst forth by putting in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and even more so the mechanist thesis, by putting in question the structural unity of the machine. One says that machines do not reproduce themselves, or reproduce themselves only through the intermediary of man, but "is there anyone who can claim that the red clover has no system of reproduction because the bumblebee, and the bumblebee alone, must serve as intermediary for it to reproduce itself? The bumblebee is part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each of us has come forth from infinitesimal animalcules whose identity was entirely distinct from ours, and which are part of our own reproductive system; why should we not be part of that of machines?... What deceives us is that we consider every complicated machine as a single object. In reality, it is a city or a society whose each member is procreated directly according to its species. We see a machine as a whole, we give it a name and individualize it; we look at our own members and we think that their combination forms an Individual which has come forth from a single center of reproductive action. But this conclusion is anti-scientific, and the simple fact that never a steam engine has been made by another or by two other machines of its own species does not authorize us in the least to say that steam engines have no system of reproduction. In reality, each part of whatever steam engine it may be is procreated by its particular and special progenitors, whose function is to procreate this part, and that one alone, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system..." In passing, Butler encounters the phenomenon of code surplus-value, when a part of a machine captures in its own code a fragment of code from another machine, and thus reproduces itself thanks to a part of another machine: the red clover and the bumblebee; or the orchid and the male wasp which it attracts, which it intercepts by bearing on its flower the image and the scent of the female wasp.

269At this point of dispersion of the two theses, it becomes indifferent to say that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two definitions are equivalent: man as "vertebro-machined animal," or as "aphidian parasite of machines." The essential is not in the passage to infinity itself, the composite infinity of machine parts or the temporal infinity of animalcules, but rather in what emerges by way of this passage. Once the structural unity of the machine is undone, once the personal and specific unity of the living is set aside, a direct link appears between the machine and desire, the machine passes to the heart of desire, the machine is desiring and desire, machined. It is not desire that is in the subject, but the machine in desire — and the residual subject is on the other side, beside the machine, all around it, parasite of machines, accessory of vertebro-machined desire. In short, the true difference is not between the machine and the living, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine which are also two states of the living. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living taken in its specific and even personal unity, are phenomena of mass or molar ensembles; it is in this respect that they refer to one another from without. And even if they distinguish themselves and oppose themselves, it is only as two directions in the same statistical direction. But, in the other deeper or intrinsic direction of multiplicities, there is compenetration, direct communication between molecular phenomena and the singularities of the living, that is, between the small machines dispersed throughout every machine, and the small formations swarming throughout every organism: domain of indifference of the microphysical and the biological, which means there are as many living things in the machine as there are machines in the living. Why speak of machines in this domain, when there are none, it seems, properly speaking (no structural unity nor preformed mechanical connections)? "There is possibility of formation of such machines, in relays indefinitely superposed, in cycles of functioning geared one into another, which will obey once assembled the laws of thermodynamics, but which, in their assembly, do not depend on these laws, since the assembly line begins in a domain where by definition there are not yet statistical laws… At this level, functioning and formation are still confused as in the molecule; and, from this level, open the two divergent paths which will lead, one to more or less regular clusters of individuals, the other to the perfections of individual organization whose simplest schema is the formation of a tube…"{222} The true difference is therefore between the molar maxims on one hand, whether they be social, technical or organic, and on the other hand the machines of desire, which are of molecular order. That is what the machines of desire are: formative machines, whose very misfires are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from formation; chronogenous machines confused with their own assembly, operating by non-localizable liaisons and dispersed localizations, bringing into play temporalization processes, formations in fragments and detached pieces, with surplus-value of code, and where the whole is itself produced beside the parts, as a part apart or, in Butler's word, "in another department" which folds it back onto the other parts; machines properly speaking, because they proceed by cuts and flux, associated waves and particles, associative flux and partial objects, always inducing at a distance transversal connections, inclusive disjunctions, polyvocal conjunctions, thus producing extractions, detachments and remainders, with transfer of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are flux-schizes.

270When next, or rather on the other hand, machines find themselves unified on the structural plane of techniques and institutions that give them a visible existence like a steel framework, when the living find themselves too structured by the statistical units of their persons, their species, varieties and environments, — when a machine appears as a unique object, and a living being as a unique subject, — when connections become global and specific, disjunctions exclusive, conjunctions bivalent, — desire has no need to project itself into these forms become opaque. These are immediately the molar manifestations, the statistical determinations of desire and its own machines. These are the same machines (there is no difference of nature): here as organic, technical or social machines apprehended in their phenomenon of mass to which they subordinate themselves, there as machines of desire apprehended in their submicroscopic singularities which subordinate the phenomena of mass. This is why we refused from the start the idea that machines of desire belong to the domain of dream or the imaginary, and come to double the other machines. There is only desire and environments, fields, forms of gregariousness. That is to say: the molecular machines of desire are in themselves investment of the great molar machines or of the configurations they form under the laws of large numbers, in one sense or in the other of subordination, in one sense and in the other of subordination. Machines of desire on one hand, and on the other hand organic, technical or social machines: these are the same machines under determined conditions. By determined conditions, we mean these statistical forms into which they enter as so many stable forms, unifying, structuring and proceeding by great heavy ensembles; the selective pressures that group the pieces retain certain ones, exclude others, organizing crowds. These are therefore the same machines, but it is not at all the same régime, the same relations of magnitude, the same usages of synthesis. There is functionalism only at the submicroscopic level of machines of desire, machinical arrangements, machinery of desire (engineering); for, there alone, functioning and formation, usage and assembly, product and production coincide. All molar functionalism is false, since organic or social machines do not form in the same way they function, and technical machines are not assembled as one makes use of them, but precisely imply determined conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only that which does not produce itself as it functions has meaning, and also a goal, an intention. Machines of desire by contrast represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what one does with them, what they do in themselves.

271They function according to régimes of synthesis that have no equivalent in large ensembles. Jacques Monod defined the originality of these syntheses, from the point of view of a molecular biology or a "microscopic cybernetics" indifferent to the traditional opposition of mechanism and vitalism. The fundamental traits of synthesis are here the arbitrary nature of chemical signals, indifference to substrate, the indirect character of interactions. Such formulas are negative only in appearance, and in relation to laws of ensembles, but must be understood positively in terms of power. "Between the substrate of an allosteric enzyme and the ligands that activate or inhibit its activity, there exists no chemically necessary relation of structure or reactivity… An allosteric protein must be considered as a specialized product of molecular engineering, permitting an interaction to establish itself between bodies devoid of chemical affinity and thus to enslave any reaction whatsoever to the intervention of chemical compounds chemically foreign and indifferent to this reaction. The operative principle of allosteric (indirect) interactions therefore authorizes entire freedom in the choice of enslavements which, escaping all chemical constraint, will all the better obey only the physiological constraints in virtue of which they will be selected according to the increase of coherence and efficacy that they confer on the cell or organism. It is ultimately the very gratuitousness of these systems which, opening to molecular evolution a practically infinite field of exploration and experiments, permitted it to construct the immense network of cybernetic interconnections…"{223} How, starting from this domain of chance or of real disorganization, do great configurations organize themselves which necessarily reproduce a structure, under the action of D.N.A. and its segments, the genes, operating genuine drawings of lots, forming switchpoints like lines of selection or evolution—this is precisely what all the stages show of the passage from the molecular to the molar, as it appears in organic machines, but no less in social maxims with other laws and other figures. One was able in this sense to insist on a common character of human cultures and living species, as "Markov chains" (partially dependent random phenomena). For, in the genetic code as in social codes, what is called a significant chain is a jargon more than a language, made of non-significant elements that take on a sense or an effect of signification only in the large ensembles they form by chained drawing, partial dependence and superposition of relays.{224} It is not a question of biologizing human history, nor of anthropologizing natural history, but of showing the common participation of social machines and organic machines in machines of desire. At the bottom of man, it: the schizophrenic cell, schizo molecules, their chains and their jargons. There is an entire biology of schizophrenia, molecular biology is itself schizophrenic (as is microphysics). But, inversely, schizophrenia, the theory of schizophrenia is biological, biocultural, insofar as it considers machinic connections of molecular order, their distribution in maps of intensity on the giant molecule of the full body, and the statistical accumulations that form and select large ensembles.

272On this molecular path, Szondi engaged himself, discovering a genetic unconscious that he opposed to Freud's individual unconscious as to Jung's collective unconscious.{225} This genetic or genealogical unconscious, he often calls it familial; and Szondi himself proceeded to the study of schizophrenia with, for units of measurement, familial ensembles. But familial, the genetic unconscious is little, much less so than Freud's, since the diagnosis is conducted by relating desire to photos of hermaphrodites, assassins, etc., instead of reducing it as usual onto images of mommy-daddy. Finally a bit of relation with the outside… A whole alphabet, a whole axiomatics with photos of the mad; testing "the need for paternal sentiment" on a scale of portraits of assassins, one has to do it, one can say as much as one likes that it remains within the Oedipus, in truth it opens it singularly… The hereditary genes of drives thus play the role of simple stimuli that enter into variable combinations following vectors that grid an entire historical social field — analysis of destiny. In fact, the truly molecular unconscious cannot hold to genes as units of reproduction; these are still expressive, and lead to molar formations. Molecular biology teaches us that it is only D.N.A. that reproduces itself, not proteins. Proteins are at once produced and units of production, it is they that constitute the unconscious as cycle or the self-production of the unconscious, ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement of machines of desire and the syntheses of desire. We have seen that, through reproduction and its objects (determined familially or genetically), it is always the unconscious that produces itself in a cyclical orphaned movement, cycle of destiny where it always remains subject. It is precisely on this point that rests the independence in law of sexuality with respect to generation. Now this direction according to which one must surpass the molar toward the molecular, Szondi feels it so well that he rejects all statistical interpretation of what one wrongly calls his "test". Even more, he demands a surpassing of contents toward functions. But this surpassing, he makes it only, this direction, he follows it only by going from ensembles or classes toward "categories", of which he establishes a systematically closed list, and which are still only expressive forms of existence that a subject must choose and combine freely. By this, he misses the internal or molecular elements of desire, the nature of their choices, arrangements and machnic combinations — and the true question of schizo-analysis: what is it, your pulsional machines of desire? and what functioning, in what syntheses do they enter, do they operate? what use do you make of it, in all the transitions that go from the molecular to the molar and inversely, and which constitute the cycle where the unconscious, remaining subject, produces itself?

273We call Libido the energy proper to machines of desire; and the transformations of this energy (Numen and Voluptas) are never desexualizations nor sublimations. But precisely, this terminology seems extremely arbitrary. According to the two ways one must consider machines of desire, one does not see well what they have to do with energy properly sexual: either one relates them to the molecular order which is theirs, or one relates them to the molar order in which they form organic or social machines, and invest organic or social milieus. It is difficult indeed to present the sole energy as directly cosmic and intra-atomic, and equally as directly social historical. One may say whatever one likes, that love has to do with proteins and with society… Is this not beginning once more the old liquidation of Freudianism, by substituting for libido a vague cosmic energy capable of all metamorphoses, or a sort of socialized energy capable of all investments? Or the final attempt of Reich concerning a "biogenesis," which one does not qualify without reason as schizo-paranoid? One recalls that Reich concluded to the existence of a cosmic intra-atomic energy, orgone, generative of an electrical flux and carrier of submicroscopic particles, bions. This energy produced differences of potential or intensities distributed over the body considered from a molecular point of view, and associated itself with a mechanics of fluids in this same body considered from a molar point of view. What defined libido as sexuality, then, was the association of two functionings, mechanical and electrical, in a two-poled sequence, molar and molecular (mechanical tension, electrical charge, electrical discharge, mechanical relaxation). By this, Reich thought to surpass the alternative of mechanism and vitalism, since these functions, mechanical and electrical, existed in matter in general, but combined themselves in a sequence particular within the living. And above all he maintained the basic psychoanalytic truth, which he could denounce in Freud as supreme disavowal: the independence of sexuality with respect to reproduction, the subordination of progressive or regressive reproduction to sexuality as cycle. If one considers the detail of Reich's final theory, we avow that its character at once schizophrenic and paranoid presents no inconvenience for us, on the contrary. We avow that every approximation of sexuality with cosmic phenomena of the type "electrical storm," "bluish mist and blue sky," the blue of orgone, "Saint Elmo's fires and sunspots," fluids and flux, matters and particles, seems to us finally more adequate than the reduction of sexuality to the lamentable little familiarist secret. We believe that Lawrence and Miller have a more just evaluation of sexuality than Freud, including from the point of view of the famous scientificity. It is not the neurotic lying on his divan who speaks to us of love, of its power and its despairs, but the mute walk of the schizo, the race of Lenz in the mountains and under the stars, the immobile voyage in intensities on the body without organs. As for the ensemble of reichist theory, it has the incomparable advantage of showing the double pole of libido, as molecular formation at the submicroscopic scale, as investment of molar formations at the scale of organic and social ensembles. Missing only are the confirmations of common sense: why, in what does this consist, sexuality?

274On cynicism about love, it has said everything, or claimed to say everything: namely that it is a copulation of organic and social machines on a grand scale (at the bottom of love the organs, at the bottom of love economic determinations, money). But what is proper to cynicism is to claim scandal where there is none, and to pass for audacious without audacity. Rather than its flatness, the delirium of common sense. For the first evidence is that desire does not have for its object persons or things, but entire milieus that it traverses, vibrations and flux of every nature that it espouses, in introducing cuts, captures into them, desire always nomadic and migrant whose character is first the "gigantism": no one has shown it better than Charles Fourier. In short, social as well as biological milieus are the object of investments of the unconscious that are necessarily desiring or libidinal, in opposition to preconscious investments of need and interest. The libido as sexual energy is directly investment of masses, of great ensembles and of organic and social fields. We understand poorly on what principles psychoanalysis grounds its conception of desire, when it supposes that the libido must desexualize itself or even sublimate itself to proceed to social investments, and inversely only re-sexualizes these in the course of processes of pathological regression. Unless the postulate of such a conception is still familialism, which maintains that sexuality operates only in family, and must transform itself to invest larger ensembles. In truth, sexuality is everywhere: in the manner in which a bureaucrat caresses his files, in which a judge renders justice, in which a businessman makes money flow, in which the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat, etc. And there is no need to pass through metaphors, any more than the libido, to pass through metamorphoses. Hitler made fascists hard. Flags, nations, armies, banks make many people hard. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much power of cut and flux as these coercive machines. It is not through desexualizing extension that the libido invests great ensembles, it is on the contrary through restriction, blockage and reduction, that it is determined to repress its flux in order to contain them in narrow cells of the type "couple," "family," "persons," "objects." And doubtless such a blockage is necessarily grounded: the libido only passes into consciousness in relation with such a body, such a person that it takes for object. But our "choice of object" itself refers back to a conjunction of flux of life and society, that this body, this person intercept, receive and emit, always in a biological, social, historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we communicate. The persons to whom our loves are dedicated, including parental persons, intervene only as points of connection, of disjunction, of conjunction of flux whose libidinal tenor they translate of properly unconscious investment. Henceforth, however grounded the amorous blockage may be, it changes singularly its function, depending on whether it engages desire in the oedipal impasses of couple and family in the service of repressive machines, or whether it condenses on the contrary a free energy capable of feeding a revolutionary machine (here again, everything was said by Fourier, when he shows the two opposite directions of "capturing" or "mechanizing" the passions). But it is always with worlds that we make love. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of the beloved, of closing itself or of opening itself onto vaster worlds, masses and great ensembles. There is always something statistical in our loves, and laws of large numbers. And is it not thus that one must first understand the famous formula of Marx: the rapport of man and woman is "the immediate, natural, necessary rapport of man with man"? That is to say that the rapport between the two sexes (man with woman) is only the measure of the rapport of sexuality in general insofar as it invests great ensembles (man with man)? Whence what one could call the specification of sexuality to the sexes. And must one not also say that the phallus is not a sex, but sexuality in its entirety, that is to say the sign of the great ensemble invested by the libido, from which flow necessarily at once the two sexes in their separation (the two homosexual series of man with man, of woman with woman) as in their statistical relations within this ensemble?

275But Marx says something even more mysterious: that the true difference is not that of the two sexes in man, but that of the human sex and the "non-human sex".{228} It is obviously not a matter of beasts, of animal sexuality. It is something entirely different. If sexuality is the unconscious investment of large molar ensembles, it is because it is on its other face identical to the play of molecular elements that constitute these ensembles under determined conditions. The dwarfism of desire as correlate of its gigantism. Sexuality is strictly one with machines of desire insofar as they are present and active in social machines, in their field, their formation, their functioning. Non-human sex, these are the machines of desire, the molecular machinic elements, their arrangements and their syntheses, without which there would be neither human sex specified in large ensembles, nor human sexuality capable of investing these ensembles. In a few phrases, Marx, nonetheless so sparing and so reluctant when it comes to sexuality, blew apart what Freud and all of psychoanalysis will remain forever prisoners of: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! What we call anthropomorphic representation is equally the idea that there are two sexes as the idea that there is only one. We know how Freudianism is traversed by this strange idea that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which woman defines herself as lack, feminine sex, as absence. One might at first believe that such a thesis founds the omnipresence of masculine homosexuality. It is not so, however; what is founded here is rather the statistical ensemble of intersexual loves. For if woman defines herself as lack in relation to man, man in turn lacks what woman lacks, simply in another way: the idea of a single sex necessarily leads to the erection of a phallus as an object of heights, which distributes lack under two non-superimposable faces and makes the two sexes communicate in a common absence, castration. Psychoanalysts or psychoanalyzed women can then rejoice in showing man the way, and in recovering equality in difference. Hence the irresistible comic quality of formulas by which one accedes to desire through castration. But the idea that there would really be two sexes, after all, is not better. One tries this time, like Melanie Klein, to define feminine sex by positive characteristics, even if terrifying ones. If not anthropomorphism, one at least exits phallocentrism. But this time, far from founding the communication of the two sexes, one founds rather their separation into two still statistical homosexual series. And one does not exit castration at all. Simply, this, instead of being the principle of sex conceived as male sex (the great cut Phallus hovering above), becomes the result of sex conceived as feminine sex (the small absorbed buried penis). We say therefore that castration is the foundation of the anthropomorphic and molar representation of sexuality. It is the universal belief that unites and disperses at once men and women under the yoke of the same illusion of consciousness, and makes them adore this yoke. Every effort to determine the non-human nature of sex, for example "the great Other," while preserving the myth of castration, is lost in advance. And what does Lyotard mean, in his commentary nonetheless so profound of Marx's text, when he assigns the opening of the non-human as having to be "the entry of the subject into desire through castration"? Long live castration so that desire be strong? Does one desire well only phantasms? What a perverse idea, human, all too human. What an idea born of bad conscience, and not of the unconscious. The anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in what founds it, the ideology of lack. On the contrary, the molecular unconscious ignores castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form as such free multiplicities; because the multiple cuts cease not to produce flux, instead of repressing them into the same unique cut capable of drying them up; because the syntheses constitute local and non-specific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic trans-sexuality, which means that woman contains as many men as man, and man women, capable of entering one with the other, ones with the others, into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of sexes. Making love is not becoming one, not even two, but making a hundred thousand. That is, machines of desire or non-human sex: not one nor even two sexes, but n… sexes. Schizo-analysis is the variable analysis of n… sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes upon it and that it imposes upon itself of its own sexuality. The schizo-analytic formula of the desirous revolution will be first: to each his sexes.

SECTION 3

276The thesis of schizoanalysis is simple: desire is machine, synthesis of machines, machinic arrangement — machines of desire. Desire is of the order of production, all production is at once desiring and social. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having crushed this order of production, for having overturned it into representation. Far from being the audacity of psychoanalysis, the idea of unconscious representation marks from the outset its bankruptcy or its renunciation: an unconscious that no longer produces, but contents itself with believing… The unconscious believes in Oedipus, it believes in castration, in law… No doubt the psychoanalyst is the first to say that belief, in all rigor, is not an act of the unconscious; it is always the preconscious that believes. Must we not even say that it is the psychoanalyst who believes, the psychoanalyst in us? Would belief be an effect on conscious material, which unconscious representation exercises from a distance? But, inversely, what is it that has reduced the unconscious to this state of representation, if not first a system of beliefs put in place of productions? In truth, it is at the same time that social production is found alienated in beliefs supposed to be autonomous, and that desiring production is found diverted into representations supposed to be unconscious. And it is the same instance, as we have seen, the family, that operates this double operation, denaturing, disfiguring, leading into a deadlock the social desiring production. Thus the link of representation-belief with the family is not accidental, it belongs to the essence of representation to be familial representation. But production is not suppressed for all that, it continues to rumble, to drone beneath the representative instance that stifles it, and that it can make resonate in turn up to the limit of rupture. Then representation must swell itself with all the power of myth and tragedy, it must give of the family a mythic and tragic presentation (and of myth and tragedy, a familial presentation), so that it effectively bites into the zones of production. Are myth and tragedy not themselves, nonetheless, productions, forms of production? Surely not; they are so only insofar as they are related to real social production, to real desiring production. Otherwise, they are ideological forms, which have taken the place of units of production. Oedipus, castration, etc., who believes in them? Is it the Greeks? But did the Greeks produce as they believed? Is it the Hellenists, who believe that the Greeks produced thus? At least the Hellenists of the nineteenth century, those of whom Engels said: one would say they believe in it, in myth, in tragedy… Is it the unconscious that represents Oedipus, castration? or is it the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst in us, who represents the unconscious thus? For never has Engels's phrase taken on so much meaning: one would say they believe in it, the psychoanalysts, in myth, in tragedy… (They continue to believe in it, when the Hellenists ceased long ago.)

277Always the case of President Schreber: Schreber's father invented and manufactured astonishing little machines, sadistic-paranoiac, for the constrained use of children so that they would hold themselves perfectly straight, for example head-clamps with metal stems and leather straps.{229} These machines play no role in Freudian analysis. Perhaps it would have been more difficult to crush all the social-political content of Schreber's delirium if one had taken into account these machines of desire of the father and their evident participation in a pedagogical social machine in general. For the entire question is this: certainly, the father acts on the child's unconscious — but does he act as father of the family in an expressive familial transmission, or rather as agent of machine, in a machinic information or communication? The machines of desire of the president communicate with those of his father; but it is precisely through this that they are from childhood onward libidinal investment of a social field. The father has a role there only as agent of production and anti-production. Freud on the contrary chooses the first path: it is not the father who refers back to the machines, but just the opposite; there is no longer even occasion to consider the machines, neither as machines of desire, nor as social machines. In return, one will inflate the father with all the "powers of myth and religion," and of philogenesis, so that the little familial representation will appear to be coextensive with the field of delirium. The couple of production, machines of desire and social field, gives way to a couple representative of an entirely different nature, family-myth. Once again, have you seen a child play: how it already peoples the technical social machines with its own machines of desire, oh sexuality — the father or mother being in the background, from which the child borrows as needed pieces and gears, and who are there as emitting agents, receptors or interception agents, benevolent agents of production or suspicious agents of anti-production?

278Why grant to mythic and tragic representation this senseless privilege? Why install expressive forms, and an entire theater where there were fields, workshops, factories, units of production? The psychoanalyst plants his circus in the stupefied unconscious, an entire Barnum in the fields and in the factory. That is what Miller, and already Lawrence, have to say against psychoanalysis (the living are not believers, the seers do not believe in myth, in tragedy): "By ascending to the heroic times of life, you destroy the very principles of heroism, for the hero, just as he does not doubt his strength, never looks backward. Hamlet took himself without any doubt for a hero, and for every Hamlet-born, the only path to follow is the path Shakespeare traced for him. But it would be necessary to know whether we are Hamlet-born. Were you born Hamlet? Did you not rather give birth to Hamlet in yourself? But the question that seems most important to me is this: why return to myth?... This ideological junk with which the world served itself to build its cultural edifice is losing its poetic value, its mythic character, because through a series of writings that treat illness, and consequently the possibilities of escaping it, the terrain is being cleared, new edifices can rise (this idea of new edifices is odious to me, but it is only the consciousness of a process, not the process itself). For now, my process, in this case all the lines I write, consists solely in vigorously cleaning the uterus, in subjecting it to a curettage in a manner of speaking. What leads me to the idea, not of a new edifice, of new superstructures that signify culture, therefore lie, but of a perpetual birth, of a regeneration, of life... There is no life possible in myth. There is only myth that can live in myth... This faculty of giving birth to myth comes to us from consciousness, consciousness that develops ceaselessly. This is why, speaking of the schizophrenic character of our epoch, I said: as long as the process is not terminated, it is the belly of the world that will be the third eye. What did I mean by that? Nothing but that, from this world of ideas where we flounder, a new world must emerge? But this world can only appear insofar as it is conceived. And, to conceive, one must first desire... Desire is instinctive and sacred, it is only through desire that we perform the immaculate conception."{230} There is everything in these pages of Miller: the tracking of Oedipus (or Hamlet) to the point of self-critique, the denunciation of expressive forms, myth and tragedy, as beliefs or illusions of consciousness, nothing but ideas, the necessity of a cleaning of the unconscious, schizo-analysis as curettage of the unconscious, the opposition of the matricial slit to the line of castration, the splendid affirmation of an orphan and productive unconscious, the exaltation of the process as schizophrenic process of deterritorialization that must produce a new earth, and at the limit the functioning of machines of desire against tragedy, against "the fatal drama of personality," against "the inevitable confusion of mask and actor." It is evident that Michael Fraenkel, Miller's correspondent, does not understand. He speaks like a psychoanalyst, or like a nineteenth-century Hellenist: yes, myth, tragedy, Oedipus, Hamlet are good expressions, pregnant forms; they express the true permanent drama of desire and knowledge... Fraenkel calls to his aid all the commonplaces, Schopenhauer, and the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. He believes that Miller is ignorant of all that, and does not ask himself for an instant why Nietzsche himself broke with The Birth of Tragedy, why he ceased to believe in tragic representation...

279Michel Foucault profoundly demonstrated what cut the eruption of production introduced into the world of representation. Production can be that of labor or that of desire, it can be social or desiring, it appeals to forces that no longer allow themselves to be contained in representation, to flux and cuts that pierce it, traverse it from all sides: "an immense sheet of shadow" extended beneath representation.{231} And this failure or submersion of the classical world of representation, Foucault assigns its date to the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems therefore that the situation is much more complex than we say; for psychoanalysis participates to the highest degree in this discovery of units of production, which submit all possible representations to themselves rather than subordinate themselves to them. Just as Ricardo founds political or social economy by discovering quantitative labor at the principle of all representable value, Freud founds desiring economy by discovering quantitative libido at the principle of all representation of the objects and aims of desire. Freud discovers the subjective nature or abstract essence of desire, as Ricardo discovers the subjective nature or abstract essence of labor, beyond all representation that would attach them to objects, aims or even sources in particular. Freud is therefore the first to disengage desire pure and simple, as Ricardo "labor pure and simple," and by that the sphere of production which effectively overflows representation. And, just as abstract subjective labor, abstract subjective desire is inseparable from a movement of deterritorialization, which discovers the play of machines and agents beneath all the particular determinations that still bound desire or labor to such or such a person, to such or such an object within the framework of representation. Machines and desiring production, psychic apparatuses and machines of desire, machines of desire and the assembly of an analytic machine capable of decoding them: the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible, partial connections, included disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions, flux and polyvocal chains, transductive cuts — and the relation of machines of desire as formations of the unconscious with the molar formations they constitute statistically in organized crowds, the apparatus of repression-refoulement that follows from it… Such is the constitution of the analytic field; and this sub-representational field will continue to survive and to function, even through Oedipus, even through the myth and tragedy that nonetheless mark the reconciliation of psychoanalysis with representation. It remains that a conflict runs through all of psychoanalysis, between familial mythic and tragic representation, and desiring and social production. For myth and tragedy are systems of symbolic representations that still bring desire back to exterior conditions determined as particular objective codes — the body of the earth, the despotic body — and that thus thwart the discovery of abstract or subjective essence. It has been noted in this sense that, each time Freud puts back in the foreground the consideration of psychic apparatuses, of desiring and social machines, of pulsional and institutional mechanisms, his interest in myth and tragedy tends to decrease, at the same time that he denounces in Jung, then in Rank, the restoration of an exterior representation of the essence of desire as objective, alienated in myth or tragedy.{232}

280How to explain this very complex ambivalence of psychoanalysis? We must distinguish several things. First, symbolic representation certainly grasps the essence of desire, but by referring it to great objectities as to particular elements that fix for it objects, aims and sources. Thus myth refers desire to the element of earth as full body, and to the territorial code that distributes prohibitions and prescriptions; and tragedy, to the full body of the despot and to the corresponding imperial code. Henceforth, the understanding of symbolic representations can consist in a systematic phenomenology of these elements and objectities (in the manner of the old hellenists or even of Jung); or else in a historical study that refers them to their objective and real social conditions (in the manner of recent hellenists). From this latter point of view, representation implies a certain lag, and expresses less a stable element than the conditioned passage from one element to another: mythic representation does not express the element of earth, but rather the conditions under which this element effaces itself before the despotic element; and tragic representation does not express the despotic element properly speaking, but the conditions under which, for example in Greece in the fifth century, this element effaces itself to the profit of the new order of the city.{233} Now it is evident that none of these treatments of myth or tragedy suits psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic method is entirely other: instead of referring symbolic representation to determined objectities and to objective social conditions, it refers them to the subjective and universal essence of desire as libido. Thus, the operation of decoding in psychoanalysis can no longer signify what it signifies in the human sciences, namely to discover the secret of such or such a code, but to undo the codes in order to attain to quantitative and qualitative flux of libido that traverse the dream, the fantasy, pathological formations as well as myth, tragedy and social formations. Psychoanalytic interpretation does not consist in rivaling code, in adding a code to codes already known, but in decoding absolutely, in disengaging something uncodable by virtue of its polymorphism and its polyvocity.{234} It appears then that the interest of psychoanalysis in myth (or tragedy) is an essentially critical interest, since the specificity of myth, objectively understood, must melt in the subjective sun of libido: it is indeed the world of representation that collapses, or tends to collapse.

281That is to say, secondly, that the link between psychoanalysis and capitalism is no less profound than that of political economy. This discovery of decoded and deterritorialized flux is the same one that takes place for political economy and in social production, in the form of subjective abstract labor, and for psychoanalysis and in desiring production, in the form of subjective abstract libido. As Marx says, it is in capitalism that essence becomes subjective, activity of production in general, and that abstract labor becomes something real from which one can reinterpret all previous social formations from the point of view of a decoding or a process of generalized deterritorialization: "Thus the most simple abstraction, which modern economy places in the foreground, and which expresses an ancestral phenomenon valid for all forms of society, nevertheless appears as practically true, in this abstraction, only insofar as it is a category of the most modern society." It is the same for abstract desire as libido, as subjective essence. Not that one must establish a simple parallelism between capitalist social production and desiring production, or between the flux of capital-money and the flux of shit of desire. The relation is much tighter: machines of desire are not elsewhere than in social machines, so that the conjunction of decoded flux in the capitalist machine tends to liberate the free figures of a universal subjective libido. In short, the discovery of an activity of production in general and without distinction, as it appears in capitalism, is inseparably that of political economy and of psychoanalysis, beyond determined systems of representation.

282This is not to say, obviously, that capitalist man, or man in capitalism, desires to work nor works according to his desire. The identity of desire and work is rather, not a myth, but the active utopia par excellence that designates the limit to be crossed in capitalism regarding desirous production. But why, precisely, is desirous production always at the limit thwarted by capitalism? Why does capitalism, at the very moment it discovers the subjective essence of desire and work—essence common insofar as it is activity of production in general—never cease to alienate it again, and immediately, in a repressive machine that separates the essence in two, and maintains it separated, abstract work on one side, abstract desire on the other side: political economy and psychoanalysis, political economy and libidinal economy? It is here that we can appreciate the full extent of psychoanalysis's belonging to capitalism. For, as we have seen, capitalism has as its limit the decoded flux of desirous production, but never ceases to push them back by binding them in an axiomatic that takes the place of codes. Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but this movement it conjures away through factitious and artificial re-territorializations. It constructs itself on the ruins of territorial and despotic representations, mythic and tragic, but it restores them to its service and under another form, as images of capital. Marx sums it all up in saying that the abstract subjective essence is discovered by capitalism only to be chained again, alienated, no longer truly in an external and independent element like objectivity, but in the very subjective element of private property: "Formerly, man was exterior to himself, his condition was that of real alienation; now, this condition has changed into an act of alienation, of dispossession." Indeed, it is the form of private property that conditions the conjunction of decoded flux, that is to say their axiomatization in a system where the flux of means of production, as property of capitalists, relates to the flux of so-called free work, as "property" of workers (so that state restrictions on the matter or content of private property affect this form not at all). It is still the form of private property that constitutes the center of capitalism's factitious re-territorializations. It is it finally that produces the images filling the field of immanence of capitalism, "the" capitalist, "the" worker, etc. In other words, capitalism does imply the collapse of great determined objective representations, to the profit of production as universal interior essence, but it does not thereby exit the world of representation, it operates only a vast conversion of this world, giving it the new form of an infinite subjective representation.

283We seem to be moving away from the concerns of psychoanalysis, and yet we have never been closer to them. For, there too, as we saw previously, it is within the interiority of its movement that capitalism demands and institutes not only a social axiomatic, but an application of this axiomatic to the privatized family. Representation would never assure its own conversion without this application that hollows it out, splits it and folds it back onto itself. Then abstract subjective Labor as it is represented in private property has for its correlate abstract subjective Desire, as it is represented in the privatized family. Psychoanalysis takes charge of this second term, as political economy does of the first. Psychoanalysis is the technique of application, of which political economy is the axiomatic. In short, psychoanalysis disengages the second pole in the movement proper to capitalism, which substitutes infinite subjective representation for great objective determinate representations. It is indeed necessary that the limit of the decoded flux of desiring production be twice conjured, twice displaced, once by the position of immanent limits that capitalism ceaselessly reproduces on an increasingly large scale, another time by the tracing of an interior limit that folds this social reproduction back onto restricted familial reproduction. The ambiguity of psychoanalysis with respect to myth or tragedy is explained from this point on thus: it undoes them as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a universal subjective libido; but it refound them, and promotes them as subjective representations that elevate to infinity the mythic and tragic contents. It treats myth and tragedy, but treats them as the dreams and fantasms of the private man, Homo familia — and indeed the dream and the phantasm are to myth and tragedy what private property is to common property. What in myth and tragedy plays as objective element, is thus taken up and elevated by psychoanalysis, but as unconscious dimension of subjective representation (myth as the dream of humanity). What plays as objective and public element — the Earth, the Despot — is now taken up, but as the expression of a subjective and private re-territorialization: Oedipus is the fallen despot, banished, deterritorialized, but one re-territorializes onto the Oedipus complex conceived as the papa-mama-me of the man of today. Psychoanalysis, and the Oedipus complex, gather up all beliefs, all that has been believed at all times by humanity, but in order to bring it to the state of a disavowal that preserves belief without believing in it (it is only a dream…: the most severe piety, today, demands nothing more…). Whence this double impression, that psychoanalysis opposes mythology no less than mythologists, but at the same time carries myth and tragedy to the dimensions of universal subjectivity: if Oedipus himself is "without complex," the Oedipus complex is without Oedipus, as narcissism without Narcissus. Such is the ambivalence that traverses psychoanalysis, and which overflows the particular problem of myth and tragedy: on one hand it undoes the system of objective representations (myth, tragedy) in favor of subjective essence conceived as desiring production, and on the other hand it pours this production back into a system of subjective representations (dream, phantasm, of which myth and tragedy are posited as developments or projections). Images, nothing but images. What remains in the end is an intimate and familial theater, the theater of the private man, which is neither desiring production nor objective representation. The unconscious as scene. An entire theater in place of production, and which disfigures it even more than tragedy and myth reduced to their sole ancient resources could do.

284Myth, tragedy, dream, fantasy — and myth and tragedy reinterpreted in function of dream and fantasy —, there is the representative series that psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production, social and desiring production. Series of theater, in place of the series of production. But, precisely, why does representation become subjective take this theatrical form ("There is between psychoanalysis and theater a mysterious link…")? One knows the eminently modern answer of certain recent authors: theater disengages the finite structure of infinite subjective representation. What disengaging means is very complex, since structure can never present anything but its own absence, or represent something non-represented in representation: but it is, one says, the privilege of theater to stage this metaphoric and metonymic causality which marks at once the presence and absence of structure in its effects. André Green, at the very moment when he makes reservations about the sufficiency of structure, makes them only in the name of a theater necessary to the actualization of it, playing a role of revealer, place by which it becomes visible.{237} Octave Mannoni, in his beautiful analysis of the phenomenon of belief, takes similarly the model of theater to show how the denial of belief implies in fact a transformation of belief, under the effect of a structure that theater incarnates or stages.{238} We must understand that representation, when it ceases to be objective, when it becomes infinite subjective, that is to say imaginary, loses effectually all consistency, unless it refers back to a structure which determines as well the place and functions of the subject of representation, of objects represented as images, and the formal relations between them all. Symbolic designates no longer at all then the rapport of representation to an objectity as element, but the ultimate elements of subjective representation, pure signifiants, pure non-represented representatives from which flow at once the subjects, the objects and their rapports. Structure designates thus the unconscious of subjective representation. The series of this representation presents itself now: infinite subjective representation (imaginary) — theatrical representation — structural representation. And, precisely because theater is supposed to stage the latent structure, as if to incarnate its elements and relations, it is apt to reveal the universality of this structure, including in the objective representations which it recuperates and reinterprets in function of the hidden representatives, of their migrations and variable relations. One gathers up, one retakes all beliefs in the name of a structure of the unconscious: we are still pious. Everywhere, the great game of the symbolic signifiant which incarnates itself in the signifieds of the imaginary — Oedipus as universal metaphor.

285Why the theatre? How strange this unconscious of theatre and papier-mâché. Theatre taken as model of production. Even with Althusser we witness the following operation: the discovery of social production as "machine" or "machinery," irreducible to the world of objective representation (Vorstellung); but immediately the reduction of the machine to structure, the identification of production with a structural and theatrical representation (Darstellung).{239} Now it is with desiring production as with social production: each time production, instead of being grasped in its originality, in its reality, finds itself thus folded back onto a space of representation, it can only be worth by its own absence, and appears as a lack in this space. In search of structure in psychoanalysis, Moustafa Safouan can present it as a "contribution to a theory of lack." It is in structure that the soldering of desire with the impossible occurs, and lack defined as castration. It is from structure that the most austere song rises in honour of castration: yes, yes, it is through castration that we enter the order of desire — as soon as desiring production has spread out in the space of a representation that lets it subsist only as absence and lack of itself. It is that an structural unity is imposed on machines of desire that unites them in a molar ensemble; partial objects are related to a totality that can only appear as that of which they lack, and what lacks to itself in lacking them (the great Signifier "symbolizable by the inherence of a — 1 to the ensemble of signifiers"). How far will one go in the development of a lack of lack that traverses structure? This, the structural operation: it arranges lack in the molar ensemble. Then, the limit of desiring production — the limit that separates molar ensembles and their molecular elements, objective representations and machines of desire — is now quite displaced. It passes now only in the molar ensemble itself insofar as it is hollowed by the furrow of castration. The formal operations of structure are those of extrapolation, application, bi-univocization that fold back the departing social ensemble onto an arriving familial ensemble, the familial relation becoming "metaphoric of all others," and preventing molecular productive elements from following their own line of flight. When Green seeks the reasons that ground the affinity of psychoanalysis with theatrical representation and the structure it renders visible, he assigns two particularly striking ones: that theatre elevates the familial relation to the state of universal metaphoric structural relation, from which emerge the imaginary play and place of persons; and, inversely, that it pushes back into the wings the play and functioning of machines, behind a limit become impassable (exactly as in fantasy, machines are there, but behind the wall). In short, the displaced limit passes no longer between objective representation and desiring production, but between the two poles of subjective representation, as infinite imaginary representation, and finite structural representation. One can from then on oppose these two aspects, the imaginary variations that tend toward the night of the indeterminate or the undifferentiated, and the symbolic invariant that traces the path of differentiations: it is the same thing found on both sides, according to a rule of inverse relation, or of double bind. All production conducted in the double impasse of subjective representation. One can always send Oedipus back to the imaginary, one finds it again, stronger and more entire, more lacking and triumphant from the fact that it lacks, one finds it entirely in symbolic castration. And assuredly structure gives us no means of escaping familialism; on the contrary, it applies a tourniquet, it gives the family a universal metaphoric value at the very moment it has lost its objective literal values. Psychoanalysis avows its ambition: to take over from the failing family, to replace the debris of the familial bed with the psychoanalytic couch, to make the "analytic situation" incestuous in its essence, that it be proof or guarantee of itself, and be worth for Reality.{240} This is indeed what it is about in the end, as Octave Mannoni shows: how can belief continue after repudiation, how can we continue to be pious? We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that passed through objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert grows: the old father is dead, the territorial father, the son too, the despotic Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing but images that turn in infinite subjective representation. But these images, we find the force to believe in them, from the depths of a structure that regulates our relations with them and our identifications as so many effects of a symbolic signifier. The "good identification"… We are all Chéri-Bibi at the theatre, crying before Oedipus: there's a type in my style, there's a type in my style! Everything is taken up again, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, as shadows projected onto a theatre. The great territorialities have collapsed, but structure proceeds to all the re-territorializations subjective and private. What perverse operation, psychoanalysis, where this neo-idealism culminates, this restored cult of castration, this ideology of lack: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! Truly, they do not know what they do, nor what mechanism of repression they serve, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an analyst's office without knowing at least that everything is played out in advance: Oedipus and castration, the imaginary and the symbolic, the great lesson of the insufficiency of being or of dispossession… Psychoanalysis as gadget, Oedipus as re-territorialization, as reforestation of modern man on the "rock" of castration.

286Quite different was the path traced by Lacan. He does not content himself, like the analytical squirrel, with turning in the wheel of the imaginary and the symbolic, of oedipal imaginary and oedipianizing structure, of the imaginary identity of persons and the structural unity of machines, striking everywhere against the impasses of a molar representation that the family closes upon itself. What good is it to pass from imaginary duel to the (third or fourth) symbolic, if the latter is bi-univocizing while the former is bi-univocized? Machines of desire as partial objects undergo two totalizations, one when the socius confers upon them a structural unity under a symbolic signifier acting as absence and lack in a set of departure, the other when the family imposes upon them a personal unity with imaginary signifieds that distribute, that "vacuolize" the lack in a set of arrival: two abductions of machines, insofar as structure places its articulation there, insofar as parents place their fingers there. To go back from images to structure would be of little import, and would not make us exit representation, if structure did not have a reverse side which is like the real production of desire. This reverse side is the "real disorganization" of molecular elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial in the sense of extensive parts, but rather "partial" like the intensities under which a matter always fills space at diverse degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter); pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusion or negation, syntheses operating without plan, where the connections are transversal, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their support, since this matter which serves them precisely as support is specified under no structural or personal unity, but appears as the full body that fills space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain, but which are not themselves signifying, not responding to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but to the draws of a game of lotto that brings forth now a word, now a drawing, now a thing or a bit of thing, the ones depending on the others only by the order of random draws and holding together only by the absence of link (localizable non-linkings), having no other status than that of being dispersed elements of machines of desire themselves dispersed. It is all this reverse side of structure that Lacan discovers, with the "a" as machine, and the "A" as non-human sex: to schizophrenize the analytic field, instead of oedipianizing the psychotic field.

287How the structure exits it, following planes of consistency or structuration, lines of selection, which correspond to the great statistical ensembles or molar formations, which determine liaisons and fold production back onto representation: it is there that disjunctions become exclusive (and connections, global, and conjunctions, bi-univocal), at the same time that the support finds itself specified under a structural unity, and that signs become themselves significant under the action of a despotic symbol that totalizes them in the name of its own absence or its own withdrawal. For-there-yes-indeed: the production of desire can only be represented as a function of an extrapolated sign that reunites all its elements in an ensemble and does not itself form part of that ensemble. It is there that the absence of link appears necessarily as an absence, and no longer as a positive force. It is there that desire is necessarily related to a missing term, whose very essence is to be missing. The signs of desire, not being significant, become so in representation only as a function of a significant of absence or lack. The structure forms and appears only as a function of the symbolic term defined as lack. The great Other as non-human sex gives way, in representation, to a significant of the great Other as always-missing term, sex too human, phallus of molar castration.{242} But it is there also that Lacan's approach takes on all its complexity; for, to be sure, he does not close an oedipal structure over the unconscious. He shows on the contrary that Oedipus is imaginary, nothing but an image, a myth; and that this or these images are produced by an oedipianizing structure; and that this structure acts only insofar as it reproduces the element of castration which, itself, is not imaginary, but symbolic. There are the three great planes of structuration, which correspond to molar ensembles: Oedipus as imaginary re-territorialization of privatized man, produced in the structural conditions of capitalism, insofar as the latter reproduces and resurrects the archaism of the imperial symbol or the vanished despot. All three are at once necessary: precisely to bring Oedipus to the point of its self-critique. To bring Oedipus to such a point, this is the task undertaken by Lacan. (Similarly, Elisabeth Roudinesco saw well that, for Lacan, the hypothesis of an unconscious-language does not close the unconscious within a linguistic structure, but brings linguistics to its point of self-critique, by showing how the structural organization of significants still depends on a great despotic Significant acting as archaism.){243} What is the point of self-critique? It is that where the structure, beyond the images that fill it and the symbolic that conditions it in representation, discovers its reverse side as a positive principle of non-consistency that dissolves it: where desire is redirected into the order of production, related to its molecular elements, and where it lacks nothing, because it defines itself as being natural and sensible object, at the same time that the real defines itself as being objective of desire. For the unconscious of schizo-analysis ignores persons, ensembles and laws; images, structures and symbols. It is orphaned, as it is anarchist and atheist. It is not orphaned in the sense that the name of the father would designate an absence, but in the sense that it produces itself everywhere that the names of history designate present intensities ("the sea of proper names"). It is not figurative, for its figural is abstract, the figure-schize. It is not structural nor symbolic, for its reality is that of the Real in its production, in its very disorganization. It is not representative, but only machinic, and productive.

288Destroy, destroy: the task of schizo-analysis passes through destruction, a whole cleaning, a whole curettage of the unconscious. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, law, castration… It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as psychoanalysis operates under the benevolent neutrality of the analyst. For these are Hegelian destructions, ways of conserving. How could the famous neutrality not make one laugh? And what psychoanalysis calls, dares to call, the disappearance or dissolution of the Oedipus complex? We are told that Oedipus is indispensable, source of all possible differentiation, and saves us from the terrible undifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, is herself already part of Oedipus; her undifferentiation is only the reverse of the exclusive differentiations that Oedipus creates, she is herself created by Oedipus: Oedipus necessarily functions in the form of this double impasse. We are told that Oedipus in turn must be overcome, and that it is by castration, latency, desexualization and sublimation. But castration, what is it except Oedipus still, to the nth power, and become symbolic, all the more virulent? And latency, this pure fable, what is it except the silence imposed on machines of desire so that Oedipus can develop, strengthen itself in us, accumulate its venomous sperm, while becoming capable of propagating itself, of passing to our future children? And the elimination of castration anxiety in turn, desexualization and sublimation, what are they except divine acceptance, infinite resignation of bad conscience, which consists for woman in "converting her desire for the penis into desire for man and child," and for man in assuming his passive attitude and in "bowing before a substitute for the father"? We are all the more "out" of Oedipus as we become a living example, a poster, a theorem in act, to bring our children into it: we have evolved into Oedipus, we have structured ourselves in Oedipus, under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute, we have learned the song of castration, the lack-of-being-that-is-life, "yes it is through castration / that we accede / to Deeeeeesire…". What is called the disappearance of Oedipus, it is Oedipus become an idea. Only the idea can inject the venom. Oedipus must become an idea so that, each time, his arms and legs regrow, his lips and his mustache: "In reliving the dead reminiscent ones, your ego becomes a sort of mineral theorem that constantly demonstrates the vanity of life". We have been triangulated in Oedipus, and we will triangulate ourselves in it. From family to couple, from couple to family. In truth, the benevolent neutrality of the analyst is very limited: it ceases as soon as one ceases to answer it papa-mama. It ceases as soon as one introduces a little machine of desire, the tape recorder in the analyst's office, it ceases as soon as one causes to flow a flux that does not allow itself to be stamped by Oedipus, the mark of the triangle (you are told that you have libido that is too viscous, or too liquid, contraindications for analysis). When Fromm denounces the existence of a psychoanalytic bureaucracy, he does not yet go far enough, because he does not see what is the stamp of this bureaucracy, and it does not suffice to call for the pre-oedipal to escape it: the pre-oedipal, it is like the post-oedipal, it is still a way of bringing back to Oedipus all desiring production — the an-oedipal. When Reich denounces the way psychoanalysis places itself in the service of social repression, he does not yet go far enough, because he does not see that the link of psychoanalysis with capitalism is not only ideological, that it is infinitely tighter, more constrained; and that psychoanalysis depends directly on an economic mechanism (whence its relations with money) by which the decoded fluxes of desire, as they are taken in the axiomatic of capitalism, must necessarily be reduced to a familial field where the application of this axiomatic is effected: Oedipus as the final word of capitalist consumption, sucking papa-mama, getting oneself stamped and triangulated on the divan, "so then…". No less than the bureaucratic or military apparatus, psychoanalysis is a mechanism of absorption of surplus value; and it is not so from outside, extrinsically, but its very form and finality are marked by this social function. It is not the pervert, nor even the autistic, who escape psychoanalysis, it is psychoanalysis itself that is a gigantic perversion, a drug, a radical cut with reality, beginning with the reality of desire, a narcissism, a monstrous autism: autism proper and intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital. At the limit, psychoanalysis is no longer measured against any reality, no longer opens onto any outside, but becomes itself the test of reality, and the guarantee of its own test, reality as the lack to which one brings back the outside and the inside, departure and arrival: psychoanalysis index sui, without other reference than itself or "the analytical situation".

289Psychoanalysis says quite well that the unconscious representation can never be grasped independently of the deformations, disguises, or displacements it undergoes. Unconscious representation therefore essentially comprises, by virtue of its law, a represented displaced in relation to an instance in perpetual displacement. But two illegitimate conclusions are drawn from it: that one can discover this instance from the displaced represented; and this because this instance itself belongs to representation, as title of unrepresented representative, or of lack "that stands out in the overflow of a representation." It is that displacement refers to very different movements: sometimes it is a matter of the movement by which desiring production ceases to cross the limit, to deterritorialize itself, to make its flux flee, to pass the threshold of representation; sometimes it is on the contrary a matter of the movement by which the limit itself is displaced, and now passes inside representation which operates the artificial re-territorializations of desire. Now, if one can conclude from the displaced to the displacing, it is only in the second sense, where molar representation organizes itself around a representative that displaces the represented. But it is certainly not in the first sense, where molecular elements ceaselessly pass through the meshes. We have seen in this perspective how the law of representation denaturalized the productive forces of the unconscious, and in its very structure induced a false image that took desire in its trap (impossibility of concluding from the interdicted to what is really interdicted). Yes, Oedipus is indeed the displaced represented; yes, castration is indeed the representative, the displacing, the signifier — but none of this constitutes an unconscious material, nor concerns the productions of the unconscious. All of this is rather at the crossing of two operations of capture, that where repressive social production makes itself replaced by beliefs, that where repressed desiring production finds itself replaced by representations. And certainly it is not psychoanalysis that makes us believe: Oedipus and castration, one asks for them, asks for them again, and these demands come from elsewhere and from deeper. But psychoanalysis found the following means, and fulfills the following function: make beliefs survive even after repudiation! make still believe those who no longer believe in anything, ... remake them a private territoriality, a private Urstaat, a private capital (the dream as capital, Freud said...). This is why schizo-analysis inversely must devote all its forces to necessary destructions. Destroy beliefs and representations, scenes of theater. And never for this task will it have activity too malevolent. Blow up Oedipus and castration, intervene brutally, each time a subject intones the song of myth or the verses of tragedy, bring it always back to the factory. As Charlus says, "but we really don't give a damn about his old grandmother, huh, you little rascal!" Oedipus and castration, nothing but reactionary formations, resistances, blockages and armors, whose destruction does not come fast enough. Reich senses a fundamental principle of schizo-analysis when he says that the destruction of resistances must not await the discovery of the material.{246} But it is for a still more radical reason than the one he thought: it is that there is no unconscious material, so that schizo-analysis has nothing to interpret. There are only resistances, and then machines, machines of desire. Oedipus is a resistance; if we were able to speak of the intrinsically perverse character of psychoanalysis, it is that perversion in general is the artificial re-territorialization of fluxes of desire, while machines on the contrary are the indices of deterritorialized production. Psychoanalysis re-territorializes on the couch, in the representation of Oedipus and castration. Schizo-analysis must on the contrary disengage the deterritorialized fluxes of desire, in the molecular elements of desiring production. Let one recall the practical rule enunciated by Leclaire following Lacan, the rule of the right to non-sense as to absence of link: you will not have attained the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you find or restore a link between two elements… (But why, then, see in this extreme dispersion, machines dispersed in every machine, only a pure "fiction" that must give way to Reality defined as lack, Oedipus or castration returned at a gallop, at the same time one folds the absence of link onto a "signifier" of absence charged with representing it, linking it itself and making us pass again from one pole to the other of displacement? One falls back into the molar hole while claiming to unmask the real).

290What complicates everything is that there is indeed a necessity for desiring production to be induced from representation, to be discovered along its lines of flight; but it is in a completely different way than psychoanalysis believes. The decoded flux of desire form the free energy (libido) of machines of desire. Machines of desire are drawn and point toward a tangent of deterritorialization that traverses representative milieus, and that runs along the full body. To leave, to flee, but by making flee… Machines of desire themselves are flux-schizes or cut-flux that cut and flow at once upon the full body: not the great wound represented in castration, but the thousand small connections, disjunctions, conjunctions through which each machine produces a flux with respect to another that cuts it, and cuts a flux that another produces. But these decoded and deterritorialized flux of desiring production, how would they not be beaten down upon some representative territoriality, how would they not form yet another, even if upon the full body as indifferent support of a last representation? Even those who know best how to "leave," who make of leaving something as natural as being born and dying, those who plunge in search of non-human sex, Lawrence, Miller, erect from afar somewhere a territoriality that forms still an anthropomorphic and phallic representation, the Orient, Mexico or Peru. Even the schizo's promenade or voyage do not operate great deterritorializations without borrowing territorial circuits: Molloy's stumbling walk and his bicycle preserve the mother's room as residue of aim; the wavering spirals of the Unnamable keep for uncertain center the family tower where he continues to turn trampling on his own; the infinite series of Watt's juxtaposed and unlocalized parks still has a reference to Monsieur Knott's house, alone capable of "pushing the soul out," but also of recalling it to its place. We are all small dogs, we need circuits, and to be walked. Even those who know best how to disconnect, to disconnect, enter into connections of machines of desire that reform small lands. Even the great deterritorialized of Gisela Pankow are brought to discover, beneath the roots of the uprooted tree that traverses their full body, the image of a family castle. We distinguished previously two poles of delirium, as the schizophrenic molecular line of flight, and paranoiac molar investment; but it is equally the perverse pole that opposes the schizophrenic pole, as the reconstitution of territorialities to the movement of deterritorialization. And if perversion in the narrowest sense operates a certain very particular type of re-territorialization in artifice, perversion in the broad sense comprises all its types, not only the artificial, but the exotic, the archaic, the residual, the private, etc.: thus Oedipus and psychoanalysis as perversion. Even Raymond Roussel's schizophrenic machines convert into perverse machines of a theater that represents Africa. In short, no deterritorialization of schizophrenic desire flux that is not accompanied by global or local re-territorializations, which always reform regions of representation. More than that, one cannot evaluate the force and obstinacy of a deterritorialization except through the types of re-territorialization that represent it; the one is the reverse of the other. Our loves are complexes of deterritorialization and re-territorialization. What we love is always a certain mulatto, a certain mulatta. Deterritorialization, one can never grasp it in itself, one grasps only indices of it with respect to territorial representations. Take the example of the dream: yes the dream is Oedipal, and there is nothing to be surprised about, because it is a perverse re-territorialization with respect to the deterritorialization of sleep and nightmare. But why return to the dream, why make it the royal road of desire and the unconscious, when it is the manifestation of a superego, of an all-powerful and over-archaicized ego (the Urszene of the Urstaat?) And yet within the dream itself, as well as within fantasy and delirium, machines function as indices of deterritorialization. In the dream there are always machines endowed with the strange property of passing from hand to hand, of making flow, of carrying away and being carried away. The airplane of parental coitus, the father's automobile, the grandmother's sewing machine, the little brother's bicycle, all objects of theft, in the double sense of "stealing"…, the machine is always infernal in the family dream. It introduces cuts and flux that prevent the dream from closing upon its scene and systematizing itself in its representation. It asserts an irreducible factor of non-sense, which will develop elsewhere and outside, in the conjunctions of the real as such. Psychoanalysis accounts for it very poorly, with its Oedipal obstinacy; it is that one re-territorializes on persons and milieus, but one deterritorializes on machines. Is it President Schreber's father who acts through the intermediary of machines, or rather the machines that function through the intermediary of the father? Psychoanalysis fixes itself on the imaginary and structural representatives of re-territorialization, while schizo-analysis follows the machinic indices of deterritorialization. Always the opposition of the neurotic on the divan, as ultimate and sterile land, last exhausted colony, with the schizo on promenade in a deterritorialized circuit.

291Extract from an article by Michel Cournot on Chaplin, which makes clear what schizophrenic laughter is, the schizophrenic line of flight or breakthrough, and the process as deterritorialization, with its machinic indices: "At the moment when the plank falls on his head for the second time — a psychotic gesture —, Charles Chaplin provokes the laughter of the spectator. Yes, but what laughter is it? And what spectator? For example, the question no longer arises at that moment of the film, of knowing whether the spectator must see the accident coming, or be surprised by it. Everything happens as if the spectator, at that moment, was no longer in his armchair, was no longer in a situation to observe things. A sort of perceptual gymnastics has led him, gradually, not to identify with the character of Modern Times, but to experience so immediately the resistance of the events that he accompanies this character, has the same surprises, the same presentiments, the same familiarity as him. Thus the famous eating machine, which is in a sense, by its excess, foreign to the film (Chaplin had invented it twenty-two years before the film), is only the formal, absolute exercise that prepares for the conduct, psychotic as well, of the worker trapped in the machine, of whom only the overturned head protrudes, and who has his lunch administered to him by Chaplin, since it is the hour. If laughter is a reaction borrowing certain circuits, one can say that Charles Chaplin, gradually through the sequences of the film, progressively displaces the reactions, makes them retreat, level by level, until the moment when the spectator is no longer master of his circuits, and tends to borrow spontaneously either a shorter path, which is not practicable, which is blocked, or else a path very explicitly announced as leading nowhere. After having suppressed the spectator as such, Chaplin denatures laughter, which becomes like so many short-circuits of a disconnected mechanism. One has sometimes spoken of the pessimism of Modern Times and the optimism of the final image. Neither term suits the film. Charles Chaplin, in Modern Times, rather draws, at very small scale, with a dry line, the outline of several oppressive manifestations. Fundamental ones. The main character, whose role Chaplin holds, need not be passive or active, consenting or refractory, because he is the point of the pencil tracing the outline, he is the line itself… This is why the final image is without optimism. One does not see what optimism would come to do in conclusion of this observation. This man and this woman seen from behind, all black, whose shadows are projected by no sun, advance toward nothing. The poles without wires that border the road on the left, the leafless trees that border it on the right do not meet at the horizon. There is no horizon. The bare hills opposite form only a bar confused with the void that looms over them. This man and this woman are no longer alive, it jumps to the eyes. It is not pessimistic either. What had to arrive has arrived. They did not kill themselves. They were not shot down by the police. And one should not go looking for the alibi of an accident. Charles Chaplin did not insist. He went quickly, as usual. He traced the outline."

292In its destructive task, schizo-analysis must proceed as quickly as possible, but also can only proceed with great patience, great prudence, by successively undoing the territories and re-territorializations representative through which a subject passes in its individual history. For there are several layers, several planes of resistance coming from within or imposed from without. Schizophrenia as process, deterritorialization as process is inseparable from the stases that interrupt it, or that exacerbate it, or that make it turn in circles, and that re-territorialize it in neurosis, in perversion, in psychosis. To the point that the process can only disengage itself, pursue itself and accomplish itself insofar as it is capable of creating — what then? a new earth. In each case one must pass again through the old earths, study their nature, their density, seek how on each are grouped the machinic indices that allow surpassing them. Oedipal familial earths of neurosis, artificial earths of perversion, asylary earths of psychosis, how on them reconquer each time the process, continually resume the voyage? In Search of Lost Time as great enterprise of schizo-analysis: all planes are traversed to their line of molecular flight, schizophrenic breakthrough; thus in the kiss where Albertine's face jumps from one plane of consistency to another to finally come undone in a nebula of molecules. The reader always risks, for his part, stopping at some plane, and saying yes, it is there that Proust explains himself. But the narrator-spider ceases to undo webs and planes, to resume the voyage, to spy the signs or indices that function as machines and will make him go further. This very movement is humor, black humor. The familial and neurotic earths of Oedipus, where global and personal connections establish themselves, oh, the narrator does not install himself there, he does not remain there, he traverses them, he profanes them, he pierces them, he even liquidates his grandmother with a machine for lacing shoes. The perverse earths of homosexuality, where exclusive disjunctions of women with women, of men with men, establish themselves, jump likewise as a function of the machinic indices that undermine them. The psychotic earths, with their conjunctions in place (Charlus is therefore certainly mad, Albertine was therefore perhaps!), are traversed in turn to the point where the problem no longer arises, no longer arises thus. The narrator continues his own affair, toward the unknown fatherland, the unknown earth that, alone, his own work in progress creates, In Search of Lost Time "in progress," functioning as machine of desire capable of collecting and treating all indices. He goes toward those new regions where connections are always partial and non-personal, conjunctions, nomadic and polyvocal, disjunctions included, where homosexuality and heterosexuality can no longer be distinguished: world of transversal communications, where non-human sex finally conquered confuses itself with flowers, new earth where desire functions according to its elements and its molecular flux. Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension, it is made immobile, in a room and on a body without organs, intensive voyage that undoes all earths to the profit of the one it creates.

293The patient resumption of the process or conversely its interruption, the two are so closely interwoven that they can only be evaluated in one another. The schizo's voyage, how would it be possible independently of certain circuits, how could it do without a territory? But, inversely, how can one be sure that these circuits do not reform the all-too-familiar territories of the asylum, of artifice or of the family? We return always to the same question: what does the schizo suffer from, he whose sufferings are unspeakable? Does he suffer from the process itself, or from its interruptions, when he is neuroticized in family on the territory of Oedipus, when he is psychoticized on asylum territory the one who will not allow himself to be oedipianized, when he is perverted in artificial milieu the one who escapes the asylum and the family? Perhaps there is only one illness, neurosis, Oedipal rot to which all pathogenic interruptions of the process are measured. Most modern attempts — day hospital, night hospital, patients' club, hospitalization at home, institution and even anti-psychiatry — remain threatened by a danger, which Jean Oury has been able to analyze profoundly: how to prevent the institution from reforming an asylum structure, or from constituting perverted and reformist artificial societies, or residual pseudo-families that are maternizing and paternalistic? We are not thinking of attempts at so-called community psychiatry, whose avowed aim is to triangulate, to oedipianize everyone, people, beasts and things, to the point that one will see a new race of the sick begging by reaction that one give them back an asylum, or a little Beckettian territory, a dustbin in which to catatonize themselves in a corner. But, in a genre less openly repressive, who says that the family is a good place, a good circuit for the deterritorialized schizo? It would still be surprising, "the therapeutic potentialities of the family milieu"... Then the entire village, the neighborhood? What molar unit will form a circuit sufficiently nomadic? How to prevent the chosen unit, even if it be a specific institution, from constituting a perverse society of tolerance, a mutual aid group that hides the real problems? Is it the structure of the institution that will save it? But how will the structure break its relation with neuroticizing, pervertizing, psychoticizing castration? How will it produce anything other than a subjugated group? How will it give free rein to the process, it whose entire molar organization has for function to bind the molecular process? And even anti-psychiatry, particularly sensitive to the schizophrenic breakthrough and to intense voyage, exhausts itself proposing the image of a group-subject that repervertizes itself immediately, with former schizos charged with guiding the most recent, and, for relay, little chapels or, shabby, a convent in Ceylon.

294Only an effective politicization of psychiatry can save us from these impasses. And no doubt, anti-psychiatry has gone very far in this direction, with Laing and Cooper. But it seems to us that they still think this politicization in terms of structure and event, rather than in the terms of the process itself. On the other hand, they localize on the same line social alienation and mental alienation, and tend to identify them by showing how the family instance prolongs one into the other.{249} Between the two, however, the relationship is rather that of an included disjunction. It is that the decoding and deterritorialization of flux defines the process itself of capitalism, that is to say its essence, its tendency and its external limit. But we know that the process ceases not to be interrupted, or the tendency thwarted, or the limit displaced, by re-territorializations and subjective representations that operate as well at the level of capital as subject (the axiomatic) as at the level of persons who effect it (application of the axiomatic). Now we will seek in vain to assign social alienation and mental alienation to one side or the other, so long as we establish between the two a relationship of exclusion. But the deterritorialization of flux in general coincides effectively with mental alienation, insofar as it includes the re-territorializations that allow it itself to subsist only as the state of a particular flux, flux of madness which defines itself thus because one charges it with representing all that escapes in the other flux to the axiomatics and to the applications of re-territorialization. Inversely, in all the re-territorializations of capitalism, one will be able to find the form of social alienation in act, insofar as they prevent flux from fleeing the system, and maintain work within the axiomatic framework of property, and desire within the applied framework of the family; but this social alienation includes in its turn mental alienation which finds itself represented or re-territorialized in neurosis, perversion, psychosis (mental illnesses).

295A genuine politics of psychiatry, or of anti-psychiatry, would therefore consist in: 1°) undoing all the re-territorializations that transform madness into mental illness, 2°) liberating in all flux the schizoid movement of their deterritorialization, in such a manner that this character could no longer qualify a particular residue as flux of madness, but would affect equally the flux of work and desire, of production, knowledge and creation in their deepest tendency. Madness would no longer exist as madness, not because it would have been transformed into "mental illness," but on the contrary because it would receive the support of all the other flux, including science and art — it being understood that it is called madness, and appears as such, only because it is deprived of this support and finds itself reduced to testifying all alone for deterritorialization as universal process. It is only its undue privilege, and beyond its strength, that renders it mad. Foucault announced in this sense an age when madness would disappear, not merely because it would be poured into the controlled space of mental illnesses ("warm great aquariums"), but on the contrary because the exterior limit it designates would be crossed by other flux escaping control from all sides, and sweeping us along.{250} One must therefore say that one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you have seen nothing yet, irreversible process. And when we consider what is profoundly artificial in the perverse re-territorializations, but also in the psychotic re-territorializations of the hospital, or neurotic familial ones, we cry out: even more perversion! even more artifice! until the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates necessarily by itself a new earth. Psychoanalysis is particularly satisfying in this regard: its entire perverse cure consists in transforming familial neurosis into artificial neurosis (of transference), and in erecting the couch, small island with its commander, the psychoanalyst, into autonomous territoriality and ultimate artifice. Then it barely suffices an additional effort for everything to tip over, and sweep us finally toward other distances. The flick of schizo-analysis, which relaunches the movement, rejoins the tendency, and pushes simulacra to the point where they cease to be artificial images to become indices of the new earth. This is the accomplishment of the process: not a promised and pre-existing earth, but an earth that creates itself as it goes according to its tendency, its lifting-off, its very deterritorialization. Movement of the theatre of cruelty; for it is the only theatre of production, where flux cross the threshold of deterritorialization and produce the new earth (not a hope, but a simple "observation," a "sketch," where he who flees makes flee, and traces the earth in deterritorializing himself). Point of active flight where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, the (schizo)-analytic machine become pieces and fragments of one another.

SECTION 4

296But the negative or destructive task of schizo-analysis is in no way separable from its positive tasks (all are necessarily carried out at the same time). The first positive task consists in discovering in a subject the nature, formation or functioning of its machines of desire, independently of all interpretation. What is it, your machines of desire, what do you make enter into your machines, and exit, how does it work, what are your non-human sexes? The schizo-analyst is a mechanic, and schizo-analysis, purely functional. It cannot in this respect remain at the still interpretative examination (from the point of view of the unconscious) of the social machines in which the subject is caught as a cog or as a user, nor of the technical machines that are in its favorite possession, or that it perfects or even fabricates through bricolage, nor of the use it makes of machines in its dreams and its fantasies. They are still too representative, and represent overly large units — even the perverse machines of the sadist or the masochist, the machines to influence of the paranoiac… We have seen in general that the pseudo-analyses of the "object" were truly the lowest degree of analytical activity, even and especially when they claim to double the real object with an imaginary object; and better the key to dreams than a market psychoanalysis. Yet the consideration of all these machines, whether they be real, symbolic or imaginary, must indeed intervene in a wholly determined way: but as functional indices to put us on the path of machines of desire, of which they are more or less close and akin. Machines of desire in effect are reached only from a certain threshold of dispersion that leaves subsisting neither their imaginary identity nor their structural unity (these instances are still of the order of interpretation, that is, of the order of the signified or the signifier). Machines of desire have for pieces the partial objects; partial objects define the working machine or the working pieces, but in a state of dispersion such that a piece ceases to refer to a piece of a wholly other machine, as the red clover and the bumblebee, the wasp and the orchid flower, the bicycle horn and the tail of the dead rat. Let us not hastily introduce a term that would be like a phallus structuring the whole and personalizing the parts, unifying and totalizing. Everywhere there is libido as machine energy, and neither the horn nor the bumblebee have the privilege of being a phallus: the latter intervenes only in the structural organization and the personal relations that ensue from it, where each, like the worker summoned to war, abandons its machines and begins to struggle for a trophy as great absent, with the same sanction, the same derisory wound for all, castration. All this struggle for the phallus, will to power poorly understood, anthropomorphic representation of sex, all this conception of sexuality that makes Lawrence recoil in horror, precisely because it is only a conception, because it is an idea that "reason" imposes on the unconscious and that it introduces into the pulsional sphere, and not at all a formation of this sphere. That is where desire finds itself trapped, specified to human sex, in the unified and identified molar whole. But machines of desire live on the contrary under the régime of dispersion of molecular elements. And one does not understand what partial objects are if one does not see in them such elements, instead of the parts of a whole even fragmented. As Lawrence said, analysis has not to concern itself with anything that resembles a concept or a person, "the so-called human relations are not at stake".{251} It must concern itself only (except in its negative task) with machinic arrangements grasped in the element of their molecular dispersion.

297Let us return then once again to the rule that Serge Leclaire stated so well, even if he sees in it only a fiction rather than real-desire: the pieces or elements of machines of desire are recognized by their mutual independence, by the fact that nothing in one must depend or does depend on something in the other. They must not be opposed determinations of the same entity, nor the differentiations of a single being, as masculine and feminine in human sex, but different or really-distinct, "beings" distinct, as one finds them in the dispersal of non-human sex (the clover and the bumblebee). As long as schizo-analysis does not reach these disparates, it has not yet found the partial objects as ultimate elements of the unconscious. It is in this sense that Leclaire called "erogenous body" not a dismembered organism, but an emission of pre-individual and pre-personal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, glued together by real distinction or the very absence of link. Such are Beckettian schizoid sequences: pebbles, pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe bowl, a small soft undetermined packet, a bicycle stamp cover, half a crutch… ("if one bumps indefinitely against the same set of pure singularities, one can think that one has approached the singularity of the subject's desire").{252} Certainly, one can always establish, or restore some link whatever between these elements: organic links between the organs or fragments of organs which may possibly form part of the multiplicity; psychological and axiological links—the good, the bad—which finally refer back to the persons and scenes from which these elements are borrowed; structural links between the ideas or concepts which may correspond to them. But it is not under this aspect that partial objects are the elements of the unconscious, and we cannot even follow the image that their inventor, Melanie Klein, proposes of them. It is that, organs or fragments of organs, they refer in no way to an organism which would function fantasmatically as a lost unity or totality to come. Their dispersal has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification or totalization. Every deposited structure, every abolished memory, every organism annulled, every link undone, they hold as raw partial objects, dispersed working pieces of a machine itself dispersed. In short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious. This is why, when we insisted a moment ago on the difference between machines of desire and all the figures of molar machines, we well understood that the ones were in the others and did not exist without them, but we had to mark the difference of régime and scale between the two species.

298It is true that one will wonder rather how these conditions of dispersion, of real distinction and of absence of link permit any machinistic régime whatsoever — how the partial objects thus defined can form machines and arrangements of machines. The answer lies in the passive character of the syntheses or, which amounts to the same thing, in the indirect character of the interactions considered. If it is true that every partial object emits a flux, this flux is equally associated with another partial object for which it defines a field of potential presence itself multiple (a multiplicity of anuses for the flux of shit). The synthesis of connection of partial objects is indirect since the one, at each point of its presence in the field, always cuts a flux that the other emits or produces relatively, all the while emitting itself a flux that others cut. It is the fluxes that are as it were double-headed, and by which operates every productive connection such as we have tried to account for it with the notion of flux-schiz or of cut-flux. So that the veritable activities of the unconscious, to make flow and to cut, consist in the passive synthesis itself insofar as it assures the coexistence and the relative displacement of the two different functions. Suppose now that the respective fluxes associated with two partial objects overlap at least partially: their production remains distinct with respect to the objects x and y which emit them, but not so the fields of presence with respect to the objects a and b which populate and cut them, so that the partial a and the partial b become in this regard indiscernible (thus the mouth and the anus, the mouth-anus of the anorexic). And they are not only indiscernible in the mixed region, since one can always suppose that having exchanged their function in this region, they cannot further be distinguished by exclusion where the two fluxes no longer overlap: one finds oneself then before a new passive synthesis where a and b are in a paradoxical relation of included disjunction. There remains finally the possibility, not of an overlap of fluxes, but of a permutation of the objects which emit them: one discovers fringes of interference at the edge of each field of presence, which testify moreover to a remainder of flux in the other, and form residual conjunctive syntheses guiding the passage or the becoming felt from the one to the other. Permutation at 2, 3, n organs; deformable abstract polygons which make sport of the figurative oedipal triangle, and never cease to undo it. All these passive indirect syntheses, by binarity, overlap or permutation, are one and the same machinery of desire. But who will tell the machines of desire of each, what analysis sufficiently meticulous? The machine of desire of Mozart? "Stretch your ass up to your mouth, … ah, my ass is burning like fire, what can that mean? Perhaps a turd wants to come out? Yes, yes, turd, I know you, I see you and I feel you. What is it, is it possible?…"

299These syntheses necessarily imply the position of a full body. It is that the full body is in no way the contrary of partial-object organs. It is itself produced in the first passive synthesis of connection, as that which will neutralize, or on the contrary set in motion the two activities, the two heads of desire. For it can just as well, as we have seen, be produced as the amorphous fluid of anti-production as the support that appropriates itself the production of flux. It can just as well repel the partial-object organs as attract them, appropriate them to itself. But in repulsion no less than in attraction, it does not oppose them, it only assures its own opposition, and their opposition, with an organism. It is to the organism that the full body and the partial-object organs oppose themselves conjointly. The full body is in effect produced as a whole, but a whole beside the parts, and which neither unifies nor totalizes them, which adds itself to them as a new really distinct part. When it repels the organs, thus in the arrangement of the paranoiac machine, it marks the external limit of the pure multiplicity that they themselves form as a non-organic and non-organized multiplicity. And when it attracts them and folds back onto them, in the process of a miraculating fetishist machine, it neither totalizes them, it unifies them no more in the manner of an organism: the partial-object organs cling to it, and enter onto it in the new syntheses of included disjunction and nomadic conjunction, of overlapping and permutation that continue to repudiate the organism and its organization. It is well by the body, and it is well by the organs that desire passes, but it is not by the organism. This is why the partial objects are not the expression of a fragmented, shattered organism, which would suppose an undone totality or parts liberated from a whole; the full body is no more the expression of a re-glued or "de-differentiated" organism that would overcome its own parts. At bottom, the partial-organs and the full body are one and the same thing, one and the same multiplicity that must be thought as such by schizo-analysis. The partial objects are the direct powers of the full body, and the full body, the raw material of the partial objects. The full body is the matter that always fills space at such or such a degree of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0. The full body is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely in that they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose themselves. The partial objects and the full body are the two material elements of the machines of desire schizophrenic: the ones as working parts, the other as immobile motor; the ones as micro-molecules, the other as giant molecule — the two together in a relation of continuity at the two ends of the molecular chain of desire.

300The chain is like the apparatus of transmission or reproduction in the machine of desire. In that it brings together (without uniting them, without unifying them) the full body and partial objects, it coincides at once with the distribution of these on that, with the folding of that onto these from which appropriation follows. Thus the chain implies another type of synthesis than the flux: these are no longer the lines of connection that traverse the productive pieces of the machine, but an entire network of disjunction on the recording surface of the full body. And no doubt we were able to present things in a logical order where the disjunctive synthesis of recording seemed to succeed the connective synthesis of production, a part of the energy of production (libido) converting itself into energy of recording (numen). But in fact there is no succession from the point of view of the machine itself which assures the strict coexistence of chains and flux, as of the full body and partial objects; the conversion of a part of the energy does not occur at such or such a moment, but is a prior and constant condition of the system. The chain is the network of disjunctions included on the full body, in that they intersect the productive connections; it makes them pass into the full body itself, and thereby channels or "codifies" the flux. However, the whole question is whether one can speak of a code at the level of this molecular chain of desire. We have seen that a code implied two things—one or the other, or both together: on the one hand a saturation of the full body as territoriality of support, on the other hand the erection of a despotic signifier on which the entire chain depends. The axiomatic in this regard may oppose codes profoundly, since it works on decoded flux, it can itself only proceed by operating re-territorializations and by resuscitating significant unity. The very notions of code and axiomatic thus seem to hold only for molar assemblages, there where the significant chain forms such or such a determined configuration on a support itself specified, and in function of a detached signifier. These conditions are not fulfilled without exclusions forming and appearing in the disjunctive network (at the same time as the connective lines take on a global and specific sense). But it is entirely otherwise with the properly molecular chain: in that the full body is a non-specific and unspecified support that marks the molecular limit of molar assemblages, the chain has no other function than to de-territorialize the flux and to make them pass through the wall of the signifier. Thus to undo the codes. The function of the chain is no longer to code the flux on a full body of the earth, of the despot or of capital, but on the contrary to decode them on the full body without organs. It is a chain of flight, and no longer of code. The significant chain has become a chain of decoding and de-territorialization, which must be grasped and can only be grasped as the reverse of codes and territorialities. This molecular chain is still significant because it is made of signs of desire; but these signs are no longer significant at all, insofar as they are under the régime of included disjunctions where everything is possible. These signs are points of whatever nature, abstract machinic figures that play freely on the full body and form still no structured configuration (or rather no longer form any). As Monod says, we must conceive a machine which is such by its functional properties, but not by its structure "where nothing is discerned but the play of blind combinations." Precisely, the ambiguity of what biologists call genetic code is apt to make us understand such a situation: for if the corresponding chain indeed forms codes, insofar as it coils itself in exclusive molar configurations, it undoes the codes by unrolling itself according to a molecular fiber that includes all possible figures. Similarly, in Lacan, the symbolic organization of the structure, with its exclusions that come from the function of the signifier, has as its reverse the real disorganization of desire. One would say that the genetic code refers back to a genetic decoding: it suffices to grasp the functions of decoding and de-territorialization in their proper positivity, insofar as they imply a particular state of chain, metastable, distinct at once from all axiomatic and from all code. The molecular chain is the form under which the genial unconscious, remaining always subject, reproduces itself. And it is this, we have seen, the first inspiration of psychoanalysis: it does not add a code to all those already known. The significant chain of the unconscious, Numen, does not serve to discover or decipher codes of desire, but on the contrary to make pass through absolutely decoded flux of desire, Libido, and to find in desire what confuses all codes and undoes all lands. It is true that Oedipus will bring psychoanalysis back to the rank of a simple code, with familial territoriality and the signifier of castration. Worse still, it will happen that psychoanalysis wants itself to hold for an axiomatic: it is the famous turning point where it no longer even relates to the family scene, but only to the psychoanalytic scene supposed guarantor of its own truth, and to the psychoanalytic operation supposed guarantor of its own success—the couch as axiomatized earth, the axiomatic of the "cure" as successful castration! But, in recoding or axiomatizing thus the flux of desire, psychoanalysis makes of the significant chain a molar use which entails a misrecognition of all the syntheses of the unconscious.

301The full body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of terror well understood, it is not death that serves as model to catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Intensity-zero. The model of death appears when the full body without organs repels and deposits the organs — no mouth, no tongue, no teeth… unto self-mutilation, unto suicide. And yet there is no real opposition between the full body without organs and the organs as partial objects; the only real opposition is with the molar organism which is their common enemy. One sees, in the machines of desire, the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor which forces it to deposit its organs, to immobilize them, silence them, but also, pushed by the working pieces, which function then in an autonomous or stereotyped manner, to reactivate them, to reinspire them with local movements. It is a matter of different pieces of the machine, different and coexistent, different in their coexistence itself. Thus it is absurd to speak of a death drive which would oppose qualitatively the drives of life. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, as title of the full body without organs or of the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, as title of the working organs. There are not two desires here, but two pieces, two sorts of pieces of the machines of desire, in the dispersion of the machine itself. Yet the problem subsists: how can this function together? For it is not yet a functioning, but only the condition (non-structural) of a molecular functioning. The functioning appears when the motor, under the preceding conditions, that is to say without ceasing to be immobile and without forming an organism, draws the organs onto the full body without organs, and appropriates them to itself in the apparent objective movement. Repulsion is the condition of the functioning of the machine, but attraction is the functioning itself. That the functioning depends on the condition, we see this well in the measure where it only works by breaking down. One can say then in what consists this working or this functioning: it is in the cycle of the machines of desire to constantly translate, to constantly convert the model of death into everything else which is the experience of death. To convert death which rises from within (in the full body without organs) into death which arrives from without (on the full body without organs).

302But it seems that obscurity accumulates, for what is it, the experience of death, distinct from the model? Here again is it a desire for death? A being toward death? Or rather an investment of death, however speculative? None of that. The experience of death is the most ordinary thing of the unconscious, precisely because it is made in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage and becoming. It is proper to each intensity to invest in itself the intensity-zero from which it is produced in a moment as what grows or diminishes under an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski said, "an afflux is necessary in order only to signify the absence of intensity"). We have tried to show in this sense how relations of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, emotions, which imply a new energetic conversion and form the third sort of synthesis, the syntheses of conjunction. It would seem that the unconscious as real subject has swarmed over the entire perimeter of its cycle an apparent, residual and nomadic subject, which passes through all the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: last piece of the machines of desire, the adjacent piece. These are these becomings and intense feelings, these intensive emotions that feed deliriums and hallucinations. But, in themselves, they are closest to the matter of which they invest in themselves the zero degree. It is they which lead the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling, what does not cease and does not finish arriving in every becoming—in the becoming-other sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-race, etc., forming the zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity leads in its own life the experience of death, and envelops it. And doubtless every intensity extinguishes itself in the end, every becoming becomes itself a becoming-death! Then death arrives effectively. Blanchot distinguishes well this double character, these two irreducible aspects of death, one under which the apparent subject does not cease to live and to travel as one, "one does not cease and does not finish dying," and the other under which this same subject, fixed as I dies effectively, that is to say ceases finally to die since it finishes by dying, in the reality of a final instant that fixes it thus as I while undoing the intensity, bringing it back to the zero that it envelops. From one aspect to the other, there is not at all personological deepening, but something entirely other: there is return of the experience of death to the model of death, in the cycle of machines of desire. The cycle is closed. For a new departure, for I is an other? It is necessary that the experience of death give us precisely enough enlarged experience, to live and to know that machines of desire do not die. And that the subject as adjacent piece is always an "one" which leads the experience, not an I which receives the model. For the model itself is no more the I, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model, anew, departing again toward the experience. Always go from the model to the experience, and depart, return from the model to the experience, this is it, schizophrenizing death, the exercise of machines of desire (their secret, well understood by terrifying authors). They tell us this, the machines, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the return to repulsion will condition other attractions, other functionings, the setting in motion of other working pieces on the body without organs, the implementation of other adjacent pieces around the perimeter, and which have no less the right to say one than ourselves. "Let it die in its bounding through things unheard-of and unnameable: there will come other horrible workers; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed." The eternal return as experience, and deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire.

303How curious, the adventure of psychoanalysis. It ought to be a song of life, on pain of being worth nothing. Practically, it ought to teach us to sing life. And here what emanates from it is the saddest song of death, the most defeated: eiapopeia. Freud, from the beginning, through his obstinate dualism of pulsions, did not cease wanting to limit the discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death drive against Eros, it was no longer simply a limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich was not mistaken about this, he who was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis ought to be a free and joyful man, carrier of fluxes of life, capable of carrying them even into the desert and of decoding them—even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a mad idea, by reason of what analysis had become. He showed that Freud had no less repudiated the sexual position than Jung and Adler: indeed, the assignment of the death drive deprives sexuality of its motor role, at least on one essential point which is the genesis of anguish, since this becomes autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of result; it follows that sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization on the contrary finds itself sanctified as the sole instance capable of opposing the death drive—and how? by turning in principle death against death, by making of turned death a force of desire, by putting it at the service of a pseudo-life through an entire culture of guilt feeling… There is nothing to redo this history, where psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, culture broth, to judge life, to depreciate life, to measure it against death, and to keep of it only what the death of death is willing to leave us, sublime resignation. As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, everyone sighed with relief, one knew what that meant, and that everything would happen in a modified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for the worst, but also for the better. Psychoanalysis becomes the formation of a new type of priests, animators of bad conscience: it is from it that one is sick, but it is also by it that one will be cured! Freud did not hide what it is really a question of with the death drive: it is a question of no fact, but only of a principle, a matter of principle. The death drive is pure silence, pure transcendence, non-givable and non-given in experience. This very point is entirely remarkable: it is because death, according to Freud, has neither model nor experience, that Freud makes of it a transcendent principle. So that the psychoanalysts who refused the death drive did so for the same reasons as those who accepted it: some said there was no death drive since there was no model nor experience in the unconscious, others, that there was a death drive precisely because there was no model and experience. We say on the contrary: there is no death drive because there is model and experience of death in the unconscious. Death is then a piece of machines of desire, which must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as abstract principle.

304If Freud needs it as a principle, it is by virtue of the exigencies of dualism that demands a qualitative opposition between the pulsions (you will not escape from conflict): when the dualism of sexual pulsions and the pulsions of the ego no longer has anything but a topical scope, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But it is the same enterprise that continues and strengthens itself: eliminate the machinic element of desire, the machines of desire. It is a matter of eliminating the libido, insofar as this implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the machine (Libido-Numen-Voluptas). It is a matter of imposing the idea of an energetic duality that renders machinic transformations impossible, everything having to pass through a neutral energy indifferent to it, that which emanates from Oedipus, capable of adding itself to one or the other of the two irreducible forms — neutralize, mortify life. The topical and dynamic dualities aim to set aside the point of view of functional multiplicity which, alone, is economic. (Szondi will pose the problem well: why two sorts of pulsions qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, that is to say oedipally, rather than n genes of pulsions, eight molecular genes for example, functioning machinicly?) If one seeks in this direction the ultimate reason for which Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as principle, one will find it in the practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with facts, it has much to do with the conception one makes of practice, and one wants to impose. Freud operated the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire, Libido. But since this essence, he re-alienated it, re-invested it in a subjective system of representation of the ego, since he recoded it upon the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration —, then he could no longer conceive the essence of life except under a form turned against itself, under the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, it is still the last manner in which a depressive and exhausted libido can continue to survive, and dream that it survives: "The ascetic ideal is an expedient of the art of conserving life… Yes, even when it wounds itself, this master destroyer, destroyer of itself, it is still the wound that constrains it to live…" It is Oedipus, swampy earth, that gives off a profound odor of decay and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that makes of this death a conservatory for oedipal life. Desire is in itself, not desire to love, but force of loving, virtue that gives and that produces, that machines (for how could what is in life still desire life? who would want to call that a desire?). But it must, in the name of a horrible Ananké, the Ananké of the weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananké, that desire turn against itself, that it produce its shadow or its ape, and find a strange artificial force to vegetate in the void, within its own lack. For better days? It must — but who speaks thus? what abjectness? — that it become desire to be loved, and worse, whimpering desire to have been loved, desire that is reborn from its own frustration: no, mom-dad didn't love me enough… Sick desire lies down on the divan, artificial swamp, little earth, little mother. "Look: you cannot walk, you stumble, you no longer know how to use your legs… and the only cause of it is your desire to be loved, a sentimental and whimpering desire that removes all firmness from your knees". For, just as there are two stomachs for the ruminant, there must be two abortions, two castrations for sick desire: once in the family, on the family scene, with the knitter; another time in sterilized luxury clinic, on the psychoanalytic scene, with specialist artists who know how to handle the death instinct, and "succeed" at castration, "succeed" at frustration. In truth, is this the good means for better days? And do not all the destructions operated by schizo-analysis not surpass this psychoanalytic conservatory, do they not make up more of an affirmative task? "Lie down then on the soft sofa that the analyst offers you, and try to conceive something else… If you realize that the analyst is a human being like you, troubles, defects, ambitions, weaknesses and all, that he is not depository of a universal wisdom (= code), but a wanderer like you (deterritorialized), perhaps you will cease to vomit your sewage waters, however melodious their echo in your ears; perhaps you will raise yourself on your two feet, and begin to sing with all the voice that God (numen) gave you as a gift. To confess, to feign, to complain, to lament, it always costs dearly. To sing, it is gratis. And not only gratis — one enriches others (instead of infecting them)… The world of fantasies is the one we have not finished conquering. It is a world of the past, not of the future. To go forward by clinging to the past, it is to drag with oneself the shackles of the convict… There is not one of us who is not guilty of a crime: that, enormous, of not living fully the life". You were not born Oedipus, you made Oedipus grow in yourself; and you count on getting out of it through fantasy, through castration, but it is in turn what you made grow in Oedipus, namely yourself, the horrible circle. Shit on all your death-dealing theater, imaginary or symbolic. What does schizo-analysis ask? Nothing other than a little true relation with the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical lightness and incompetence, that of entering the analyst's office, and saying it smells bad at your place. It smells of great death and little ego.

305Freud himself stated the connection of his "discovery" of the death drive with the war of 14-18, which remains the model of capitalist war. And more generally, the death drive celebrates the marriage of psychoanalysis with capitalism; previously, it was still hesitant engagements. What we have tried to show concerning capitalism is how it inherited a transcendent mortifying instance, the despotic signifier, but made it effuse throughout all the immanence of its own system: the full body become that of capital-money suppresses the distinction between anti-production and production; it mixes anti-production everywhere with productive forces, in the immanent reproduction of its own always-enlarged limits (axiomatic). The enterprise of death is one of the principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus-value in capitalism. It is this very progression that psychoanalysis finds and remakes with the death drive: the latter is no longer than pure silence in its transcendent distinction with life, but only effuses all the more through all the immanent combinations it forms with this same life. Immanent death, diffuse, absorbed, such is the state the signifier takes in capitalism, the empty square displaced everywhere to plug schizophrenic escapes and put a tourniquet on flights. The only modern myth is that of zombies — mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason. In this sense, the savage and the barbarian, with their ways of coding death, are children compared to modern man and his axiomatic (so many unemployed are needed, so many dead are needed, the Algerian war kills no more than car accidents on the weekend, planned death in Bengal, etc.). Modern man "delires far more. His delirium is a standard with thirteen telephones. He gives his orders to the world. He does not like ladies. He is brave too. He is decorated right and left. In the game of man, the death drive, the silent drive is decidedly well-placed, perhaps beside egoism. It holds the place of zero in roulette. The casino always wins. Death too. The law of large numbers works for it…"{263} It is for us now or never to take up a problem we had left in abeyance. Once it is said that capitalism works on decoded flux as such, how is it that it is infinitely more distant from machines of desire than primitive or even barbarian systems are, which, however, code and overcode flux? Once it is said that machines of desire are themselves decoded and deterritorialized production, how explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its statistics, operates an infinitely vaster repression of this production than preceding régimes, which nonetheless did not lack repressive means? We have seen that the molar statistical ensembles of social production were in a relation of variable affinity with the molecular formations of production of desire. What must be explained is that the capitalist ensemble be the least affine, at the very moment when it decodes and deterritorializes left and right.

306The answer is death drive, by calling drive in general the conditions of life historically and socially determined by the relations of production and anti-production in a system. We know that social molar production and molecular machines of desire must be judged at once from the point of view of their identity of nature and from the point of view of their difference of régime. But it may be that these two aspects, nature and régime, are in some way potential and actualize themselves only in inverse ratio. That is to say: where régimes are closest, the identity of nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and where the identity of nature appears at its maximum, régimes differ at the highest degree. If we consider primitive or barbarian ensembles, we see that the subjective essence of desire as production is transferred to great objectities, territorial or despotic bodies, which act as natural or divine presuppositions, which therefore ensure the coding or overcoding of the flux of desire by introducing them into systems of representation themselves objective. We can therefore say that the identity of nature between the two productions is there entirely hidden: both by the difference between the objective socius and the full body subjective of desiring production, and by the difference between the codes and qualified overcodings of social production and the chains of decoding or deterritorialization of desiring production, and by the entire repressive apparatus represented in savage interdictions, barbaric law and the rights of anti-production. And yet, far from the difference of régime accentuating and deepening itself, it is on the contrary reduced to its minimum, because desiring production as absolute limit remains an exterior limit, or else remains unoccupied as an interiorized and displaced limit, so that the machines of desire function beneath their limit within the framework of the socius and its codes. This is why primitive codes and even despotic overcodings testify to a polyvocity which brings them functionally closer to a chain of decoding of desire: the pieces of machines of desire function in the very gears of the social machine, the flux of desire enter and exit through the codes which ceaselessly continue to inform the model and experience of death elaborated in the unity of social-desiring apparatus. And there is all the less death drive as the model and experience are better coded in a circuit that ceaselessly grafts machines of desire onto the social machine and implants the social machine in machines of desire. Death comes all the more from without as it is coded from within. This is especially true of the system of cruelty, where death inscribes itself in the primitive mechanism of surplus-value as in the movement of finite blocks of debt. But, even in the system of despotic terror, where debt becomes infinite and where death experiences an exhaustion which tends to make it a latent drive, a model nonetheless subsists in the overcoding law, and an experience for the overcoded subjects, at the same time that anti-production remains separated as the lord's share.

307It is very different in capitalism. Precisely because the flux of capital are decoded and deterritorialized flux, — precisely because the subjective essence of production reveals itself in capitalism, — precisely because the limit becomes interior to capitalism which ceaselessly reproduces it, and also occupies it as internalized and displaced limit —, the identity of nature must appear for itself between social production and machines of desire. But in turn: far from this identity of nature favoring an affinity of régime between the two productions, it increases the difference of régime in a catastrophic manner, it sets up an apparatus of repression of which neither savagery nor barbarism could have given us the idea. It is that, on the basis of the collapse of great objectities, the decoded and deterritorialized flux of capitalism are, not taken up or recovered, but immediately seized in an axiomatics without code that refers them to the universe of subjective representation. Now this universe has the function of splitting the subjective essence (identity of nature) into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private property which reproduces the interior limits always enlarged, and that of abstract desire alienated in the privatized family which displaces internalized limits always more narrow. It is the double alienation labor-desire which ceaselessly increases and deepens the difference of régime within the identity of nature. At the same time that death is decoded, it loses its relation to a model and an experience, and becomes instinct, that is effused in the immanent system where each act of production finds itself inextricably mixed with the instance of anti-production as capital. Where codes are undone, the death drive seizes the repressive apparatus, and begins to direct the circulation of libido. Mortuary axiomatics. One can then believe in desires liberated, but which, like corpses, nourish themselves on images. One does not desire death, but what one desires is dead, already dead: images. Everything works in death, everything desires for death. In truth, capitalism has nothing to recover; or rather its powers of recovery coexist most often with what is to be recovered, and even precede it. (How many revolutionary groups as such are already in place for a recovery that will only occur in the future, and form an apparatus for the absorption of a surplus-value that is not even yet produced: which gives them precisely an apparent revolutionary position.) In such a world, there is not a single living desire that would not suffice to blow the system apart, or that would not do so at a point where everything would end up following and engulfing itself — a question of régime.

308Here are the machines of desire,—with their three pieces: the working pieces, the immobile motor, the adjacent piece,—their three energies: Libido, Numen and Voluptas,—their three syntheses: the connective syntheses of partial objects and flux, the disjunctive syntheses of singularities and chains, the conjunctive syntheses of intensities and becomings. The schizo-analyst is not an interpreter, still less a director, he is a mechanic, micro-mechanic. There is no excavation or archaeology in the unconscious, there are no statues: nothing but stones to suck, à la Beckett, and other machinic elements of deterritorialized arrangements. It is a matter of finding what are someone's machines of desire, how they function, with which syntheses, which runaway processes, which constitutive misfires, with which flux, which chains, which becomings in each case. Moreover this positive task cannot be separated from the indispensable destructions, from the destruction of molar arrangements, structures and representations that prevent the machine from functioning. It is not easy to recover the molecules, even the giant molecule, their paths, their zones of presence and their own syntheses, through the great masses that fill the preconscious, and which delegate their representatives into the unconscious itself, immobilizing the machines, silencing them, glueing them, sabotaging them, jamming them, nailing them. It is not the lines of pressure of the unconscious that count, it is on the contrary its lines of flight. It is not the unconscious that presses upon consciousness, it is consciousness that presses and strangles, to prevent it from fleeing. As for the unconscious, it is like the Platonic contrary approaching its contrary: it flees or it perishes. What we have attempted to show from the beginning is how the productions and formations of the unconscious were, not simply pushed back by an instance of repression that would compromise with them, but truly covered over by anti-formations that denature the unconscious in itself, and impose upon it causations, understandings, expressions that no longer have anything to do with its real functioning: thus all the statues, the Oedipal images, the fantasmatic stagings, the symbolics of castration, the effusion of the death drive, the perverse re-territorializations. So that one can never, as in an interpretation, read the repressed through and in repression, since the latter ceases to induce a false image of what it represses: illegitimate and transcendent usages of syntheses according to which the unconscious can no longer function in conformity with its own constituent machines, but only "represent" what a repressive apparatus gives it to represent. It is the very form of interpretation that reveals itself incapable of reaching the unconscious, since it itself brings forth the inevitable illusions (including structure and the signifier) by which consciousness makes of the unconscious an image in conformity with its desires—we are still pious, psychoanalysis remains at the pre-critical age.

309And no doubt these illusions would never take hold if they did not benefit from a coincidence and a support within the unconscious itself, which assure the "grip." We have seen what this support was: it is originary repression, as it is exercised by the full body at the moment of repulsion, within molecular desiring production. Without this originary repression, never would a properly said repression be able to be delegated into the unconscious by molar forces, and crush desiring production. Properly said repression profits from an occasion without which it could not insinuate itself into the machinery of desire. Contrary to psychoanalysis which itself falls into the trap by making the unconscious fall into its trap, schizo-analysis follows lines of flight and machinic indices all the way to machines of desire. If the essential of the destructive task is to undo the oedipal trap of properly said repression, and all its dependencies, each time in a manner adapted to the "case," the essential of the first positive task is to assure the machinic conversion of originary repression, there too in a manner variably adapted. That is to say: undo the blockage or coincidence on which properly said repression rests, transform the apparent opposition of repulsion (full body—partial object machines) into condition of real functioning, assure this functioning in the forms of attraction and production of intensities, henceforth integrate the misfires into the attractive functioning as wrapping the zero degree in the produced intensities, and thereby set the machines of desire in motion again. Such is the focal and delicate point, which holds for transference in schizo-analysis (disperse, schizophrenize the perverse transference of psychoanalysis).

310We must not, however, let the difference of régime make us forget the identity of nature. There are fundamentally two poles; but if we must present them as the duality of molar formations and molecular formations, we cannot content ourselves with presenting them in this way, since there is no molecular formation that is not by itself an investment of molar formation. No machines of desire that exist outside the social machines they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring ones that populate them on a small scale. Thus there is no molecular chain that does not intercept and reproduce entire blocks of code or molar axiomatics, no such blocks either that do not contain or seal fragments of molecular chain. A sequence of desire is found prolonged by a social series, or else a social machine has in its workings pieces of machines of desire. The micro-multiplicities of desire are no less collective than the great social ensembles, properly inseparable and constituting one and the same production. From this point of view, the duality of poles passes less between the molar and the molecular than within molar social investments, since in any case molecular formations are such investments. This is why our terminology, concerning the two poles, has necessarily varied. Now we opposed the molar and the molecular, as lines of paranoid integration, signifying and structured, and lines of schizophrenic flight, machinic and dispersed; or again as the trace of perverse re-territorializations and the movement of schizophrenic deterritorializations. Now, on the contrary, we opposed them as two great types of equally social investments, one sedentary and bi-univocal, of reactionary or fascist tendency, the other nomadic and polyvocal, of revolutionary tendency. Indeed, in the schizoid declaration "I am eternally of inferior race," "I am a beast, a negro," "We are all German Jews," the historico-social field is invested no less than in the paranoid formula "I am of yours, and well from our place, I am a pure Aryan, forever of superior race"… And from one formula to the other all possible oscillations, from the point of view of unconscious libidinal investment. How is this possible? How can schizophrenic flight, with its molecular dispersion, form as strong and determined an investment as the other? And why are there two types of social investment, which correspond to the two poles? It is because there is everywhere the molar and the molecular: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which varies only according to the two senses of subordination, according to whether molecular phenomena subordinate themselves to great ensembles, or on the contrary subordinate them to themselves. At one pole, great ensembles, great forms of gregarity do not prevent the flight that carries them away, and oppose to it the paranoid investment only as a "flight before flight." But at the other pole, schizophrenic flight itself does not consist only in moving away from the social, in living on its margins: it makes the social flee through the multiplicity of holes that gnaw at it and pierce it, always in direct grip on it, disposing everywhere the molecular charges that will make explode what must explode, fall what must fall, flee what must flee, assuring at each point the conversion of schizophrenia as process into effectively revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first he who can no longer bear "all this," money, the stock market, forces of death, as Nijinsky said—values, moralities, homelands, religions and private certainties? From the schizo to the revolutionary there is only the entire difference between he who flees and he who knows how to make what he flees flee, bursting an obscene tube, letting loose a deluge, liberating a flux, cutting through a schize. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process (of which the schizo is only the interruption, or the continuation in the void) is the potential of revolution. To those who say that fleeing is not courageous, we respond: what is not flight, and social investment at the same time? The choice is only between two poles, the paranoid counter-flight that animates all conformist, reactionary and fascist investments, schizophrenic flight convertible into revolutionary investment. Blanchot says admirably, of this revolutionary flight, of this fall that must be thought and carried out as the most positive: "What is this flight? The word is poorly chosen to please. Courage is nonetheless in accepting to flee rather than to live quietly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, moralities, homelands, religions and these private certainties that our vanity and our self-complacency generously grant us, are as many deceptive abodes that the world arranges for those who think to hold themselves thus upright and at rest, among stable things. They know nothing of this immense rout where they go, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous humming of their steps ever faster that carry them impersonally by a great motionless movement. Flight before flight. [Let one of these men] who, having had the revelation of mysterious drift, can no longer bear to live in the false semblances of abode. First he tries to take this movement into his own hands. He would like to move away personally. He lives on the margins… [But] perhaps this is it, the fall, that it can no longer be a personal destiny, but the lot of each in all." In this regard, the first thesis of schizo-analysis is: every investment is social, and in any case bears upon a historico-social field.

311Let us recall the chief traits of a molar formation or a form of gregarity. They effect a unification, a totalization of molecular forces through statistical accumulation obeying laws of large numbers. This unity can be the biological unity of a species or the structural unity of a socius: an organism, social or living, is found composed as a whole, as a global or complete object. It is with respect to this new order that the partial objects of molecular order appear as a lack, at the same time that the whole itself is said to lack for the partial objects. It is thus that desire will be welded to lack. The thousand cuts-flux that define positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity are folded back onto vacuoles of lack that effect this welding in a statistical ensemble of molar order. Freud showed well in this sense how one passed from psychotic multiplicities of dispersion, founded on cuts or schizes, to great vacuoles determined globally, of the type neurosis and castration: the neurotic has need of a global object with respect to which partial objects can be determined as lack and inversely.{266} But, more generally, it is the statistical transformation of molecular multiplicity into molar ensemble that organizes lack on a grand scale. Such organization belongs essentially to the biological or social organism, species or socius. There is no society that does not arrange lack within itself, by variable means that are proper to it (these means are not the same, for example, in a society of despotic type, or in a capitalist society where market economy carries them to a degree of perfection unknown until then). This welding of desire with lack, it is precisely what gives desire its ends, its goals or collective and personal intentions — in place of desire taken in the real order of its production which behaves as a molecular phenomenon deprived of goal and intention. So one must not believe that statistical accumulation is a result of chance, a result by chance. It is on the contrary the fruit of a selection exercising itself on elements of chance. When Nietzsche says that selection exercises itself most often in favor of large numbers, he launches a fundamental intuition that will inspire modern thought. For he means that large numbers or large ensembles do not preexist a selective pressure that would disengage singular lines from them, but that, quite on the contrary, they are born from this selective pressure that crushes, eliminates or regularizes singularities. It is not selection that presupposes a primary gregarity, but gregarity that presupposes selection, and that is born from it. "Culture" as a selective process of marking or inscription invents the large numbers in favor of which it exercises itself. This is why statistics is not functional, but structural, and bears on chains of phenomena that selection has already put in a state of partial dependence (Markov chains). One sees it even in the genetic code. In other words, gregarities are never arbitrary, they refer back to qualified forms that produce them through creative selection. The order is not: gregarity → selection, but on the contrary molecular multiplicity → forms of gregarity exercising selection → molar or gregarious ensembles that follow from it.

312What are these qualified forms, "formations of sovereignty" Nietzsche said, which play the role of totalizing, wearing, signifying objectities, fixing organizations, lacks and aims? These are full bodies which determine the different modes of the socius, veritable heavy ensembles of the earth, of the despot, of capital. Full bodies or clothed matters, which distinguish themselves from the full body without organs or from the naked matter of molecular desiring production. If one asks where these forms of power come from, it is evident that they are explained by no aim, no end, since it is they which fix the aims and the ends. The form or quality of such or such a socius, body of the earth, body of the despot, body of capital-money, depends on a state or a degree of intensive development of productive forces insofar as these define a man-nature independent of all social formations, or rather common to all (what the marxists call "the data of useful labor"). The form or quality of the socius is therefore itself produced, but as the ungenerated, that is to say as the natural or divine presupposed of the production corresponding to such or such a degree, to which it gives a structural unity and apparent aims, over which it folds back and from which it appropriates the forces, determining the selections, the accumulations, the attractions without which these would not take on a social character. It is indeed in this sense that social production is desiring production itself under determined conditions. These determined conditions are therefore the forms of gregarity as socius or full body, under which the molecular formations constitute molar ensembles.

313We can then specify the second thesis of schizoanalysis: we will distinguish in social investments the unconscious libidinal investment of group or of desire, and the preconscious investment of class or of interest. The latter passes through the grand social aims, and concerns the organism and the collective organs, including the arranged vacuoles of lack. A class is defined by a régime of syntheses, a state of global connections, of exclusive disjunctions, of residual conjunctions that characterize the set considered. Belonging to a class refers back to the role in production or anti-production, to the place in inscription, to the share that falls to the subjects. The preconscious interest of class thus refers itself back to extractions of flux, to detachments of codes, to remainders or subjective revenues. And it is quite true, from this point of view, that a set comprises practically only a single class, that which has interest in such a régime. The other class can only constitute itself through a counter-investment that creates its own interest in function of new social aims, of new organs and means, of a new possible state of social syntheses. Hence the necessity for the other class to be represented by a party apparatus that fixes these aims and these means, and operates in the domain of the preconscious a revolutionary cut (for example, the legalist cut). In this domain of preconscious investments of class or of interest, it is thus easy to distinguish what is reactionary, or reformist, or what is revolutionary. But those who have interest, in this sense, are always in more restricted number than those whose interest, in some sense, "is had" or represented: the class from the point of view of praxis is infinitely less numerous or less broad than the class taken in its theoretical determination. Hence the subsisting contradictions within the dominant class, that is to say, the class plain and simple. It is evident in the capitalist régime where, for example, primitive accumulation can only be done to the profit of a restricted fraction of the entirety of the dominant class. But it is no less evident for the Russian revolution with its formation of a party apparatus.

314This situation nonetheless in no way suffices to resolve the following problem: why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of reactionary type? and more rarely, how do certain ones whose interest is objectively reactionary manage to operate a preconscious revolutionary investment? Must one invoke in one case a thirst for justice, a correct ideological position, as a good and just view; and in the other case a blindness, fruit of an ideological deception or mystification? Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to acknowledge that one desires and makes revolution by desire, not by duty. There as elsewhere, the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the true problems, always of an organizational nature. If Reich, at the very moment when he posed the most profound question, "Why did the masses desire fascism?", contented himself with answering by invoking the ideological, the subjective, the irrational, the negative and the inhibited, it is because he remained prisoner of derivative concepts which caused him to miss the materialist psychiatry of which he dreamed, which prevented him from seeing how desire was part of the infra-structure, and enclosed him within the duality of the objective and the subjective (thereafter, psychoanalysis was returned to the analysis of the subjective defined by ideology). But everything is objective or subjective, as one wishes. The distinction is not there; the distinction to be made passes through the economic infra-structure itself and its investments. Libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and politics, no less subjective than the libidinal, although both correspond to two different modes of investments of the same reality as social reality. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of desire which does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and which explains how these can be troubled, perverted in "the darkest organization," below all ideology.

315Libidinal investment does not bear upon the régime of social syntheses, but upon the degree of development of the forces or energies on which these syntheses depend. It does not bear upon the extractions, detachments and remainders operated by these syntheses, but upon the nature of the flux and codes that condition them. It does not bear upon social aims and means, but upon the full body as socius, upon the formation of sovereignty or the form of power for itself, which is devoid of sense and aim, since sense and aims flow from it and not the reverse. Doubtless interests predispose us to this or that libidinal investment, but they do not coincide with it. More than that, it is the unconscious libidinal investment that determines us to seek our interest on one side rather than another, to plant our aims on this path, persuaded that it is there we have all our chances — since love pushes us there. The manifest syntheses are only the preconscious gradiometers of a degree of development, the apparent interests and aims are only the preconscious exponents of a social full body. As Klossowski says in his profound commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power coincides with the violence it exercises through its very absurdity, but can only exercise this violence by assigning itself aims and senses in which even the most enslaved elements participate: "Sovereign formations will have no other purpose than to mask the absence of aim and sense of their sovereignty by the organic aim of their creation," and thus to convert absurdity into spirituality. This is why it is so vain to seek to distinguish what is rational from what is irrational in a society. Certainly, the role, place, share one has in a society, and which one inherits according to the laws of social reproduction, push the libido to invest such socius as full body, such an absurd power in which we participate or have chances of participating under the cover of aims and interests. It remains that there is a disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power and the degree of development for themselves. Even in he who has an interest in it — and who loves it in addition to another love than that of his interest. Even in he who has no interest in it, and who substitutes for this counter-interest the force of a strange love. Flux that couler upon the porous full body of a socius, that is the object of desire, higher than all aims. It will never couler enough, it will never cut, it will never code enough — and in this way! How beautiful the machine is! The officer of the penal colony shows what can be the intense libidinal investment of a machine that is not only technical, but social, through which desire desires its own repression. We have seen how the capitalist machine constituted a system of immanence bordered by a great mutant flux, non-possessive and non-possessed, couler upon the full body of capital and forming an absurd power. Each in his class and person receives something of this power, or is excluded from it, insofar as the great flux converts itself into revenues, revenues of wages or enterprises, which define aims or spheres of interest, extractions, detachments, shares. But the investment of the flux itself and its axiomatic, which certainly requires no precise knowledge of political economy, is the affair of the unconscious libido as presupposed by the aims. One sees the most disadvantaged, the most excluded, invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest, since it is there they seek it and measure it. Interest always follows. Anti-production effuses in the system: one will love for itself the anti-production, and the manner in which desire represses itself in the great capitalist ensemble. To repress desire, not only for others, but in oneself, to be the cop of others and of oneself, that is what makes one hard, and it is not ideology, it is economy. Capitalism gathers and possesses the power of aim and interest (power), but it experiences a disinterested love for the absurd and non-possessed power of the machine. Oh, certainly, it is not for him or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. Violence without aim, joy, pure joy of feeling oneself a cog of the machine, traversed by flux, cut by schizes. To put oneself in the position where one is thus traversed, cut, fucked by the socius, to seek the good place where, according to the aims and interests assigned to us, one feels something pass that has neither interest nor aim. A sort of art for art's sake in the libido, a taste for work well done, each in his place, the banker, the cop, the soldier, the technocrat, the bureaucrat, and why not the worker, the unionist… Desire gapes.

316Now, not only can the libidinal investment of the social field trouble the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the most exploited, to perch their aims in an oppressive machine, but what is reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest does not necessarily coincide with what it is in the unconscious libidinal investment. A preconscious revolutionary investment bears on new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it is possible that at least part of the unconscious libido continues to invest the old body, the old form of power, its codes and its flux. This is all the more easy, and the contradiction all the better masked, in that a state of forces does not prevail over the old without conserving or resurrecting the old full body as residual and subordinated territoriality (thus the way the capitalist machine resurrects the Urstaat despotic, or the way the socialist machine conserves a monopolist capitalism of State and market). But there is something more grave: even when the libido espouses the new body, the new power that corresponds to the aims and syntheses effectively revolutionary from the point of view of the preconscious, it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For it is not the same cuts that pass at the level of unconscious desires and preconscious interests. The preconscious revolutionary cut is sufficiently defined by the promotion of a socius as full body bearer of new aims, as form of power or formation of sovereignty that subordinates the production of desire to itself under new conditions. But, although the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In effect, the unconscious revolutionary cut implies for its account the body without organs as limit of the socius that the production of desire subordinates to itself in turn, under the condition of an inverted power, an inverted subordination. The preconscious revolution refers to a new régime of social production that creates, distributes and satisfies new aims and interests; but the unconscious revolution refers not only to the socius that conditions this change as form of power, it refers in this socius to the régime of the production of desire as inverted power upon the body without organs. It is not the same state of flux and schizes: in one case the cut is between two socius, the second of which is measured by its capacity to introduce the flux of desire into a new code or new axiomatics of interest; in the other case, the cut is in the socius itself, insofar as it has the capacity to make the flux of desire pass according to their positive lines of flight, and to recut them according to cuts of productive cuts. The most general principle of schizo-analysis is that, always, desire is constitutive of a social field. In any case, it is of the infra-structure, not of ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as production of desire. But these formulas can be understood in two ways, according to whether desire enslaves itself to a structured molar ensemble that it constitutes under such form of power and gregariousness, or according to whether it enslaves the great ensemble to the functional multiplicities that it forms itself at the molecular scale (it is no more a question of persons or individuals in this case than in the other). Now, if the preconscious revolutionary cut appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new ensemble, the unconscious or the libidinal belongs to the second level and is defined by the motor role of the production of desire and the position of its multiplicities. One thus conceives that a group can be revolutionary from the point of view of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so, and remain even fascist and police, from the point of view of its libidinal investments. Preconscious interests really revolutionary do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; never does an apparatus of interest have value for a machine of desire.

317A revolutionary group with respect to the preconscious remains an subjected group, even in conquering power, so long as this power itself refers back to a form of puissance that continues to enslave and crush desiring production. At the moment it is preconscious revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjected group: subordination to a socius as fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracts from them and absorbs the surplus-value; the effusion of anti-production and mortiferous elements in the system that feels and wills itself all the more immortal; the phenomena of "superego-ization," of narcissism and group hierarchy, the mechanisms of repression of desire. A subject-group, by contrast, is one whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it makes desire penetrate the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of puissance to desiring production; producer of desire and desire that produces, it invents formations always mortal that conjure in it the effusion of a death instinct; to the symbolic determinations of subjection, it opposes real coefficients of transversality, without hierarchy or group superego. What complicates everything, it is true, is that the same men can participate in both sorts of groups under diverse respects (Saint-Just, Lenin). Or that one same group can present both characteristics at once, in diverse, but coexistent situations. A revolutionary group may already have recovered the form of a subjected group, and yet be determined under certain conditions to still play the role of a subject-group. One ceases not to pass from one type of group to the other. Subject-groups cease not to derive by rupture from subjected groups: they make desire pass, and cut it always further, crossing the limit, relating the social machines to the elemental forces of desire that form them.{269} But, inversely, they cease not also to close themselves again, to remodel themselves in the image of subjected groups: reestablishing interior limits, reforming a great cut that the fluxes will not pass, will not cross, subordinating machines of desire to the repressive ensemble that they constitute on a grand scale. There is a velocity of subjection that opposes the coefficients of transversality; and what revolution has not the temptation to turn itself against its subject-groups, qualified as anarchists or irresponsible, and to liquidate them? How to conjure the funest slope that makes a group pass, from its revolutionary libidinal investments to revolutionary investments that are no longer anything but preconscious or of interest, then to preconscious investments that are no longer anything but reformist? And even, where to situate such and such a group? Did it ever have unconscious revolutionary investments? The surrealist group, with its fantastic subjection, its narcissism and its superego? (It happens that a man alone functions as flux-schize, as subject-group, by rupture with the subjected group from which he excludes himself or is excluded: Artaud the schizo). And the psychoanalytic group, where to situate it in this complexity of social investments? Each time one asks oneself when it begins to go badly, one must always go back higher. Freud as group superego, oedipianizing grandfather, instituting Oedipus as interior limit, with all sorts of little Narcissi around, and Reich the marginal, tracing a tangent of deterritorialization, making fluxes of desire pass, breaking the limit, crossing the wall. But it is not only a question of literature or even of psychoanalysis. It is a question of politics, although it is not a question, as we shall see, of program.

318The task of schizoanalysis is therefore to attain the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they distinguish themselves from preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they can not only contradict them, but coexist with them in opposing modes. In the conflict of generations, one hears old people reproach young people, in the most malevolent fashion, for putting their desires (car, credit, borrowing, boy-girl relations) before their interest (work, savings, good marriage). But, in what appears to others as raw desire, there are still complexes of desire and interest, and a mixture of precisely reactionary and vaguely revolutionary forms of the one as of the other. The situation is entirely muddled. It seems that schizoanalysis can dispose only of indices—machining indices—to untangle, at the level of groups or individuals, the libidinal investments of the social field. Now, in this regard, it is sexuality that constitutes the indices. Not at all that revolutionary capacity is judged by the objects, the aims and the sources of the sexual drives animating an individual or a group; assuredly, perversions, and even sexual emancipation, grant no privilege, so long as sexuality remains enclosed within the frame of the "dirty little secret." One may as well publish the secret, demand its right to publicity, one may even disinfect it, treat it in scientific and psychoanalytic fashion, one risks rather killing desire, or inventing for it forms of liberation more dreary than the most repressive prison—so long as one has not torn sexuality from the category of secret itself, even public, even disinfected, that is, from the Oedipal-narcissistic origin imposed on it as the lie under which it can only become cynical, shameful or mortified. It is a lie to claim to liberate sexuality, and to demand for it rights over the object, the aim and the source, while maintaining the corresponding flux within the limits of an Oedipal code (conflict, regression, solution, Oedipal sublimation...) and continuing to impose on it a form or motivation that is familial and masturbatory which renders vain in advance any perspective of liberation. For example, no "homosexual front" is possible so long as homosexuality is grasped in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, which refers them both to a common Oedipal and castrating root, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two non-communicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transversal communication in the decoded flux of desire (included disjunctions, local connections, nomadic conjunctions). In short, sexual repression, more lively than ever, will survive all publications, manifestations, emancipations, protestations as to the freedom of objects, sources and aims, so long as sexuality is maintained consciously or not within the narcissistic, Oedipal and castrating coordinates that suffice to ensure the triumph of the most rigorous censors, the grey little men of whom Lawrence spoke.

319Lawrence shows profoundly that sexuality, including chastity, is a matter of flux, "an infinity of different and even opposed flux." Everything depends on how these flux, whatever their object, source and aim, are coded and cut according to constant figures, or on the contrary taken in chains of decoding that recut them according to mobile and non-figurative points (flux-schizes). Lawrence attacks the poverty of identical unchanging images, figurative roles that are so many tourniquets on the flux of sexuality: "mistress, lover, woman, mother"—one might as well say "homosexuals, heterosexuals," etc.—all these roles are distributed by the Oedipal triangle, father-mother-me, a representative me being supposed to define itself in terms of father-mother representations, through fixation, regression, assumption, sublimation, and all that under what rule? The rule of the great Phallus that no one possesses, a despotic signifier animating the most wretched struggle, common absence for all reciprocal exclusions where the flux runs dry, desiccated by bad conscience and resentment. "To place a woman on a pedestal, for example, or on the contrary to render her unworthy of all importance: to make her a model housewife, a model mother or a model wife, these are simply means of avoiding all contact with her. A woman does not figure something, she is not a distinct and defined personality… A woman is a strange and sweet vibration of the air, which advances, unconscious and unknown, in search of a vibration that responds to her. Or it is a painful, discordant vibration and hard on the ear that advances wounding all those in its reach. It is the same for man."[270] One should not mock too quickly the pantheism of flux present in such texts: it is not easy to de-Oedipalize even nature, even landscapes, to the extent that Lawrence succeeded in doing it. The fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and schizo-analysis is the following: that schizo-analysis attains to a non-figurative and non-symbolic unconscious, pure figural abstract in the sense one speaks of abstract painting, flux-schizes or real-desire, taken beneath the minimal conditions of identity.

320What does psychoanalysis do, and first what does Freud do, if not maintain sexuality under the mortifying yoke of the little secret, while finding a medicinal means of making it public, of making it Punch's secret, analytical Oedipus? We are told: come now, it's perfectly normal, everyone is like that, but we continue to hold of sexuality the same humiliating and debasing conception, the same figurative conception as that of the censors. Certainly, psychoanalysis has not made its pictural revolution. There is a thesis to which Freud clings dearly: libido invests the social field as such only on the condition that it desexualizes and sublimates itself. If he clings to it so much, it is because he wants first to maintain sexuality within the narrow framework of Narcissus and Oedipus, of the ego and the family. From then on, every sexual libidinal investment of social dimension appears to him to testify to a pathogenic state, "fixation" to narcissism, or "regression" to Oedipus and to pre-oedipal stages, by which will be explained equally well homosexuality as reinforced drive as paranoia as means of defense. We have seen on the contrary that what libido invested, through loves and sexuality, was the social field itself in its economic, political, historical, racial, cultural determinations, etc.: libido ceases not to delirium History, continents, kingdoms, races, cultures. Not that it is fitting to put historical representations in the place of the family representations of the Freudian unconscious, or even of the archetypes of a collective unconscious. It is only a matter of noting that our amorous choices are at the crossroads of "vibrations," that is, express connections, disjunctions, conjunctions of flux that traverse a society, enter it and exit it, linking it to other societies, ancient or contemporary, distant or disappeared, dead or to be born, Africas and Orients, always by the underground thread of libido. Not figures or statues geo-historical, although our apprenticeship takes place more willingly with them, with books, histories, reproductions, than with our mama. But flux and codes of socius that figure nothing, that designate only zones of libidinal intensity on the full body, and that are found emitted, captured, intercepted by the being that we are then determined to love, as a point-sign, a singular point in the entire network of the intensive body that responds to History, that vibrates with it. Gradiva, never was Freud so far… In short, our libidinal investments of the social field, reactionary or revolutionary, are so well hidden, so well unconscious, so well covered over by preconscious investments, that they appear only in our amorous sexual choices. A love is not reactionary or revolutionary, but it is the index of the reactionary or revolutionary character of the social investments of libido. The desiring sexual relations of man and woman (or of man and man, or of woman and woman) are the index of social relations between men. Loves and sexuality are the exponents or the gauges, this time unconscious, of the libidinal investments of the social field. Every being loved or desired counts as an agent of collective enunciation. And it is certainly not, as Freud believed, libido that must desexualize and sublimate itself in order to invest society and its flux, it is on the contrary love, desire and their flux that manifest the immediately social character of the non-sublimated libido and of its sexual investments.

321To those seeking a thesis subject on psychoanalysis, one should not advise vast considerations on analytical epistemology, but modest and rigorous subjects such as: the theory of servants or household people in Freud's thought. There lie the true indices. For, concerning servants, everywhere present in the cases studied by Freud, an exemplary hesitation occurs in Freudian thought, resolved too hastily in favor of what would become a dogma of psychoanalysis. Philippe Girard, in unpublished remarks that seem to us to have great import, poses the problem at several levels. First, Freud discovers "his own" Oedipus in a complex social context that brings into play the elder half-brother from the wealthy family branch, and the thieving servant as poor woman. Second, the family romance and fantasmatic activity in general will be presented by Freud as a true drift from the social field, where one substitutes for parents persons of higher or lower rank (son of a princess abducted by Bohemians, or son of a poor man taken in by the bourgeoisie); Oedipus already did this, when he claimed a poor birth and domestic parents. Third, the Rat Man does not install his neurosis only in a social field determined from one end to the other as military, he does not make it turn only around a torture that derives from the Orient, but in this very field he makes it go from one pole to another constituted by the rich woman and the poor woman, under a strange unconscious communication with the father's unconscious. Lacan was the first to emphasize these themes which suffice to call all of Oedipus into question; and he shows the existence of a "social complex" where the subject, now tends to assume his own role, but at the price of a doubling of the sexual object into rich woman and poor woman, now assures the unity of the object, but at the price this time of a doubling of "his own social function," at the other end of the chain. Fourth, the Wolf Man manifests a decisive taste for the poor woman, the peasant woman on all fours washing laundry or the servant washing the floor. Now the fundamental problem concerning these texts is the following: must one see, in all these sexual-social investments of libido and these object choices, mere dependencies of a familial Oedipus? must one at all costs save Oedipus by interpreting them as defenses against incest (thus the family romance, or Oedipus's own wish to be born of poor parents who would exonerate him)? must one understand them as compromises and substitutes for incest (thus in the Wolf Man, the peasant woman as substitute for the sister, bearing the same name as her, or the person on all fours, working, as substitute for the mother surprised in coitus; and in the Rat Man, the disguised repetition of the paternal situation, even if it means enriching or enlarging Oedipus with a fourth "symbolic" term charged with accounting for the doublings through which libido invests the social field)? Freud chooses this direction firmly; all the more firmly in that, by his own admission, he wants to settle his accounts with Jung and Adler. And, after having noted in the case of the Wolf Man the existence of a "tendency to debase" woman as object of love, he concludes that it is only a "rationalization," and that "the real and profound determination" brings us back as always to the sister, to the mother, considered as the only "purely erotic motives"! And, resuming the eternal song of Oedipus, the eternal lullaby, he writes: "The child places himself above the social differences which, for him, signify little, and he classes persons of inferior condition in the series of parents when these persons love him as his parents love him."

322We always fall back into the false alternative into which Freud was led by Oedipus, then confirmed by his polemic with Adler and Jung: either, he says, you will abandon the sexual position of libido in favor of an individual and social will to power, or of a prehistoric collective unconscious — or else you will recognize Oedipus, make it the sexual dwelling of libido, and make papa-mama "the purely erotic mobile." Oedipus, touchstone of the pure psychoanalyst to sharpen upon it the sacred knife of successful castration. What was nonetheless the other direction, glimpsed for an instant by Freud concerning the family romance, before the oedipal trap closed again? The one that Philippe Girard rediscovers, at least hypothetically: there is no family where vacuoles are not arranged, and where extra-familial cuts do not pass, through which libido engulfs itself to invest sexually the non-familial, that is to say the other class determined under the empirical species of the "richer or the poorer," and sometimes both at once. The great Other, indispensable to the position of desire, would it not be the social Other, social difference apprehended and invested as non-family within the family itself? The other class is in no way grasped by libido as a magnified or miserated image of the mother, but as the stranger, non-mother, non-father, non-family, index of what is non-human in sex, and without which libido would not rise through its machines of desire. Class struggle passes through the heart of the trial of desire. It is not the family romance that is a derivative of Oedipus, it is Oedipus that is a drift of the family romance and, through that, of the social field. It is not a question of denying the importance of parental coitus, and of the position of the mother; but, when this position makes her resemble a floor-washer, or an animal, what authorizes Freud to say that the animal or the maid count for the mother, independently of social or generic differences, instead of concluding that the mother functions also as something other than mother, and raises in the child's libido a whole differentiated social investment at the same time as a relation to non-human sex? For if the mother works or not, if the mother is of origin richer or poorer than the father, etc., these are cuts and flux that traverse the family, but which exceed it on all sides and are not familial. From the beginning we ask ourselves whether libido knows father-mother, or whether it makes the parents function as anything else, agents of production in relation with other agents in social-desiring production. From the point of view of libidinal investment, parents are not only open to the other, they are themselves recut and doubled by the other which de-familializes them according to the laws of social production and desiring production: the mother functions herself as rich woman or poor woman, maid or princess, pretty girl or old woman, animal or holy virgin, and both at once. Everything passes through the machine that makes familial determinations burst open. What orphan libido invests is a field of social desire, a field of production and anti-production with its cuts and its flux, where parents are grasped in non-parental functions and roles confronted with other roles and other functions. Is this to say that parents have no unconscious role as such? Of course they do, but in two well-determined ways which destitute them all the more of their supposed autonomy. In accordance with the distinction embryologists make concerning the egg between stimulus and organizer, parents are stimuli of any value whatsoever that trigger the distribution of gradients or zones of intensity on the full body: it is with respect to them that there will be situated in each case the richness and the poverty, the relative richer and poorer, as empirical forms of social difference — so that they themselves surge forth anew, within this difference, distributed in such or such zone, but under another species than that of parents. And the organizer is the social field of desire which, alone, designates the zones of intensity, with the beings that populate them, and determines their libidinal investment. Secondly, parents as parents are terms of application which express the folding-back of the social field invested by libido onto a finite ensemble of arrival, where it finds only dead ends and blockages in accordance with the mechanisms of repression-refoulement that exercise themselves in the field: Oedipus, such is Oedipus. In each of these senses, the third thesis of schizo-analysis posits the primacy of libidinal investments of the social field over familial investment, from the point of view both of fact and of right, stimulus of any value whatsoever at the start, extrinsic result at the arrival. The relation to the non-familial is always primary, under the form of field sexuality in social production, and of non-human sex in desiring production (gigantism and nanism).

323One often gets the impression that families have listened too well to the lesson of psychoanalysis, even from a distance or in a diffuse way, in the air of the times: they play at Oedipus, sublime alibi. But, behind it, there is an economic situation, the mother reduced to housework, or to difficult and uninteresting work outside, children whose future state remains uncertain, the father who is sick of feeding all this world — in short, a fundamental relation with the outside, which the psychoanalyst washes his hands of, too attentive to whether his clients are playing nicely. Now the economic situation, the relation with the outside, that is what libido invests and counter-invests as sexual libido. One gets hard according to the flux and their cuts. Let one consider for a moment the motivations for which someone gets psychoanalyzed: it is a situation of economic dependence become unbearable to desire, or full of conflicts for the investment of desire. The psychoanalyst, who says so many things about the necessity of money in the cure, remains superbly indifferent to the question: who pays? For example, the analysis reveals the unconscious conflicts of a woman with her husband, but it is the husband who pays for the woman's analysis. This is not the only time we encounter the duality of money, as a structure of external financing and as a means of internal payment, with the "dissimulation" it contains, essential to the capitalist system. But it is interesting to find this essential dissimulation, miniaturized, enthroned in the analyst's office. The analyst speaks of Oedipus, of castration and the phallus, of the necessity of assuming sex, as Freud says, human sex, and that woman renounce her desire for the penis, and that man too renounce his male protest… We say that there is not a woman, not a child, notably, who can as such "assume" his situation in a capitalist society, precisely because this situation has nothing to do with the phallus and castration, but concerns closely an unbearable economic dependence. And the women and children who manage to "assume" do so only by detours, and determinations quite distinct from their being-woman or their being-child. Nothing to do with the phallus, but much to do with desire, with sexuality as desire. For the phallus has never been the object nor the cause of desire, but it is itself the apparatus for castration, the machine to put lack in desire, to dry up all flux, and to make of all the cuts from the outside and the real a single and same cut with the outside, with the real. From the outside, there always penetrates too much to the analyst's liking, in the analyst's office. Even the closed family scene seems to him still an excessive outside. He promotes the pure analytic scene, Oedipus and cabinet castration, which must be to itself its own reality, its own proof, and which, contrary to movement, proves itself only in not working, and in not finishing. Psychoanalysis has become a sufficiently stupefying drug, where the strangest personal dependence allows clients to forget, during the time of sessions on the couch, the economic dependences that drive them there (a bit like the decoding of flux entails a reinforcement of servitude). Do they know what they are doing, these psychoanalysts who oedipianize women, children, negroes, animals? We dream of entering their homes, opening the windows, and saying: it smells stale, a bit of relation with the outside… For desire does not survive, cut from the outside, cut from its investments and counter-investments economic and social. And, if there is a "purely erotic motive," to speak like Freud, it is certainly not Oedipus who gathers it, nor the phallus who moves it, nor castration who transmits it. The erotic motive, purely erotic, runs through the four corners of the social field, everywhere that machines of desire agglutinate or disperse themselves in social machines, and where choices of amorous object are produced at the crossing, following lines of flight or integration. Will Aaron leave with his flute, which is not phallus, but machine of desire and process of deterritorialization?

324Suppose we concede everything to them: they concede it to us only afterward. It is only afterward that libido would invest the social field, and that it would "make" social and metaphysical. This allows one to save the basic Freudian position, according to which libido must desexualize itself to operate such investments, but begins with Oedipus, me, father and mother (the pre-oedipal stages relating structurally or eschatologically to oedipal organization). We have seen that this conception of the afterward implied a radical misunderstanding of the nature of actual factors. For: either libido is seized in molecular desiring production, and it ignores persons just as much as the me, even the almost undifferentiated me of narcissism, since its investments are already differentiated, but according to the prepersonal régime of partial objects, singularities, intensities, mechanisms and pieces of machines of desire where one would have difficulty recognizing mother or father, or me (we have seen how contradictory it was to invoke partial objects, and to make them the representatives of parental characters or the supports of family relations). Or else libido invests persons and a me, but it is already seized in a social production and social machines that differentiate them not only as family beings, but as derivatives of the molar whole to which they belong under this other régime. It is quite true that social and metaphysical arrive at the same time, in conformity with the two simultaneous senses of process, as historical process of social production and metaphysical process of desiring production. But they do not arrive afterward. Always the Lindner painting, where the fat little boy has already connected a machine of desire to a social machine, short-circuiting the parents who can only intervene as agents of production and anti-production in one case as in the other. There is only social and metaphysical. If something comes afterward, it is certainly not the social and metaphysical investments of libido, the syntheses of the unconscious; on the contrary, it is rather Oedipus, narcissism and the whole series of psychoanalytic concepts. The factors of production are always "actual," and this from earliest childhood: actual does not mean recent as opposed to infant, but in act, as opposed to what is virtual, and to come under certain conditions. Oedipus, virtual and reactional. Consider indeed the conditions under which Oedipus arrives: a starting set, transfinite, constituted by all the objects, agents, relations of socio-desiring production, is found folded back onto a finite family set as an arriving set (minimum, three terms, which one can and even must increase, but not to infinity). Such an application indeed supposes a fourth mobile term, extrapolated, the abstract symbolic phallus, charged with effecting the folding or the correspondence; but it operates effectively on the three constitutive persons of the minimum family set, or on their substitutes—father, mother, child. One does not stop there, since these three terms tend to reduce themselves to two, either in the castration scene where the father kills the child, or in the incest scene where the child kills the father, or in the scene of the terrible mother where the mother kills the child or the father. Then, from two one passes to one in narcissism, which in no way precedes Oedipus, but is its product. This is why we speak of an oedipal-narcissistic machine, at the issue of which the me encounters its own death, as the zero term of a pure abolition that haunted from the beginning the oedipianized desire and that one identifies now, at the end, as being Thanatos. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, Oedipus is a race toward death.

325Since the nineteenth century, the study of mental illnesses and madness has remained prisoner of the familial postulate and its correlates, the personological postulate and the ego postulate. We saw, following Foucault, how nineteenth-century psychiatry conceived the family both as the cause and judge of illness, and the closed asylum as an artificial family charged with internalizing guilt and bringing about responsibility, enveloping madness no less than its cure in a father-child relation present everywhere. In this regard, far from breaking with psychiatry, psychoanalysis transported its demands outside the asylum, and first imposed a certain "free," interior, intensive, fantasmatic use of the family, which seemed particularly suited to what was isolated as neuroses. But, on the one hand, the resistance of psychoses, on the other, the necessity of accounting for a social etiology, led psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to re-deploy in open conditions the order of an extended family, always supposed to hold the secret of illness as of cure. After having internalized the family in Oedipus, one externalizes Oedipus in the symbolic order, in the institutional order, in the communal order, sectoral, etc. There is a constant in all modern attempts. And if this tendency appears most naively in community psychiatry of adaptation — "therapeutic return to the family," to the identity of persons and to the integrity of the ego, the whole thing being by successful castration in a holy triangular form — the same tendency under more hidden species acts in other currents. It is not by chance that Lacan's symbolic order was detonated, used to establish an Oedipus of structure applicable to psychosis, and to extend the familial coordinates outside their real and even imaginary domain. It is not by chance that institutional analysis struggles to guard itself against the reconstitution of artificial families, where the symbolic order, incarnate in the institution, reforms group Oedipuses, with all the lethal characteristics of subjected groups. But, more still, anti-psychiatry sought in redefined families the secret of a causality at once social and schizogenic. Perhaps it is there that mystification appears best, because anti-psychiatry was most apt by certain of its aspects to break the traditional familial reference. What does one see in effect in the American familial studies, as they are taken up and pursued by anti-psychiatrists? One baptizes as schizogenic families quite ordinary, familial mechanisms quite ordinary, an ordinary familial logic, that is to say scarcely neurotizing. In the family monographs said to be schizophrenic, each person readily recognizes his own father, his own mother. Take for instance Bateson's "double impasse" or "double bind": what father does not simultaneously emit the two contradictory injunctions — "Let us be friends, my son, I am your best friend" and "Watch out, my son, do not treat me like a buddy"? There is nothing to make a schizophrenic. We saw in this sense that the double impasse defined in no way a specific schizogenic mechanism, but characterized only Oedipus in the entirety of its extension. If there is a true impasse, a true contradiction, it is that into which the researcher himself falls, when he claims to assign social schizogenic mechanisms, and at the same time discover them in the order of the family to which escape both social production and the schizophrenic process. Perhaps this contradiction is particularly acute in Laing, because he is the most revolutionary anti-psychiatrist. But, at the very moment when he breaks with psychiatric practice, undertakes to assign a true social genesis of psychosis, and demands as condition of cure the necessity of a continuation of the "voyage" as process and of a dissolution of the "normal ego," he relapses into the worst familial, personological and ego postulates, such that the remedies invoked are nothing more than a "sincere confirmation between parents," a "recognition of persons," a discovery of the true self following Martin Buber. Beyond the hostility of traditional authorities, perhaps it is there the source of the present failure of anti-psychiatry attempts, of their recuperation to the profit of adaptive forms of family psychotherapy and sectoral psychiatry, and of Laing's own retreat to the Orient. And is it not a contradiction on another plane, but analogous, where one attempts to precipitate the teaching of Lacan, when one replaces it on a familial and personological axis, — whereas Lacan assigns the cause of desire in a "non-human" object, heterogeneous to the person, below the conditions of minimal identity, escaping the intersubjective coordinates as much as the world of significations?

326Long live the Ndembu, for, following the detailed account of ethnologist Turner, only the ndembu doctor knew how to treat Oedipus as an appearance, a stage setting, and to trace back to the unconscious libidinal investments of the social field. Oedipal familialism, even and especially in its most modern forms, makes impossible the discovery of what one nonetheless claims to be seeking today, namely schizogenic social production. First, one may well affirm that the family expresses deeper social contradictions, one confers upon it a value of microcosm, one gives it the role of a necessary relay for the transformation of social alienation into mental alienation; more than that, one acts as if libido did not invest directly the social contradictions as such, and needed for it to awaken that they be translated according to the code of the family. By this very fact, one has already substituted for social production a familial causation or expression, and one finds oneself in the categories of idealist psychiatry. Whatever one makes of it, one thus exonerates society: there remains only vague considerations on the pathological character of the family, or more generally still on the mode of modern life, to accuse it. One has thus passed by the essential: that society is schizophrenizing at the level of its infra-structure, its mode of production, its most precise capitalist economic circuits; and that libido invests this social field, not in a form where it would be expressed and translated by a family-microcosm, but in the form where it passes into the family its cuts and its non-familial flux, invested as such; therefore, that familial investments are always a result of social-desiring libidinal investments, alone primary; finally, that mental alienation refers directly to these investments and is no less social than social alienation, which refers for its part to the preconscious investments of interest.

327Not only do we thus miss any correct evaluation of social production in its pathogenic character, but we no less miss in the second place the schizophrenic process and its relation to the schizophrenic as sick subject. For one attempts to nevroticize everything. And without doubt one conforms thus to the mission of the family, which is to produce neurotics through its oedipianization, through its system of impasses, through its delegated repression without which social repression would never find docile and resigned subjects, and would not manage to seal the lines of flight of flux. We have no need to take account of what psychoanalysis claims to cure neurosis, since for it curing consists in an infinite maintenance, in an infinite resignation, in an accession to desire through castration !… and in the establishment of conditions where the subject can swarm, pass the sickness to its progeny, rather than die single, impotent and masturbatory. Better still, again: perhaps one day it will be discovered that the only incurable thing is neurosis (whence interminable psychoanalysis). One congratulates oneself when one succeeds in transforming a schizo into a paranoiac or a neurotic. Perhaps there are many misunderstandings there. For the schizo, that is the one who escapes all oedipal, familial and personological reference—I will say me no longer, I will say papa-mamma no longer—and he keeps his word. Now the question is first whether it is from that which he is sick, or whether on the contrary it is there the schizophrenic process, which is not a sickness, not a "collapse," but a "breakthrough," however anguishing and adventurous it may be: to cross the wall or limit that separates us from desiring production, to make the flux of desire pass. The greatness of Laing is, proceeding from certain intuitions that remained ambiguous in Jaspers, to have known how to mark the incredible scope of this voyage. So that there is no schizo-analysis which does not mix with its positive tasks the constant destructive task of dissolving the so-called normal ego. Lawrence, Miller, then Laing knew how to show it profoundly: assuredly, neither man nor woman are well-defined personalities—but vibrations, flux, schizes and "knots." The ego refers to personological coordinates from which it results; persons in turn refer to familial coordinates, we will see to what the entire familial ensemble refers in order to produce persons in turn. The task of schizo-analysis is tirelessly to undo the egos and their presuppositions, to liberate the prepersonal singularities that they enclose and repress, to make flow the flux that they would be capable of emitting, receiving or intercepting, to establish ever further and finer the schizes and cuts well below the conditions of identity, to set up the machines of desire that cut across each one and group him with others. For each one is a groupuscule and must live thus, or rather like the broken zen tea box multiple, of which each crack is repaired with gold cement, or like the church flagstone of which each fissure is underlined by paint or whitewash (the contrary of castration, unified, molarized, hidden, scarred, unproductive). Schizo-analysis is called thus because, in all its procedure of cure, it schizophrenizes, instead of nevroticizing like psychoanalysis.

328What is the schizophrenic sick from, since it is not schizophrenia as process? What transforms the breakthrough into collapse? It is on the contrary the forced halt of the process, or its continuation in the void, or the way it is forced to take itself for an end. We have seen in this sense how social production produced the sick schizo: constructed on decoded flux that constitute its profound tendency or its absolute limit, capitalism ceases to thwart this tendency, to avert this limit by substituting for it internal relative limits it can reproduce on an ever larger scale, or an axiomatic of flux that subjects the tendency to despotism and the most firm repression. It is in this sense that the contradiction is established not only at the level of the flux that traverse the social field, but at the level of their libidinal investments which are their constituent parts — between the paranoiac reconstruction of the Urstaat despotic and the positive schizophrenic lines of flight. Henceforth, three eventualities take shape: either the process is found halted, the limit of desiring production is displaced, travestied, and now passes into the oedipal subset. Then the schizo is effectively neurotized, and it is this neurotization that constitutes his sickness; for, in any case, neurotization precedes neurosis, the latter is its fruit. Or else the schizo resists neurotization, oedipianization. Even the use of modern resources, the pure analytic scene, the symbolic phallus, structural foreclosure, the name of the father, do not manage to take hold of him (and there again, in these modern resources, what strange use of Lacan's discoveries, he who was the first on the contrary to schizophrenize the analytic field…). In this second case, the process confronted with a neurotization to which it resists, but which suffices to block it from all sides, is brought to take itself for an end: a psychotic is produced, who escapes delegated repression properly speaking only to take refuge in originary repression, close back over itself the full body and silence the machines of desire. Rather catatonia than neurosis, rather catatonia than Oedipus and castration — but it is still an effect of neurotization, a counter-effect of the one and same sickness. Or else, third case: the process begins to turn in the void. Process of deterritorialization, it can no longer seek and create its new earth. Confronted with oedipal re-territorialization, archaic earth, residual, ridiculously restricted, it will form even more artificial earths that arrange themselves as best they can, except by accident, with the established order: the perverse. And, after all, Oedipus was already an artificial earth, O family! And the resistance to Oedipus, the return to the full body were still an artificial earth, O asylum. So that everything is perversion. But, equally, everything is psychosis and paranoia, since everything is triggered by the counter-investment of the social field that produces the psychotic. And, further, everything is neurosis, since fruit of the neurotization that opposes the process. Finally, everything is process, schizophrenia as process, since it is to it that everything is measured, its own course, its neurotic halts, its perverse continuations in the void, its psychotic finalizations.

329Insofar as Oedipus is born from an application of the entire social field to the finite familial figure, it does not imply just any investment of this field by libido, but a very particular investment that renders this application possible and necessary. This is why Oedipus appeared to us as an idea of the paranoiac before being a sentiment of the neurotic. In effect, paranoiac investment consists in subordinating molecular desiring production to the molar ensemble it forms on one face of the full body without organs, and thereby in enslaving it to a form of socius that exercises the function of full body under determined conditions. The paranoiac machines masses, and ceaselessly forms great ensembles, invents heavy apparatuses for the framing and repression of machines of desire. Certainly, it is not difficult for him to pass for reasonable, invoking collective aims and interests, reforms to be made, sometimes even revolutions to be carried out. But madness pierces through, beneath reformist investments, or reactionary and fascist investments, which take on a reasonable appearance only in the light of the preconscious and which animate the strange discourse of an organization of society. Even language is demented in it. Listen to a minister, a general, a business chief, a technician… Listen to the great paranoiac rumor beneath the discourse of reason that speaks for others, in the name of the mute. It is that, beneath the preconscious aims and interests invoked, there rises up an otherwise unconscious investment that bears on a full body for itself, independently of any aim, on a degree of development for itself, independently of any reason: this degree and no other, do not take one step further, this socius and no other, do not touch it. A disinterested love of the molar machine, a veritable jouissance, with what it entails of hatred for those who do not submit to it: all of libido is at stake. From the point of view of libidinal investment, one sees well that there is little difference between a reformist, a fascist, sometimes even certain revolutionaries, who distinguish themselves only in a preconscious manner, but whose unconscious investments are of the same type, even when they do not espouse the same body. We cannot follow Maud Mannoni when she sees the first historical act of anti-psychiatry in the 1902 judgment that rendered to President Schreber liberty and responsibility despite the acknowledged maintenance of his delirious ideas. For there is reason to doubt that the judgment would have been the same if the president had been schizophrenic rather than paranoiac, had taken himself for a Negro or a Jew rather than for a pure Aryan, had not shown such competence in the administration of his property, and had not in his delirium testified toward the socius an already fascistic libidinal investment. Social machines as machines of subjection give rise to incomparable loves, which are not explained by interest, since interests flow from them on the contrary. At the bottom of society, delirium, for delirium is the investment of socius as such, beyond aims. And it is not only toward the body of the despot that the paranoiac aspires in love, but toward the body of capital-money, or toward a new revolutionary body, so long as it is a form of power and gregarity. To be possessed by it as much as to possess it, to machine the subjected groups of which one is oneself pieces and gears, to introduce oneself into the machine in order at last to know there the jouissance of the mechanisms that grind desire.

330Or Oedipus appears as a relatively innocent thing, a private determination dealt with in the analyst's office. But we ask precisely what type of unconscious social investment Oedipus presupposes — since it is not psychoanalysis that invents Oedipus; it merely lives off it, develops it, confirms it, gives it a marketable medical form. Insofar as paranoid investment enslaves desiring production, it matters greatly that the limit of this production be displaced, that it pass into the interior of the socius, as a limit between two molar sets, the initial social set and the family sub-set of arrival which is supposed to correspond to it, such that desire is trapped in a family repression which comes to double social repression. The paranoiac applies his delirium to the family, and to his own family, but it is first a delirium concerning races, ranks, classes, universal history. In short, Oedipus implies within the unconscious itself an entire reactionary and paranoid investment of the social field, which acts as an oedipianizing factor, and which can just as well feed as thwart preconscious investments. From the perspective of schizo-analysis, the analysis of Oedipus thus consists in tracing back from the muddled feelings of the son to the delirious ideas or lines of investment of the parents, their internalized representatives and their substitutes: not in order to reach the whole of a family, which is never anything but a place of application and reproduction, but to the social and political units of libidinal investment. So that the entire familiaristic psychoanalysis, including the psychoanalyst in the first place, is subject to schizo-analysis. Only one way to pass the time on the couch, schizo-analyze the psychoanalyst. We said that, by virtue of their difference in nature with preconscious investments of interest, unconscious investments of desire in their social scope itself had sexuality as their index. Not that it would suffice to invest in the poor woman, the maid or the prostitute, to have revolutionary loves. There are no revolutionary or reactionary loves, that is to say that loves are not defined by their objects, no more than by the sources and aims of desires or drives. But there are forms of love which are indices of the reactionary or revolutionary character of libido's investment of a historical or geographical social field, from which the loved and desired beings receive their determinations. Oedipus is one of these forms, index of reactionary investment. And the well-defined figures, the well-identified roles, the well-distinct persons, in short the model-images of which Lawrence spoke, mother, fiancée, mistress, wife, saint and prostitute, princess and maid, rich woman and poor woman, are dependencies of Oedipus, even in their reversals and substitutions. It is the form itself of these images, their cutting and the whole of their possible relations, which are the product of a code, or of a social axiomatic to which libido addresses itself through them. Persons are simulacra derived from a social set whose code is unconsciously invested for itself. This is why love, desire present reactionary indices, or else revolutionary ones; the latter surge forth on the contrary as non-figurative indices, where persons give way to decoded flux of desire, to lines of vibration, and where cuts of images give way to schizes which constitute singular points, multi-dimensional point-signs passing the flux rather than annulling it. Non-figurative loves, indices of a revolutionary investment of the social field, and which are neither oedipal nor pre-oedipal since it is the same thing, but innocently anœdipal, and which give the revolutionary the right to say "Oedipus, I know nothing of it." Undo the form of persons and of the self, not to the profit of an undifferentiated pre-oedipal, but of lines of anœdipal singularities, machines of desire. For there is indeed a sexual revolution, which concerns neither the objects, nor the aims, nor the sources, but only the form or the machinic indices.

331The fourth and last thesis of schizoanalysis is thus the distinction of two poles of social libidinal investment, the paranoid pole, reactionary and fascizing, the schizoid revolutionary pole. Once again, we see no inconvenience in characterizing social investments of the unconscious by terms inherited from psychiatry, insofar as these terms cease to have a familial connotation that would make them simple projections, and from the moment when delirium is recognized as having an immediately adequate primary social content. The two poles define themselves, one by the enslavement of production and machines of desire to the gregarious ensembles they constitute on a large scale under such form of power or selective sovereignty, the other by the inverse subordination and reversal of power; one by these molar and structured ensembles, which crush singularities, select them and regularize those they retain within codes or axiomatics, the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities which on the contrary treat large ensembles as so many materials proper to their elaboration; one by the lines of integration and territorialization which arrest the flux, apply a tourniquet to them, turn them back or re-cut them according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way that they produce the images which come to fill the field of immanence proper to this system or ensemble, the other by lines of flight which the decoded and deterritorialized flux follow, inventing their own non-figurative cuts or schizes which produce new flux, always crossing the coded wall or territorial limit which separates them from desiring production; and summarizing all the preceding determinations, one by subjected groups, the other by groups-subjects. It is true that we still encounter all sorts of problems concerning these distinctions. In what sense does schizoid investment constitute, as much as the other, a real investment of the historical social field, and not a simple utopia? in what sense are lines of flight collective, positive and creative? what relation do the two unconscious poles have with one another, and with the preconscious investments of interest?

332We have seen that unconscious paranoid investment bore upon the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the goals and preconscious interests it assigns and distributes. It remains that such an investment cannot bear being brought to light: it must always hide itself beneath assignable goals or interests presented as general, even when they represent only those of the dominant class or its fraction. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determined gregarious ensemble, bear being invested for their brute power, their violence and their absurdity? They would not survive it. Even the most declared fascism speaks the language of goals, of right, of order and reason. Even the most demented capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality. And this is forced, since it is in the irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons finds itself inextricably fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that decides it. Moreover, the bringing to light of unconscious reactionary investment, aimless turn, would suffice to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of libido, that is to say to the schizo-revolutionary pole, since it would not be done without overturning power, without inverting subordination, without returning production itself to desire; for only desire lives from being aimless. Molecular desiring production would recover its freedom to enslave in turn the entire molar ensemble under a form of reversed power or sovereignty. This is why Klossowski, who pushed furthest the theory of the two poles of investment, but always within the category of an active utopia, can write: "Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the appointed moment of its disintegration… No formation of sovereignty, in order for it to crystallize, will ever bear this taking of consciousness: for, as soon as it becomes conscious in the individuals who compose it, they decompose it… By the detour of science and art, the human being has many times risen up against this finitude; and, notwithstanding this capacity, the gregarious impulse in and by science made this rupture fail. The day when the human being would know how to behave in the manner of phenomena devoid of intention—for all intention at the level of the human being always obeys its conservation, its duration—, that day, a new creature would pronounce the integrity of existence… Science demonstrates by its own procedure that the means it ceaselessly elaborates do nothing but reproduce, externally, a play of forces by themselves without goal nor end whose combinations obtain this or that result… However, no science can yet develop outside a constituted social grouping. To prevent the calling into question of social groups by science, these retake it into hand…, (integrate it) in the various industrial plannings, its autonomy appears plainly inconceivable. A conspiracy conjoining art and science supposes a rupture of all our institutions and a total upheaval of the means of production… If some conspiracy, according to Nietzsche's wish, were to conjure science and art to ends no less suspect, industrial society would seem to thwart it in advance by the sort of staging it offers of it, under penalty of actually suffering what this conspiracy holds in reserve for it: namely the bursting of the institutional structures that cover it, into a plurality of experimental spheres finally revealing the authentic face of modernity—ultimate phase to which Nietzsche saw the evolution of societies lead. In this perspective, art and science would surge forth then as those sovereign formations of which Nietzsche said to make the object of his counter-sociology—art and science establishing themselves as dominating powers, upon the ruins of institutions".(276)

333Why this invocation of art and science, in a world where scientists and technicians, even artists, science and art themselves are so much in the service of established sovereignties (if only through financing structures)? It is that art, as soon as it attains its own grandeur, its own genius, creates chains of decoding and deterritorialization that establish, that make machines of desire function. Take the example of the Venetian school in painting: at the same time that Venice develops the most powerful merchant capitalism at the borders of a Urstaat that leaves it wide autonomy, its painting seemingly flows into a Byzantine code, where even colors and lines subordinate themselves to a signifier that determines their hierarchy like a vertical order. But, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when Venetian capitalism confronts the first signs of its decline, something bursts in this painting: one would say a new world opens, another art, where lines deterritorialize, colors decode, refer only to the relations they maintain between themselves and with one another. There is born a horizontal, or transversal, organization of the tableau with lines of flight or breakthrough. The body of Christ is machined from all sides and in all sorts of ways, pulled from all directions, playing the role of full body without organs, place of attachment for all machines of desire, place of sadomasochistic exercises where the joy of the artist bursts forth. Even Christ-perverts. Organs are the direct powers of the body without organs, and emit on it fluxes that the thousand wounds, like the arrows of Saint Sebastian, come to cut and recut so as to produce other fluxes. Persons and organs cease to be coded according to hierarchized collective investments; charm, each one is worth for itself and conducts its own affair: the child Jesus looks to one side while the Virgin listens from the other, Jesus is worth for all desiring children, the Virgin for all desiring women, a joyous activity of profanation extends itself under this generalized privatization. A Tintoret paints the creation of the world as a long-distance race, in which God himself in the last rank gives the start from right to left. All at once a painting by Lotto surges forth, which could just as well be from the nineteenth century. And certainly this decoding of the fluxes of painting, these schizoid lines of flight that form on the horizon the machines of desire, are taken up again in tatters of the old code, or else introduced into new codes, and first into a pictorial axiomatic proper that makes a tourniquet on the flights, closes the whole upon transversal relations between lines and colors, and folds it back onto archaic or new territorialities (for example, perspective). So true is it that the movement of deterritorialization can only be grasped as the reverse of territorialities, even residual, artificial, or factitious. But, at least, something has surged forth, bursting the codes, undoing the signifiers, passing beneath the structures, making fluxes pass and operating cuts at the limit of desire: a breakthrough. It is not enough to say that the nineteenth century is already there in the full fifteenth century, for one would have to say the analogue of the nineteenth century in its turn, and it would have been necessary to say it for the Byzantine code under which strange liberated fluxes already passed. We have seen it for the painter Turner, for his most accomplished tableaux that are sometimes called "unfinished" tableaux: as soon as there is genius, there is something that belongs to no school, no period, operating a breakthrough — art as process without end, but which accomplishes itself as such.

334The codes and their signifiants, the axiomatics and their structures, the imaginary figures that come to fill them as well as the purely symbolic relations that measure them, constitute molar ensembles properly aesthetic characterized by aims, schools and epochs, relating them to the vaster social ensembles that find an application there, and everywhere enslave art to a great machine of castrating sovereignty. For art also, there is a pole of reactionary investment, a dark paranoiac-oedipal-narcissistic organization. A dirty usage of painting, around the dirty little secret, even in abstract painting where the axiomatic dispenses with figures: a painting whose secret essence is scatological, an oedipianizing painting, even when it has broken with the holy Trinity as oedipal image, a neurotic and neurotizing painting that makes the process a aim, or a halt, an interruption, or a continuation in the void. This painting that flourishes today, under the usurped name of modern, poisonous flower, and which made one of Lawrence's heroes say: "It is like a kind of pure murder… — And who is assassinated?… — All the entrails of mercy that one feels in oneself are assassinated… — Perhaps it is stupidity that is assassinated, sentimental stupidity, sneered the artist. — Do you believe so? It seems to me that all these tubes and these vibrations of corrugated metal are stupider than anything, and sufficiently sentimental. They seem to me to show much self-pity, and much nervous vanity." The productive cuts projected onto the gross unproductive cut of castration, the flux become flux of corrugated metal, the breakthroughs blocked on all sides. And perhaps it is this, we have seen it, the commodity value of art and literature: a paranoiac form of expression that no longer even needs to "signify" its reactionary libidinal investments, since they serve it instead as signifiant: a form of oedipal content that no longer even needs to figure Oedipus, since the "structure" suffices. But, at the other pole, schizo-revolutionary, the value of art is measured only by the decoded and deterritorialized flux that it makes pass under a signifiant reduced to silence, below the conditions of identity of the parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence; writing on indifferent supports pneumatic, electronic or gaseous, and which appears all the more difficult and intellectual to intellectuals in that it is accessible to the feeble, to the illiterate, to the schizos, espousing all that flows and all that cuts across, entrails of mercy ignoring sense and aim (the Artaud experience, the Burroughs experience). It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which consists only in liberating what was present in art at all times, but which was hidden beneath the aims and objects were they even aesthetic, beneath the recodifications or the axiomatics: the pure process that accomplishes itself, and which ceases not to be accomplished insofar as it proceeds, art as "experimentation".{277}

335And the same will be said of science: the decoded flux of knowledge are first linked in properly scientific axiomatics, but these express a bi-polar hesitation. One pole is the great social axiomatic which retains from science what must be retained as a function of the needs of the market and zones of technical innovation, the great social ensemble which makes of scientific sub-ensembles so many applications proper to it and corresponding to it, in short, the ensemble of procedures which do not content themselves with bringing scientists back to "reason," but which prevents all deviance on their part, imposes goals upon them, and which makes of science and scientists a perfectly subjugated instance to the formation of sovereignty (example, the way in which indeterminism was tolerated only up to a point, then ordered to effect its reconciliation with determinism). But the other pole is the schizoid pole, in the vicinity of which the flux of knowledge schizophrenize, and flee not only across the social axiomatic, but pass through their own axiomatics, engendering signs increasingly deterritorialized, schiz-figures which are no longer figurative nor structured, and reproduce or produce a play of phenomena without aim nor end: science as experimentation, in the sense previously defined. In this domain as in the others, is there not a properly libidinal conflict between a paranoiac-oedipianizing element of science, and a schizo-revolutionary element? This very conflict which makes Lacan say that there exists a drama of the scientist ("J. R. Mayer, Cantor, I am not going to draw up a list of these dramas going sometimes to madness…, and which could not here include itself in Oedipus, except by putting it in question": since, in effect, Oedipus does not intervene there as familial figure nor even as mental structure, but under the guise of an axiomatic as oedipianizing factor, from which results a specifically scientific Oedipus). And, to the song of Lautréamont which rises around the paranoiac-oedipal-narcissistic pole, O severe mathematics… Arithmetic! algebra! geometry! grandiose trinity! luminous triangle!, another song opposes itself, O schizophrenic Mathematics, uncontrollable and mad machines of desire!…

336In the formation of capitalist sovereignty (full body of capital-money as socius), the great social axiomatic has replaced the territorial codes and despotic overcoding that characterized preceding formations; thus an aggregate, molar, gregarious, has formed, whose subjection has no equal. We have seen on what bases this aggregate functioned: an entire field of immanence that reproduces itself at an ever larger scale, that ceases not to multiply its axioms as much as it needs them, that fills itself with images and images of images, through which desire is determined to desire its own repression (imperialism), — a decoding and deterritorialization without precedent, which institute a conjugation as system of differential relations between decoded and deterritorialized flux, in such a way that social inscription and repression no longer even need to bear directly on bodies and persons, but rather precede them (axiomatic, régulation and application), — a surplus-value determined as surplus-value of flux, whose extortion does not occur through simple arithmetic difference between two homogeneous quantities of the same code, but precisely through differential relations between heterogeneous magnitudes that are not at the same power: flux of capital and flux of labor as human surplus-value in the industrial essence of capitalism, flux of financing and flux of payment or revenues in the monetary inscription of capitalism, flux of market and flux of innovation as machinic surplus-value in the commercial and banking functioning of capitalism (surplus-value as first aspect of immanence), — a ruling class all the more ruthless in that it does not put the machine at its service, but is the servant of the capitalist machine: unique class in this sense, contenting itself for its account with drawing revenues which, however enormous they may be, have only an arithmetic difference with the wage-revenues of workers, while it functions more profoundly as creator, regulator and guardian of the great unappropriated flux, unpossessed, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks at each instant the interior limits of capitalism, their perpetual displacement and their reproduction at an enlarged scale (play of interior limits as second aspect of the capitalist field of immanence, defined by the circular relation "great flux of financing-reflux of wage revenues-afflux of gross profit"), — the effusion of anti-production into production, as realization or absorption of surplus-value, in such a way that the military, bureaucratic and police apparatus finds itself founded in economy itself, which produces directly libidinous investments of the repression of desire (anti-production as third aspect of immanence, expressing the double nature of capitalism, produce to produce, but in the conditions of capital). There is not one of these aspects, not the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism, which does not manifest the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all false rationality, but true rationality of this pathological, of this dementia, "for the machine functions, be assured of it"). It does not risk becoming madness, from one end to the other it has been so from the beginning, and it is from there that its rationality emerges. The black humor of Marx, the source of Capital, is his fascination for such a machine: how it managed to assemble itself, on what ground of decoding and deterritorialization, how it functions, ever more decoded, ever more deterritorialized, how it functions all the harder through the axiomatic, through the conjugation of flux, how it produces the terrible unique class of grey little men who maintain the machine, how it does not risk dying on its own, but rather causes us to die, in raising up to the very end investments of desire that do not even pass through a deceptive and subjective ideology, and which make us cry to the very end Long live capital in its reality, in its objective dissimulation! There has never been, except in ideology, humanistic, liberal, paternal capitalism, etc. Capitalism defines itself by a cruelty without measure in common with the primitive system of cruelty, a terror without measure in common with the despotic régime of terror. Wage increases, improvement of standard of living are realities, but realities that flow from this or that additional axiom that capitalism always has the capacity to add to its axiomatic depending on an enlargement of its limits (let us make the New Deal, let us favor and recognize strong unions, let us promote participation, the unique class, let us take a step toward Russia which does so much toward us, etc.). But, in the enlarged reality that conditions these islands, exploitation ceases not to harden, lack is arranged in the most learned manner, final solutions of the "Jewish problem" type prepared very meticulously, the third world organized as an integral part of capitalism. The reproduction of the interior limits of capitalism at an ever larger scale has several consequences: to permit at the center increases and improvements of level, to displace the hardest forms of exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also to multiply within the center itself enclaves of overexploitation, to support easily the so-called socialist formations (it is not kibbutz socialism that troubles the Zionist State, any more than Russian socialism troubles world capitalism). It is not by metaphor that one observes: factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they are them.

337Everything is demented in the system: it is that the capitalist machine nourishes itself on decoded and deterritorialized flux; it decodes and deterritorializes them even further, but by making them pass through an axiomatic apparatus that conjugates them, and which, at the points of conjugations, produces pseudo-codes and artificial re-territorializations. It is in this sense that capitalist axiomatics cannot dispense with constantly producing new territorialities and resurrecting new despotic Urstaaten. The great mutant flux of capital is pure deterritorialization, but operates as much re-territorialization when it converts itself into reflux of means of payment. The Third World is deterritorialized with respect to the center of capitalism, but belongs to capitalism, is a pure peripheral territoriality of it. The preconscious investments of class and interest swarm. And first capitalistas have an interest in capitalism. An observation so flat is there for something else: it is that they have interest only through the extraction of profits they draw from it, and which, however enormous, does not define capitalism. And, for what defines capitalism, for what conditions profit, they have an investment of desire, of a wholly other nature, libidinal-unconscious, which does not explain itself simply through the conditioned profits, but which explains on the contrary that a small capitalist, without great profit nor hope, maintains integrally the entirety of his investments: libido for the great flux non-convertible as such, non-appropriated as such, "non-possession and non-wealth" — as Bernard Schmitt says who, among modern economists, has for us the incomparable advantage of giving a delirious interpretation of an exactly delirious economic system (at least he goes all the way). In short, a truly unconscious libido, a disinterested love: it is tremendous, this machine. Henceforth, and always departing from the tautological observation from before, one understands that men whose preconscious investments of interest do not go or should not go in the direction of capitalism, maintain an unconscious libidinal investment conforming to capitalism, or which scarcely threatens it. Either they confine, localize their preconscious interest in wage increase and improvement of standard of living; powerful organizations represent them, which become mean as soon as one questions the nature of the aims ("One can see well that you are not workers, you have no idea of real struggles, let us attack profits for better management of the system, vote for a clean Paris, Welcome Mr. Brezhnev"). And, indeed, how would one not find one's interest in the hole where one has oneself dug it, within the capitalist system? Or, second case: there is truly new investment of interest, of new aims, which suppose another body than that of capital-money, the exploited become conscious of their preconscious interest, and this is truly revolutionary, great cut from the point of view of the preconscious. But it does not suffice that libido invest a new social body corresponding to these new aims, for it to operate at the level of the unconscious a revolutionary cut that would have the same mode as that of the preconscious. Precisely, the two levels do not have the same mode. The new socius invested as full body by libido can very well function as an autonomous territoriality, but seized and enclosed within the capitalist machine, and localizable in the field of its market. For the great flux of mutant capital pushes back its limits, adds new axioms, maintains desire within the mobile framework of its enlarged limits. There can be a preconscious revolutionary cut, without real libidinal and unconscious revolutionary cut. Or rather the order of things is the following: there is first real libidinal revolutionary cut, then which slides into a simple revolutionary cut of aims and interest, finally, which reforms only a specific re-territoriality, a specific body on the full body of capital. The subjected groups cease not to derive revolutionary subject-groups. One more axiom. It is not more complicated than for abstract painting. Everything begins with Marx, continues with Lenin, and ends on "Welcome, Mr. Brezhnev." Is it still revolutionaries who speak to a revolutionary, or a village that demands the coming of a new prefect? And if one asks when it begins to turn badly, how far back must one go, back to Lenin, back to Marx? So much the diverse and opposed investments can coexist in complexes that are not those of Oedipus, but which concern the historical social field, its conflicts and its preconscious and unconscious contradictions, and of which one can only say that they fall back on Oedipus, Marx-father, Lenin-father, Brezhnev-father. Fewer and fewer people believe in it, but it has no importance, since capitalism is like Christian religion, it lives precisely from the lack of belief, it has no need of it — motley painting of all that has been believed.

338But here the inverse is equally true: capitalism never ceases by all extremities. Its productions, its organs, its science form decoded and deterritorialized flux that submit not only to the corresponding axiomatic, but that pass certain of their currents through the meshes of the axiomatic, beneath the recodages and re-territorializations. In their turn, subject-groups derive by rupture from subjected groups. Capitalism never ceases to tourniquet the flux, to cut them and to retreat the cut, but these never cease to pour forth, and to cut themselves according to schizes that turn back against capitalism, and that slit it. Always ready to enlarge its interior limits, capitalism remains threatened by an exterior limit that risks coming to it and cleaving it from within all the more as interior limits enlarge. This is why lines of flight are singularly creative and positive: they constitute an investment of the social field, no less complete, no less total than the contrary investment. The paranoiac investment and the schizoïd investment are like two opposite poles of unconscious libidinal investment, one of which subordinates the production of desire to the formation of sovereignty and to the gregarious ensemble that follows from it, and the other effectuates the inverse subordination, reverses power and submits the gregarious ensemble to the molecular multiplicities of the productions of desire. And if it is true that delirium is coextensive with the social field, one sees in every delirium the two poles coexist, and fragments of revolutionary schizoïd investment coincide with blocks of reactionary paranoiac investment. The oscillation between the two poles is even constitutive of delirium. Nevertheless, it appears that the oscillation is not equal, and that the schizoïd pole is rather potential with respect to the paranoiac pole actual (how to count on art and on science otherwise than as potentialities, since their very actuality is easily controlled by formations of sovereignty?). It is that the two poles of unconscious libidinal investment do not have the same rapport, nor the same form of rapport, with the preconscious investments of interest. On one side, in effect, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers its irrational character under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else it itself provokes and creates these interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or, much more still, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment maintains integrally a paranoiac investment at the level of libido, insofar as the new socius continues to subordinate to itself all the production of desire in the name of the superior interests of the revolution and the inevitable chains of causality. In the other case, it is necessary that preconscious interest discover on the contrary the necessity of an investment of another species, and that it operate a sort of rupture of causality as a calling into question of aims and interests. It is that the problem is not the same: it does not suffice to construct a new socius as a full body, but to pass over the other face of this social full body where the molecular formations of desire exercise themselves and inscribe themselves, formations that must enslave the new molar ensemble. It is only there that one attains to the cut and to the unconscious revolutionary investment of libido. Now this can only be done at the price and in favor of a rupture of causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs, and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other. Never an individual exile, never a personal desert, but a collective exile and desert. It is too obvious that the fate of the revolution is solely linked to the interest of the exploited and dominated masses. But the problem is the nature of this link, as determined causal link or as liaison of another sort. It is a matter of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very rapport with the exploited masses or the "weakest links" of a given system. Do these act in their place, in the order of causes and aims that promote a new socius, or on the contrary are they the site and agent of a sudden unexpected irruption, irruption of desire that breaks with causes and aims, and that turns the socius over on its other face? In subjected groups, desire is still defined by an order of causes and aims, and weaves itself an entire system of macroscopic relations that determine the grand ensembles under a formation of sovereignty. Subject-groups on the contrary have for sole cause a rupture of causality, a revolutionary line of flight; and although one can and must assign in the causal series the objective factors that have made possible such a rupture, such as the most fragile links, only what is of the order of desire and its irruption accounts for the reality it takes at such a moment, in such a place. One clearly sees how everything can coexist and mix: in the "Leninist cut," when the Bolshevik group or at least a part of this group perceives the immediate possibility of a proletarian revolution that would not follow the foreseen causal order of force relations, but would abruptly rush things by driving into a breach (the flight or "revolutionary defeatism"), everything truly coexists: preconscious investments still hesitant in some who do not believe in this possibility, revolutionary preconscious investments in those who "see" the possibility of a new socius but maintain it in an order of molar causality that already makes of the party a new form of sovereignty, finally unconscious revolutionary investments that operate a true rupture of causality in the order of desire. And in the same men, the most diverse types of investments can coexist at such or such moment, the two types of groups can interpenetrate. It is that the two groups are like determinism and freedom in Kant: they indeed have the same "object," and never is social production anything other than the production of desire, and inversely, but they do not have the same law or the same régime. The actualization of a revolutionary potentiality is explained less by the state of preconscious causality in which it is nevertheless comprised, than by the effectivity of a libidinal cut at a precise moment, schize whose sole cause is desire, that is to say the rupture of causality that forces one to rewrite history within the real itself and produces this strangely polyvalent moment where all is possible. Of course, the schize has been prepared by an underground work of causes, aims and interests; of course, this order of causes risks closing itself, and caulking the breach in the name of the new socius and its interests. Of course, one can always afterward say that history has never ceased to be governed by the same laws of ensemble and large numbers. It remains that the schize came into existence only through an aimless and causeless desire that traced it and married it. Impossible without the order of causes, it becomes real only through something of another order: Desire, desire-desert, the investment of revolutionary desire. And it is precisely this that mines capitalism: whence will the revolution come, and under what form in the exploited masses? It is like death: where, when? A decoded flux, deterritorialized, that flows too far, that cuts too fine, escaping the axiomatic of capitalism. A Castro, an Arab, a Black-Panther, a Chinese on the horizon? A May 68, a mao from within, planted like the anchorite on a factory chimney? Always add an axiom to caulk the preceding breach, the fascist colonels begin to read Mao, one will no longer let oneself be caught, Castro became impossible, even with respect to himself, one isolates the vacuoles, one makes ghettos, one calls syndicates to the aid, one invents the most sinister forms of "dissuasion," one reinforces the repression of interest — but whence will come the new irruption of desire?

339Those who will have read us this far may perhaps have many reproaches to make against us: believing too much in the pure potentialities of art and even of science; denying or minimizing the role of classes and class struggle; advocating an irrationalism of desire; identifying the revolutionary with the schizo; falling into all these known, all too known traps. This would be a bad reading, and we do not know what is better, a bad reading or no reading at all. And surely there are other reproaches far more serious, which we have not thought of. But, regarding the preceding ones, we say first of all that art and science have a revolutionary potentiality, and nothing else, and that this potentiality appears all the more as one asks less what they mean, from the point of view of signifieds or of a signifier necessarily reserved to specialists; but they make flow through the socius flows increasingly decoded and deterritorialized, sensible to everyone, which force the social axiomatic to complicate itself more and more, to saturate itself further, to the point that the artist and the scientist can be determined to join an objective revolutionary situation in reaction against the authoritarian planifications of a State essentially incompetent and above all castrating (for the State imposes a properly artistic Oedipus, a properly scientific Oedipus). Secondly, we have not at all minimized the importance of preconscious investments of class and interest, which are founded in the infrastructure itself; but we attach all the more importance to them as they are in the infrastructure the index of libidinal investments of another nature, and which can be reconciled with them, or be in contrariety with them. Which is only a way of posing the question "How can the revolution be betrayed?", once it is said that betrayals do not wait, but are there from the beginning (maintenance of unconscious paranoiac investments in revolutionary groups). And if we invoke desire as revolutionary instance, it is because we believe that capitalist society can support many manifestations of interest, but no manifestation of desire, which would suffice to make its basic structures explode, even at the level of nursery school. We believe in desire as the irrationality of all rationality, and not because it is lack, thirst or aspiration, but because it is production of desire and desire that produces, real-desire or real in itself. Finally, we do not at all think that the revolutionary is schizophrenic or the inverse. On the contrary, we have not ceased to distinguish the schizophrenic as entity, and schizophrenia as process; now the latter can only be defined in relation to the arrests, the continuations in the void or the finalist illusions that repression imposes on the process itself. Which is why we have only spoken of a schizoidal pole in the libidinal investment of the social field, to avoid as much as possible the confusion of the schizophrenic process with the production of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic process (schizoidal pole) is revolutionary, in the very sense that the paranoiac procedure is reactionary and fascist; and, freed from all familialism, it is not these psychiatric categories that must make us understand the economico-political determinations, but exactly the opposite.

340And then, above all, we are not seeking any evasion in saying that schizo-analysis as such has strictly no political program to propose. If it had one, it would be at once grotesque and disturbing. It does not take itself for a party, nor even for a group, and does not claim to speak in the name of the masses. A political program is not supposed to be elaborated within the framework of schizo-analysis. Finally something that does not claim to speak in the name of anything whatsoever, not even and especially not in the name of psychoanalysis: nothing but impressions, impression that things are going badly in psychoanalysis, and that they have been going badly from the beginning. We are still too competent, we would like to speak in the name of an absolute incompetence. Someone asked us if we had ever seen a schizophrenic, no, no, we have never seen one. If someone finds that things are going well in psychoanalysis, we do not speak for him, and for him we withdraw everything we have said. So, what is the relation of schizo-analysis to politics on the one hand, to psychoanalysis on the other? Everything turns around machines of desire and the production of desire. Schizo-analysis as such does not pose the problem of the nature of the socius that must issue from revolution; it in no way claims to be valid for revolution itself. Given a socius, it only asks what place it reserves for desiring production, what motor role desire has there, under what forms the reconciliation of the régime of desiring production and the régime of social production is made there, since it is the same production in any case, but under two different régimes — if there is therefore, on this socius as full body, the possibility of passing from one face to the other, that is, from the face where molar ensembles of social production are organized, to this other face no less collective where molecular multiplicities of desiring production are formed, — if such a socius can, and to what extent, support the reversal of power that makes desiring production subjugate social production, and yet not destroy it, since it is the same production under the difference of régime, — if there is, and how, formation of subject-groups, etc. And if one answers us that we are claiming the famous rights to laziness, or to unproductivity, or to the production of dream and fantasy, once again we are quite pleased, since we have not stopped saying the contrary, and that desiring production produced the real, and that desire had little to do with fantasy and dream. Contrary to Reich, schizo-analysis makes no distinction of nature between political economy and libidinal economy. It only asks what are on a socius the machinic, social and technical indices, that open onto machines of desire, that enter into the pieces, gears and motors of those, just as they make those enter into their own pieces, gears and motors. Everyone knows that a schizo is a machine; all schizos say it, and not only little Joey. The question is to know whether schizophrenics are the living machines of dead labor, which one then opposes to the dead machines of living labor as one organizes it in capitalism. Or rather whether machines of desire, technical and social, marry themselves in a process of schizophrenic production which, from then on, no longer has schizophrenics to produce. When Maud Mannoni in her Letter to Ministers writes: "One of these adolescents, declared unfit for studies, follows a third-form class quite honorably, on condition that he do mechanics. Mechanics passions him. The garage mechanic has been his best caregiver. If we take mechanics from him he will become schizophrenic again," she does not have the intention of praising ergotherapy, nor the virtues of social adaptation. She marks the point where the social machine, the technical machine, the machine of desire marry themselves closely and make their régimes communicate. She asks if this society is capable of this, and what it is worth if it is not capable of it. And it is indeed the sense of social, technical, scientific, artistic machines, when they are revolutionary: to form machines of desire of which they are already the index in their own régime, at the same time that machines of desire form them, in the régime that is theirs and as position of desire.

341What finally is the opposition of schizo-analysis with psychoanalysis, in the ensemble of its negative and positive tasks? We have not ceased to oppose two sorts of unconscious or two interpretations of the unconscious: one, schizo-analytic, the other, psychoanalytic; one, schizophrenic, the other neurotic-oedipal; one abstract and non-figurative, and the other, imaginary; but, equally, one really concrete, and the other symbolic; one machinic, and the other structural; one molecular, micropsychic and micrological, the other molar or statistical; one material, and the other ideological; one productive, and the other expressive. We have seen how the negative task of schizo-analysis must be violent, brutal: to defamiliarize, to de-oedipianize, to de-castrate, to de-phallicize, to undo theatre, dream and fantasy, to decode, to deterritorialize — an awful scraping, a malevolent activity. But everything happens at the same time. For, at the same time, the process liberates itself, process of desiring production following its molecular lines of flight that already define the mechanic task of the schizo-analyst. And further the lines of flight are full molar or social investments, that bite into the entire social field: such that the task of schizo-analysis is finally to discover in each case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible interior conflicts, their relations with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these, in short, the entire play of machines of desire and the repression of desire. To accomplish the process, not to stop it, not to make it run empty, not to give it an aim. One will never go far enough in deterritorialization, the decoding of flux. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing") is not in the neurotic or perverse re-territorializations that stop the process or fix aims for it, it is not more behind than ahead, it coincides with the accomplishment of the process of desiring production, this process that finds itself always already accomplished in that it proceeds, and insofar as it proceeds. It remains for us therefore to see how effectively, simultaneously, these diverse tasks of schizo-analysis proceed.