Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

CHAPTER 1 - The 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 there are machines, not at all metaphorically, machines of machines, with their couplings, their connections. An organ-machine is connected to a source-machine: the one emits a flux, which the other cuts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth, a machine coupled to it. 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 tinkerers; each one his little machines. An organ-machine for an energy-machine, always fluxes and cuts. President Schreber has the rays of heaven in his ass. Solar anus. And be sure that it works; President Schreber feels something, produces something, and can construct the theory of it. Something is produced: machine effects, and not metaphors.

2The schizophrenic's stroll: it is a better model than the neurotic lying on the divan. A bit of fresh air, a relation with the outside. For example Lenz's stroll as reconstituted by Büchner.{1} It is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself again at the home of his good pastor, who forces him to locate himself socially, in relation to the God of religion, in relation to the father, to the mother. There, on the contrary, he is in the mountains, under the snow, with other gods or without any 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 makes machine. Celestial machines, the stars or the rainbow, alpine machines, which couple with those of his body. Uninterrupted noise of machines. "He thought it must be a feeling of infinite beatitude to be touched by the profound life of every form, to have a soul for stones, metals, water, and plants, to welcome into oneself all the objects of nature, dreamily, as flowers absorb air with the waxing and waning of the moon." To be a chlorophyllic machine, or one of photosynthesis, or at least to slip one's body as a part into such machines. Lenz has placed himself before the man-nature distinction, before all the locatings this distinction conditions. He does not live nature as nature, but as process of production. There is no longer either man or nature, but solely process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines. Everywhere productive or desiring machines, the schizophrenic machines, all of generic life: *moi* and non-*moi*, exterior and interior no longer mean anything.

3Sequel to the schizo's stroll, when Beckett's characters decide to go out. One must first see how their varied gait is itself a meticulous machine. And then the bicycle: in what relation does the bicycle-horn machine stand to the mother-anus machine? "To speak of bicycles and horns, what a rest. Unfortunately it is not of that that it is a question but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole of her arse if my memory is correct." Oedipus, one often believes, is easy, is given. But it is not so: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of the machines of desire. And why, to what end? Is it really necessary or desirable to bend to it? And with what? What to put into the Oedipal triangle, with what to form it? The bicycle horn and my mother's ass, does that do the trick? Are there not more important questions? An effect being given, what machine can produce it? and a machine being given, what can it serve for? For example, guess from the geometrical description of a knife-rest what its use is. Or else, before a complete machine formed of six stones in the right pocket of my coat (pocket that discharges), five in the right pocket of my trousers, five in the left pocket of my trousers (transmission pockets), the last pocket of the coat receiving the used stones as the others advance, what is the effect of this circuit of distribution into which the mouth itself inserts itself as stone-sucking machine? What is here the production of *Voluptas*? At the end of *Malone Dies*, Mme Pédale takes the schizophrenics out on a stroll, by char-à-bancs, by boat, on a picnic into nature: an infernal machine is being prepared.

4We do not claim to fix 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 part industry opposes itself to nature, in part it draws materials from it, in part it restitutes its waste to it, etc. This distinctive relation 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 developed formal structure, presupposes (as Marx showed) not only capital and the division of labor, but the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily takes of itself and of the fixed elements of an overall process. For in truth — the dazzling and black truth that lies in delirium — there are no relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and registration, registration and consumption directly determine production, but determine it within production itself. So that everything is production: productions of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of registrations, of distributions and of locatings; productions of consumptions, of *voluptas*, of anxieties and of pains. Everything is so thoroughly production that registrations are immediately consumed, consummated, and consumptions directly reproduced.{3} Such is the first sense of process: to carry registration and consumption into production itself, to make of them the productions of one and the same process.

5In the second place, there is no further man-nature distinction: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man are identified within nature as production or industry, that is to say also within the generic life of man. Industry is then 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 the one who is touched by the deep life of all forms or all genera, who is charged with the stars and even the animals, and who does not cease connecting an organ-machine to an energy-machine, a tree in his body, a breast in the mouth, the sun in the ass: eternal functionary of the machines of the universe. This is the second sense of process; man and nature are not like two terms facing one another, even taken in a relation of causation, of comprehension or of expression (cause-effect, subject-object, etc.), but one and the same essential reality of producer and product. Production as process overflows all ideal categories and forms a cycle that relates itself 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 brutal and premature halt, is the causation of the artificial schizophrenic, such as one sees in the hospital, autisticized rag produced as entity. Lawrence says of love: "Of a process we have made a goal; the end of every process is not its own continuation to infinity, but its accomplishment… The process must tend toward its accomplishment, not toward some horrible intensification, some horrible extremity where soul and body end by perishing."{5} It is with schizophrenia as with love: there is no schizophrenic specificity nor entity, schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive machines of desire, universal primary production as "essential reality of man and nature."

6Machines of desire are binary machines, with a binary rule or associative régime; always a machine coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, has a connective form: "and," "and then"… This is because 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 since the first is in turn connected to another in relation to which it behaves as cut or extraction, the binary series is linear in all directions. Desire does not cease to effectuate the coupling of continuous fluxes and of partial objects essentially fragmentary and fragmented. Desire makes flow, flows and cuts. "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flux that carries away the unfertilized eggs…," says Miller in his song of desire{6}. Bag of waters and kidney stones; 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 fluxes, cut again by other partial objects. Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flux, every flux the fragmentation of the object. No doubt each organ-machine 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 — speaking, hearing, shitting, fucking… 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.

7The coupling of the connective synthesis, partial object-flux, therefore also has another form, product-producing. Producing is always grafted onto the product, this is why desiring production is production of production, like every machine, machine of machine. One cannot rest content with the idealist category of expression. One cannot, one should not think of describing the schizophrenic object without connecting it to the process of production. The *Cahiers de l'art brut* are the living demonstration of this (and at the same time 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: "Once it had been noticed, it continued to occupy the mind. It even continued I don't know what, its own affair no doubt… What was striking was that, not being simple, it was not really complex either, complex from the start or by intention or by a complicated plan. Rather de-simplified as it was worked on… As it was, it was a table with additions, as certain drawings by so-called overloaded schizophrenics are made, and if it was finished, it was in the measure that there was no longer any way to add anything to it, a table that had become more and more a heaping-up, less and less table… It was suited to no use, to nothing that is expected of a table. Heavy, cumbersome, it was barely transportable. One did not know how to take hold of it (neither mentally nor manually). The top, the useful part of the table, progressively reduced, was disappearing, being so little in relation to the cumbersome frame that one no longer thought of the whole as a table, but as a piece of furniture apart, an unknown instrument for 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 defended itself, refused itself to service and to communication. In it something dismayed, petrified. It could have made one think of a motor stopped."{7} The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no occasion here to distinguish producing and its product. At least the produced object carries its here into a new producing. The table continues its "own affair." The top is eaten by the frame. The non-termination of the table is an imperative of production. When Lévi-Strauss defines tinkering, he proposes a set of well-connected characters: the possession of a stock or of a code that is multiple, heteroclite, and all the same limited; the capacity to make fragments enter into ever new fragmentations; from which follows an indifference of producing and product, of the instrumental set and the set to be realized{8}. The tinkerer's satisfaction when he connects something to an electrical conduit, when he diverts a water conduit, would be very poorly explained by a game of "papa-mama" 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, as we shall see, this is already true of the child).

8Producing, a product, an identity product-producing… It is this identity that forms a third term in the linear series: enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops a moment, everything freezes (then everything will start again). In a certain way, it would be better if nothing worked, nothing functioned. Not to be born, to escape the wheel of births, no mouth to suckle, no anus to shit. Will the machines be unhinged enough, their parts detached enough to deliver themselves and deliver us to nothingness? It seems that the fluxes of energy are still too bound, the partial objects still too organic. But a pure fluid in the free state and without cut, gliding over a filled body. The machines of desire make us an organism; but at the heart of 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 and quite upright stoppage" in the middle of the process, as third moment: "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No stomach. No belly. No anus." The automatons stop and let rise the unorganized mass they articulated. The filled body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered it, there where he was, without form and without figure. Death drive, such is its name, and death is not without model. For desire desires that too, death, because the filled 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 very question is the product of abstraction. The machines of desire work only by being unhinged, by ceaselessly unhinging themselves. President Schreber "long lived without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn esophagus, without a bladder, with crushed ribs; he had sometimes partly eaten his own larynx, and so on." The body without organs is the unproductive; and yet it is produced in its place and at 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 of an originary nothingness, any more than it is the remainder of a lost totality. Above all it is not a projection; nothing to do with one's own body, or with an image of the body. It is the body without image. It, the unproductive, exists there where it is produced, at the third moment of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinjected into production. The catatonic body is produced in the bathwater. The filled 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.

SECTION 2

9Between the machines of desire and the body without organs an apparent conflict rises up. Each connection of machines, each production of machine, each noise of machine has become unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it feels repugnant larvae and worms, and the action of a God who botches it or strangles it by organizing it. "The body is the body / it is alone / and has no need of organ / 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 organ-machines, the body without organs opposes its smooth, opaque and taut surface. To the bound, connected and recut fluxes, it opposes its amorphous undifferentiated fluid. To phonetic words, it opposes breaths and cries that are so many inarticulate blocks. We believe that so-called originary repression has no other meaning: not a "counter-investment," but this repulsion of the machines of desire by the body without organs. And this is indeed what the paranoiac machine signifies, the action of effraction of the machines of desire upon the body without organs, and the repulsive reaction of the body without organs which experiences them globally as an apparatus of persecution. Therefore we cannot follow Tausk when he sees in the paranoiac machine a simple projection of the "body proper" and of the genital organs.{10} The genesis of the machine takes place on the spot, in the opposition between the process of production of the machines of desire and the unproductive standstill of the body without organs. To this attest the anonymous character of the machine and the indifferentiation of its surface. Projection intervenes only secondarily, just as does counter-investment, insofar as the body without organs invests a counter-inside or a counter-outside, in the form of a persecuting organ or of an exterior 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 body without organs, insofar as the latter can no longer bear them.

10But if we want to have an idea of the ulterior 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 concerning the nature and the relation of the two productions, nor even the question of whether there are in fact two productions. It is simply that the forms of social production likewise imply an unengendered unproductive station, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a filled body determined as *socius*. It can be the body of the earth, or the despotic body, or else capital. It is of this body that Marx says: it is not the product of labor, but appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it is not content to oppose itself to the productive forces in themselves. It falls back upon all of production, constitutes a surface upon which the forces and agents of production are distributed, so that it appropriates the surplus product and attributes to itself the whole and the parts of the process which now seem to emanate from it as from a quasi-cause. Forces and agents become its power in a miraculous form, they seem miraculated by it. In short, the *socius* as filled 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 this is not a delirium of consciousness, or rather false consciousness is true consciousness of a false movement, true perception of an apparent objective movement, true perception of the movement that produces itself on the surface of registration. Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, it is going to give to the sterility of money the form under which the latter produces money. It produces surplus-value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, buds, and extends to the bounds of the universe. It charges the machine with manufacturing a relative surplus-value, while incarnating itself in it as fixed capital. And upon capital the machines and agents hook themselves, to the point that their very functioning is miraculated by it. Everything seems (objectively) produced by capital as quasi-cause. As Marx says, in the beginning the capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between labor and capital, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But there is soon installed a perverse, bewitched world, at the same time as capital plays the role of surface of registration that falls back upon all of production (to furnish surplus-value, or to realize it, such is the right of registration). "In proportion as relative surplus-value develops in the specifically capitalist system and the social productivity of labor increases, the productive forces and the social connections of labor seem to detach themselves from the productive process and to pass from labor to capital. Capital thus becomes a most mysterious being, for all the productive forces seem to be born within it and to belong to it."{11} And what is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as filled body to form the surface of inscription or of registration. But some filled body or other, body of the earth or of the despot, a surface of registration, an apparent objective movement, a perverse fetishistic bewitched world belong to all types of society as a constant of social reproduction.

11The body without organs falls back on desiring production, and attracts it, appropriates it for itself. The organ-machines hook onto it as onto a fencer's vest, or like medals on the jersey of a wrestler who steps forward making them jiggle. A machine of attraction succeeds, can thus succeed the repulsive machine: a miraculating machine after the paranoiac machine. But what does "after" mean? The two coexist, and black humor takes it upon itself not to resolve contradictions, but to make it so that there are none, that there have never been any. The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as surface for the registration of the entire process of the production of desire, so that the machines of desire seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that relates them to it. The organs are regenerated, miraculated on the body of President Schreber who attracts to himself the rays of God. No doubt the old paranoiac machine subsists in the form of mocking voices that seek to "de-miraculate" the organs and in particular the President's anus. But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted surface of inscription or registration that attributes to itself all the productive forces and the organs of production, and that acts as quasi-cause by 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.

12Only, production is not registered in the same way it is produced. Or rather, it is not reproduced within the apparent objective movement in the same way it was produced in the process of constitution. This is because we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of registration, whose law is not the same as that of 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 body without organs (as from labor to capital), one would say that they come under another law which expresses a distribution in relation to the non-productive element as "natural or divine presupposition" (the disjunctions of capital). On the body without organs, the machines hook themselves on 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 hooked onto the body without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two come back to the same on the slippery surface. Whereas the "or" claims to mark decisive choices between impermutable terms (alternative), the "either" designates the system of possible permutations between differences that always come back to the same as they shift, as they slip. Thus for the speaking mouth and the walking feet: "It would happen to him to stop without saying anything. Either because in the end he had nothing to say. Or because while having something to say he in the end gave it up… Other principal cases come to mind. Continuous immediate communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart. Delayed continuous communication with immediate restart. Same thing with delayed restart. Discontinuous immediate 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 most meager and most moving capital, like Malone's properties, writes on his body the litany of disjunctions, and builds himself a world of parades in which the most minuscule permutation is supposed to answer to the new situation or to the indiscreet interpellator. The disjunctive synthesis of registration therefore comes to cover over the connective syntheses of production. The process as process of production prolongs 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 is transformed 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 body without organs is not God, quite the contrary. But divine is the energy that traverses it, when it attracts all production and serves it as enchanted miraculating surface, inscribing it in all its disjunctions. Whence the strange relations 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 to the master of the disjunctive syllogism, as to the a priori principle of this syllogism (God defined as the Omnitudo realitatis from which all derived realities issue by division).

13Divine, therefore, is only the character of an energy of disjunction. Schreber's divine is inseparable from the disjunctions in which it divides itself within itself: anterior empires, posterior empires; posterior empires of a superior God, and of an inferior God. Freud strongly marks the importance of these disjunctive syntheses in Schreber's delirium in particular, but also in delirium in general. "Such a splitting is altogether characteristic of paranoid psychoses. They divide whereas hysteria condenses. Or rather, these psychoses resolve back into their elements the condensations and identifications carried out in the unconscious imagination."{13} But why does Freud thus add that, on reflection, hysterical neurosis is primary and that the disjunctions are obtained only through the projection of a primordial condensate? Doubtless it is a way of maintaining the rights of Oedipus within the God of delirium and within schizo-paranoid registration. That is why we must pose the most general question on this point: 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 not Oedipus a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as it proposes to domesticate a genealogical matter and form that escapes it on every side? For it is certain that the schizo is hailed, never ceases to be so. Precisely because its relation with nature is not a specific pole, it is hailed in the terms of the social code in force: your name, your father, your mother? In the course of its exercises of desiring production, Molloy is hailed by a policeman: "Your name is Molloy, said the commissioner. Yes, I said, it comes back to me at this instant. And your mama? said the commissioner. I didn't grasp. Is her name Molloy too? 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 too? I reflected." One cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this regard: it continues to pose its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle, at the very moment when it nevertheless senses how much the phenomena called psychotic overflow this frame of reference. The psychoanalyst says that one must discover papa beneath Schreber's superior God, and why not the elder brother beneath the inferior God. Sometimes the schizophrenic grows impatient and asks to be left alone. Sometimes it enters the game, even adds to it, ready to reintroduce its own markings into the model proposed to it and which it bursts open from within (yes, it's my mother, but my mother, that's precisely the Virgin). One imagines President Schreber answering Freud: why yes, yes, yes, the talking birds are young girls, and the superior God is papa, and the inferior God is my brother. But on the sly, he re-impregnates the young girls with all the talking birds, and his father with the superior God, and his brother with the inferior God, all divine forms that complicate themselves or rather "dis-simplify themselves" as they pierce through beneath the overly simple terms and functions of the Oedipal triangle. I believe in neither father nor mother I Got No papa-mama

14Desiring production forms a linear-binary system. The filled body introduces itself as a third term in the series, but without breaking its character: 2, 1, 2, 1… The series is wholly rebellious to a transcription that would make it pass over into and mold it within a specifically ternary and triangular figure like that of Oedipus. The filled body without organs is produced as Anti-production, that is to say, intervenes as such only to reject every attempt at triangulation implying a parental production. How would you have it be produced by parents, this body that bears witness to its self-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 any projection. Yes, I have been my father and I have been my son. "I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself." The schizo has at its disposal modes of locating that are its own, because it has at its disposal first of all a particular code of registration that does not coincide with the social code or coincides with it only to parody it. The delirious, or desiring, code presents an extraordinary fluidity. One would say that the schizophrenic passes from one code to another, that it scrambles all codes, in a rapid sliding, following the questions put to it, not giving from one day to the next the same explanation, not invoking the same genealogy, not registering the same event in the same manner, even accepting, when it is imposed on it and it is not irritated, the banal Oedipal code, even at the cost of restuffing it with all the disjunctions that this code was made to exclude. Adolf Wölfli's drawings stage clocks, turbines, dynamos, celestial-machines, house-machines, etc. And their production is done in connective fashion, going from the edge toward the center by successive layers or sectors. But the "explanations" he attaches to them, and which he changes according to his mood, call upon genealogical series that constitute the registration of the drawing. Moreover, the registration folds back onto the drawing itself, in the form of lines of "catastrophe" or of "fall" that are so many disjunctions surrounded by spirals.{14} The schizo falls back on its always wobbling feet, for the simple reason that it is the same thing on all sides, in all the disjunctions. It is that, however much the organ-machines hook onto the body without organs, the latter remains no less without organs and does not become again an organism in the ordinary sense of the word. It keeps its fluid and slippery character. Likewise the agents of production settle on Schreber's body, suspend themselves from this body, such as the rays of heaven he attracts and which contain thousands of little spermatozoa. Rays, birds, voices, nerves enter into permutable relations of complex genealogy with God and the divided forms of God. But it is on the body without organs that everything takes place and is registered, even the copulations of the agents, even the divisions of God, even the gridding genealogies and their permutations. Everything is on this uncreated body like the lice in the lion's mane.

SECTION 3

15Following the sense of the word "process," registration falls back upon production, but the production of registration is itself produced by the production of production. Likewise, consumption takes up the succession of registration, but the production of consumption is produced by and in the production of registration. The reason is that on the surface of inscription something lets itself be located which is of the order of a subject. It is a strange subject, with no fixed identity, wandering over the body without organs, always at the side of the machines of desire, defined by the share it takes in the product, gathering everywhere the bonus of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states it consumes and reborn at each state. "So it is I, so it is mine…" Even suffering, as Marx says, is enjoyment of self. No doubt all desiring production is already immediately consumption and consumation, therefore "voluptas." But it is not yet so for a subject, which can locate itself only through the disjunctions of a surface of registration, in the residues of each division. President Schreber, again, has the keenest awareness of this: there is a constant rate of cosmic jouissance, such that God demands to find Voluptas in Schreber, even at the cost of a transformation of Schreber into a woman. But of this voluptas, the President experiences only a residual share, as the wage of his pains or the bonus of his becoming-woman. "It is my duty to offer God this jouissance; and if, in so doing, a little sensual pleasure happens to fall to me, I feel justified in accepting it, by way of a slight compensation for the excess of sufferings and privations that have been my lot for so many years." Just as a part of the libido as energy of production has been transformed into energy of registration (Numen), a part of the latter is transformed into energy of consumption (Voluptas). It is this residual energy that animates the third synthesis of the unconscious, the conjunctive synthesis of the "so it is…" or production of consumption.

16We must consider how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced. We were starting from the opposition between the machines of desire and the body without organs. Their repulsion, such 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 attests to it. Of Robert Gie, the excellent draftsman of paranoiac electrical machines, we are told without further specification: "It indeed seems that, failing to deliver himself from these currents that tormented him, he ended up strongly taking their side, exalting himself in figuring them in their total victory, in their triumph."{15} Freud more precisely underscores the importance of the turning point of the illness in Schreber, when the latter 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 in fact finds himself sealed into an attitude and an apparatus of transvestism, at a moment when he is practically cured and has recovered all his faculties: "I sometimes find myself standing before a mirror or elsewhere, the torso half-naked, and adorned like a woman with ribbons, false necklaces, etc.; this moreover takes place only when I am alone…" Let us borrow the name "bachelor machine" to designate this machine which succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between the machines of desire and the body without organs for the birth of a new humanity or of a glorious organism. It comes to the same thing to say that the subject is produced as a remainder, alongside the machines of desire, or that it confuses itself with this third productive machine and the residual reconciliation it operates: conjunctive synthesis of consumption in the marveling form of a "So that's what it was!"

17Michel Carrouges has isolated, under the name "bachelor machines," a certain number of fantastical machines he discovered in literature. The examples he invokes are very varied, and at first glance do not seem capable of entering into a single category: Duchamp's *Bride Stripped Bare…*, the machine in Kafka's *Penal Colony*, Raymond Roussel's machines, those of Jarry's *Supermale*, certain machines of Edgar Poe, Villiers's *Future Eve*, etc.{16} Yet the traits that ground the unity, of variable importance according to the example considered, are the following: first, the bachelor machine bears witness to an older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its shadows, its older Law. It is, however, not itself a paranoiac machine. Everything distinguishes it from one — its gears, carriage, scissors, needles, magnets, rays. Even in the tortures or the death it deals, it manifests something new, a solar power. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the miraculating character the machine owes to the inscription it harbors, although it does indeed harbor the highest inscriptions (cf. the registration placed by Edison in the *Future Eve*). There is an actual consumption of the new machine, a pleasure that can be qualified as auto-erotic, or rather automatic, in which are knotted the nuptials of a new alliance, new birth, dazzling ecstasy, as if machinic eroticism liberated other unlimited powers.

18The 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 a nearly unbearable point — a bachelor misery and glory experienced to 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 form. One often speaks of hallucinations and delirium; but the hallucinatory given (I see, I hear) and the delirious given (I think…) presuppose a deeper I feel, which gives hallucinations their object and the delirium of thought its content. An "I feel that I am becoming woman," "that I am becoming god," etc., which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory, but which is going to project the hallucination or interiorize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the truly primary emotion which at first experiences 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 the intensities themselves are in opposition to one another and balance themselves around a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive starting from the intensity = 0 which designates the filled body without organs. And they form relative falls or rises according to their complex relation and the proportion of attraction and repulsion which enters into their cause. In short, the opposition of the 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 schizoid is the Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill matter without void to varying degrees. Following the doctrine of President Schreber, attraction and repulsion produce intense nerve-states which fill the body without organs to varying degrees, and through which the Schreber-subject passes, becoming woman, becoming many other things still according to a circle of eternal return. The breasts on the bare torso of the President are neither delirious nor hallucinatory, they designate first of all a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his body without organs. The 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 within it. Nothing here is representative, but everything is life and lived: the lived emotion of the breasts does not resemble breasts, does not represent them, no more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that is going to be induced there. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds and gradients. Lacerating experience, too moving, through which the schizo is closest to matter, to an intense and living center of matter: "this emotion situated outside the particular point where the mind seeks it… this emotion which restores to the mind the overwhelming sound of matter, the whole soul flows into it and passes into its ardent fire."{18}

19How could one have figured the schizo as this autistic wreck, separated from the real and cut off from life? Worse: how could psychiatry have practically made of him this wreck, reduced him to this state of a body without organs become dead — he who installed himself at that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives each of its intensities, consumes it? And should this question not be put in relation with another, in appearance very different: how could psychoanalysis (have come) to reduce, this time the neurotic, to a poor creature who eternally consumes papa-mama, and nothing else? How could one have reduced 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 summarize this whole vital movement? According to a first path (short route): the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles of convergence around the machines of desire; then the subject, produced as residue alongside the machine, appendix or piece adjacent 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, which is 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 unnamable, "sometimes abrupt and brief, as if waltzed, sometimes with the amplitude of a parabola," with Murphy, Watt, Mercier, etc., as states, without the family being involved in any way. Or else another, more complex path, but which comes back 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 starting from 0; and the subject is born of each state of the series, is 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).

20This is what Klossowski admirably showed in his commentary on Nietzsche: the presence of the *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 in order to move away from it once more: such are the vehement oscillations that overwhelm an individual so long as he seeks only his own center and does not see the circle of which he himself is a part; for if these oscillations overwhelm him, it is because each one corresponds to an individual other than the one he believes himself to be, from the point of view of the untraceable 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." The forces of attraction and repulsion, of rising and decline, produce a series of intensive states starting from intensity = 0 which designates the body without organs ("but what is singular is that here again a new influx is necessary, merely to signify this absence"). There is not the *moi*-Nietzsche, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his reason and who would identify himself with strange personages; there is the nietzschean-subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies the names of history with these states: all the names of history, it is me. The subject is spread out along the circumference of the circle whose center *le moi* has deserted. At the center there is the machine of desire, the bachelor machine of the eternal return. Residual subject of the machine, the nietzschean-subject draws a euphoric premium (*Voluptas*) from everything it makes turn, and which the reader had believed to be only the work in fragments of Nietzsche: "Nietzsche believes that he is henceforth pursuing not the realization of a system, but the application of a program… in the form of the residues of nietzschean discourse, which have become in some way the repertoire of his histrionism." Not identifying oneself with persons, but identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time the subject cries out "It's me, therefore it's me!" Never has anyone done as much history as the schizo, and in the manner in which it does it. It consumes universal history at one go. We began by defining it as *Homo natura*, and here it is, in the end, *Homo historia*. From the one to the other, that long path that goes from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, and which precipitates itself ("Euphoria could not be sustained 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, extending over some forty years; it is the recollecting parody of an event: a single actor to mime it on a solemn day — because everything is pronounced and redisappears in a single day — even should it have lasted from December 31 to January 6 — beyond the reasonable calendar.")

SECTION 4

21The famous thesis of the psychiatrist Clérambault seems well founded: delirium, with its global systematic character, is secondary in relation to parcellar and local phenomena of automatism. In fact, delirium qualifies the registration that collects the process of production of the 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 in relation to the functioning and the misfirings of the machines of desire. However, Clérambault used the term "(mental) automatism" 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, the "personal" part, 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 contented himself with invoking the innate or the acquired character. Clérambault is the Feuerbach of psychiatry, in the sense in which Marx says: "Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not appear in him, and insofar as he takes history into consideration, he is not a materialist." A truly materialist psychiatry defines itself on the contrary by a double operation: introducing desire into mechanism, introducing production into desire.

22There is no profound difference between false materialism and 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). The first is an explanatory concept that claims to indicate the specific disorder or the primary deficit. The second is a comprehensive concept indicating the specificity of the effect: delirium itself or the cut, "detachment from reality accompanied by a relative or absolute predominance of the 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 that they relate the problem of schizophrenia to *le moi*, through the intermediary of "the image of the body" (the latest avatar of the soul, in which the demands of spiritualism and of positivism merge). And yet *le moi* is like papa-mama, the schizo no longer believes in it, and has not for a long time. It is beyond, it is behind, beneath, elsewhere, but not in those problems. And where it is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable pennilessnesses, but why want to bring it back to that from which it has emerged, to put it back into those problems that are no longer its own, to flout its truth which one believed sufficiently honored by giving it an ideal tip of the hat? It will be said that the schizo can no longer say *moi*, and that this sacred function of enunciation must be restored to it. This is what it sums up by saying: they're filthing me up again. "I'll no longer say *moi*, I'll never say it again, it's too stupid. Each time I hear it, I'll put the third person in its place, if I think of it. If it amuses them. It will change nothing." And if it says *moi* again, that changes nothing either. So far outside those problems, so far beyond. Even Freud does not get out of this narrow point of view of *le moi*. And what prevented him was his own trinitarian formula — the Oedipal, the neurotic one: papa-mama-*moi*. One will have to ask whether the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex has not led Freud to recover, and to guarantee with his authority, the unfortunate concept of autism applied to schizophrenia. Because, in the end, there is no use hiding it, Freud does not like schizophrenics, he does not like their resistance to Oedipianization, he tends rather to treat them like animals: they take words for things, he says, they are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from the real, incapable of transference, they resemble philosophers, "an undesirable resemblance." One has often wondered how to conceive analytically the relation of drives and symptoms, of the symbol and the symbolized. Is it a causal relation, or one of comprehension, or of expression? The question is posed too theoretically. Because, in fact, as soon as we are placed in Oedipus, as soon as we are measured against Oedipus, the trick is done, and the only authentic relation, which was one of production, has been suppressed. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of desiring production, of the productions of the unconscious. But, with Oedipus, this discovery was quickly occulted by a new idealism: for the unconscious as factory, an ancient theater was substituted; for the units of production of the unconscious, representation was substituted; for the productive unconscious, an unconscious was substituted that could no longer do anything but express itself (myth, tragedy, dream…).

23Each time the schizophrenic's problem is brought back to *le moi*, one can do no more than "savor" a supposed essence or specificity of the schizo, be it with love and pity, or to spit it back out with disgust. Sometimes as dissociated *moi*, sometimes as cut *moi*, sometimes, most coquettishly, as a *moi* that had not ceased to be, that was-there specifically, but in its world, and that lets itself be recovered by a clever psychiatrist, a comprehensive over-observer, in short a phenomenologist. Here again let us recall Marx's warning: from the taste of wheat one cannot divine who cultivated it, from the product one cannot divine the régime and the relations of production. The product appears all the more specific, unspeakably specific, the more it is referred to ideal forms of causation, of comprehension, or of expression, but not to the real process of production on which it depends. The schizophrenic appears all the more specific and personified the more the process is stopped, or made into an end, or made to spin in the void to infinity, so as to provoke that "horrible extremity in which soul and body end by perishing" (the Autistic one). Kraepelin's famous terminal state… As soon as, on the contrary, the material process of production is assigned, the specificity of the product tends to vanish, at the same time that the possibility of another "accomplishment" appears. Before being the affection of the artificialized schizophrenic, personified in autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and of the machines of desire. How does one pass from the one to the other, and is this passage inevitable? remains the important question. On this point as on others, Jaspers has given the most precious indications, because his "idealism" was singularly atypical. Opposing the concept of process to those of reaction or of development of the personality, he thinks the process as rupture, as intrusion, outside a fictive relation with *le moi* in order to substitute for it a relation with the "demonic" in nature. He lacked only conceiving the process as material economic reality, as process of production in the identity Nature = Industry, Nature = History.

24In a certain manner, the logic of desire misses its object from the first step: the first step of the Platonic division that makes us choose between production and acquisition. As soon as we put desire on the side of acquisition, we make of desire an idealist (dialectical, nihilist) conception that determines it first of all 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 effected in the theory of desire a critical revolution, by defining it as "the faculty of being, through one's 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 phantasies: we know well that the real object can only be produced by an external causality and external mechanisms, but this knowledge does not prevent us from believing in the interior power of desire to engender its object, were it in an unreal, hallucinatory or phantasized form, and from representing this causality in desire itself.{21} The reality of the object insofar as it is produced by desire is therefore psychic reality. Thus one can say that the critical revolution changes nothing as to the essential: this manner of conceiving productivity does not put back into question the classical conception of desire as lack, but rests upon it, props itself upon it and is content to deepen it. In fact, if desire is lack of the real object, its very reality lies in an "essence of lack" that produces the phantasized object. Desire thus conceived as production, but production of phantasies, has been perfectly expounded by psychoanalysis. At the lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object that desire lacks refers, for its part, to an extrinsic natural or social production, while desire intrinsically produces 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 thus in a study of gadgets and markets, in the most miserable form of a psychoanalysis of the object (psychoanalysis of the noodle packet, of the automobile or of the "thingamajig"). But even when the phantasy 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 that which produces the phantasy and produces itself by detaching itself from the object, but just as well by redoubling lack, by carrying it to the absolute, by making of it an "incurable insufficiency of being," a "lack-of-being which is life." Hence the presentation of desire as propped upon needs, the productivity of desire continuing to take place against the ground of needs, and of their relation of lack to the object (theory of propping). In short, when one reduces desiring production to a production of phantasy, one is content to draw all the consequences from the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, and not as production, "industrial" production. Clément Rosset puts it very well: each time one insists on a lack that desire would lack in order to define its object, "the world finds itself doubled by some other world or other, by way of the following itinerary: the object is lacking to desire; therefore the world does not contain all objects, at least one is missing from it, that of desire; therefore there exists an elsewhere which contains the key of desire (which the world lacks)."{22}

25If desire produces, it produces the real. If desire is productive, it can be so only in reality, and of reality. Desire is this ensemble of passive syntheses that machine the partial objects, the flux and the bodies, and that function as units of production. The real results 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. It is rather the subject that is lacking to desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject except by repression. Desire and its object are one, it is the machine, as machine of machine. Desire is machine, the object of desire is again connected machine, so that the product is extracted from producing, and so that something detaches itself from producing toward the product, which will give a remainder to the nomadic and vagabond subject. The objective being of desire is the Real in itself.{23} There is no particular form of existence that one could call psychic reality. As Marx says, there is no lack, there is passion as "natural and sensuous objective being." It is not desire that leans on needs, it is the contrary, it is needs that derive from desire: they are counter-produced in the real that desire produces. Lack is a counter-effect of desire, it is deposited, arranged, vacuolized in the natural and social real. Desire always holds itself near to the conditions of objective existence, it weds 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 who has lost desire by losing the passive synthesis of these conditions. Need as practice of the void has no other sense: to go looking for, to capture, to parasitize the passive syntheses where they reside. In vain do we say: we are not grass, we long ago lost the chlorophyllian synthesis, we must eat… Desire then becomes this abject fear of lacking. But precisely, this sentence, it is not the poor or the dispossessed who pronounce it. They, on the contrary, know that they are close to the grass, and that desire has "need" of few things, not those things one leaves them, but those very things one never ceases to dispossess them of, and which did not constitute a lack at 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 the 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 way all the more intense as it has little need. And too bad for those who believe that this is easy to say, or that it is an idea in books. "From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State…. The world of phantasy is the world we have not yet conquered. It is a world of the past, not of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain."{24} The living seer is Spinoza in the garb of the Neapolitan revolutionary. We know well where lack comes from — and its subjective correlate, fantasy. Lack is arranged, organized in social production. It is counter-produced by the agency of anti-production that falls back upon the productive forces and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized as a function of a prior lack, it is lack that comes to lodge itself, to vacuolize itself, to propagate itself according to the organization of a prior production.{25} 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 tip all desire into the great fear of lacking, to make the object depend on a real production supposed exterior to desire (the requirements of rationality), while the production of desire passes into fantasy (nothing other than fantasy).

26There is not on the one hand a social production of reality, and on the other 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 interiorized mental practices, or as if mental practices were projected into social systems, without the ones ever encroaching on 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 the libido, the anus, the phallus and the familial triangle, we are indulging in an agreeable 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 interiorize themselves or project themselves into one another without ceasing to be foreign, as in that famous equation money = shit. In truth, social production is solely desiring production itself under determinate conditions. We say that the social field is immediately traversed by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that the libido has no need of any 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 deathly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire, in the organization that follows from it under such or such condition that we will have to analyze. This is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy remains the one 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: more taxes! less bread! As Reich says, what is astonishing is not that some people steal, that others go on strike, but rather that the starving do not always steal and the exploited do not always go on strike: why do men endure exploitation, humiliation, slavery for centuries, to the point of willing them not only for others, but for themselves? Reich is never a greater thinker than when he refuses to invoke a misrecognition or an illusion of the masses to explain fascism, and demands an explanation through 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.{26} Yet Reich does not arrive at a sufficient answer, because in turn he restores what he was in the process of demolishing, by distinguishing rationality as it is or ought to be in the process of social production, and the irrational in desire, only the second being amenable to psychoanalysis. He thereby reserves for psychoanalysis the sole explanation of the "negative," the "subjective" and the "inhibited" in the social field. He necessarily returns to a dualism between the rationally produced real object, and the irrational phantasmatic production.{27} He renounces discovering the common measure or the coextension of the social field and desire. The fact is that, in order truly to found a materialist psychiatry, what he lacked was the category of desiring production, to which the real would be subject in its so-called rational forms as well as its irrational ones.

27The massive existence of a social repression bearing on desiring production in no way affects our principle: desire produces the real, or desiring production is nothing other than social production. There is no 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 come to duplicate them. Phantasms are rather second-order expressions, which derive from the identity of the two sorts of machines in a given milieu. Therefore the phantasm is never individual; it is a group phantasm, as institutional analysis has been able to show. And if there are two sorts of group phantasms, it is because the identity can be read in two directions, according to whether machines of desire are grasped within the great gregarious masses they form, or according to whether social machines are referred back to the elementary forces of desire that form them. It can therefore happen, in the group phantasm, that libido invests the existing social field, including in its most repressive forms; or on the contrary that it proceeds to a counter-investment that connects revolutionary desire to the existing social field (for example, the great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function not as ideal models, but as group phantasms, that is to say as agents of the real productivity of desire that render possible a disinvestment or a "deinstitution" of the actual social field, for the benefit 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 indeed a distinction, but only a distinction of régime, following relations of magnitude. They are the same machines, save for the difference of régime; and this is what group phantasms show.

28When we previously sketched a parallel between social production and desiring production, in order to show in both cases the presence of an instance of anti-production prompt to fall back upon the productive forms and appropriate them to itself, this parallelism in no way prejudged the relation between the two productions. We could only specify certain aspects concerning the distinction of régime. In the first place, technical machines obviously do not function except on the condition of not being out of order; their proper limit is wear, not breakdown. Marx can ground himself on this simple principle to show that the régime of technical machines is that of a firm distinction between the means of production and the product, thanks to which the machine transmits to the product the value, and only the value, that it loses in wearing out. Machines of desire on the contrary do not cease breaking down as they run, run only when broken down: always some producing is grafted onto the product, and the parts of the machine are also the fuel. Art often makes use of 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 are Arman's burnt violins, César's compressed cars. More generally Dali's paranoid-critical method assures the explosion of a machine of desire within an object of social production. But already Ravel preferred breakdown to wear, and substituted abrupt stops, hesitations, tremblings, misfires, breakages for the slowing-down or gradual extinction.{28} The artist is the master of objects; he integrates into his art broken, burnt, broken-down objects so as to return them to the régime of machines of desire, whose breakdown is part of the very functioning; he presents paranoiac, miraculating, bachelor machines as so many technical machines, even if it means undermining the technical machines with machines of desire. More than that, the work of art is itself machine of desire. The artist amasses his treasure for an imminent explosion, and that is why he finds that destructions, truly, do not come quickly enough.

29A second difference of régime follows from this: it is by themselves that the machines of desire produce anti-production, whereas the anti-production proper to technical machines is only produced under the extrinsic conditions of the reproduction of the process (although these conditions do not come "afterward"). That is why technical machines are not an economic category, and always refer back to a *socius* or social machine that is not to be confused with them, and that conditions this reproduction. A technical machine is therefore not a cause, but only an 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 filled body without organs, there was nonetheless an important difference. For the machines of desire are the fundamental category of the economy of desire, produce by themselves a body without organs, and do not distinguish the agents from their own parts, nor the relations of production from their own relations, nor sociality from technicity. The machines of desire are at once technical and social. It is indeed in this sense that desiring production is the site of an originary repression, whereas social production is the site of repression, and that, from the latter to the former, something is exerted that resembles the secondary repression "properly so called": everything here depends on the situation of the body without organs, or of its equivalent, according to whether it is internal result or extrinsic condition (the role of the death drive notably changes).

30Yet these are the same machines, under two different *régimes* — though it is a strange adventure for desire, to desire repression. There is only one production, 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 derives from desiring production under determinate conditions: first *Homo natura*. But we must say just as well, and more exactly, that desiring production is first of all social, and only tends to free itself at the end (first *Homo historia*). For the body without organs is not given for itself at an origin and then projected into the different sorts of *socius*, as if some great paranoiac, chief of the primitive horde, lay at the base of social organization. The social machine or *socius* may be the body of the Earth, the body of the Despot, the body of Money. It is never a projection of the body without organes. It is rather the body without organs that is the ultimate residue of a deterritorialized *socius*. The problem of the *socius* has always been this: to code the fluxes of desire, to inscribe them, to register them, to see to it 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 the fluxes. This situation capitalism does not confront from without, since it lives off it, finds in it both its condition and its matter, and imposes it with all its violence. Its sovereign production and repression can be exercised only at this price. It is born, in fact, of the encounter between two sorts of fluxes, decoded fluxes of production in the form of money-capital, decoded fluxes of labor in the form of the "free worker." Thus, contrary to the preceding social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of furnishing a code that covers the whole of the social field. To the very idea of the code, it has substituted in money an axiomatic of abstract quantities that goes ever further in the movement of the deterritorialization of the *socius*. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that undoes the *socius* in favor of a body without organs, and that, on this body, liberates the fluxes of desire in a deterritorialized field. Is it exact to say in this sense that schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as depressive mania and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, as hysteria is the product of the territorial machine?{29}

31The decoding of flux, the deterritorialization of the *socius* thus form the most essential tendency of capitalism. It never stops approaching 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 body without organs — more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian than the proletarian. To go ever 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 it is said that schizophrenia is our disease, the disease of our era, this must not be taken to mean only that modern life drives one mad. It is not a question of a way of life, but of a process of production. Nor is it a question of a simple parallelism, although the parallelism is already more exact, from the point of view of the failure of codes, for instance between the phenomena of slippage of sense in schizophrenics and the mechanisms of growing discordance at every level of industrial society. In fact, we mean that capitalism, in its process of production, produces a formidable schizophrenic charge on which it makes the whole weight of its repression bear, but which never stops reproducing itself as the limit of the process. For capitalism never stops thwarting, inhibiting its tendency at the same time as it precipitates itself toward it; it never stops pushing back its limit at the same time as it tends toward it. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and factitious territorialities, imaginary or symbolic, on which it attempts, as best it can, to recode, to stamp the persons derived from abstract quantities. Everything passes back through, or returns: States, fatherlands, families. This is what makes of capitalism, in its ideology, "the motley painting of everything that has ever been believed." The real is not impossible, it is increasingly artificial. Marx called the double movement of the tendential fall of the rate of profit and the increase of the absolute mass of surplus-value the law of the thwarted tendency. As a corollary to this law, there is the double movement of the decoding or 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 them, the more its annex apparatuses, bureaucratic and police, re-territorialize at full tilt while absorbing a growing portion of surplus-value.

32It is certainly not in relation to the drives that one can give sufficient present-day definitions of the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic; for the drives 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 folds them all back onto Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality that reconstitutes itself in the analyst's office, on the filled body of the psychoanalyst (yes, the boss is the father, and the head of state too, and you too, doctor…). The pervert is the one who takes the artifice at its word: you want some, you'll have them, territorialities infinitely more artificial still than those society proposes to us, new infinitely artificial families, secret and lunar societies. As for the schizo, with its vacillating step that never ceases to migrate, to wander, to stumble, it sinks ever further into deterritorialization, on its own body without organs to the infinity of the decomposition of the *socius*, and perhaps this is its way of rediscovering the earth, the schizo's stroll. The schizophrenic holds itself at the limit of capitalism: it is its developed tendency, its surplus product, its proletarian and its exterminating angel. It scrambles all the codes, and carries the decoded fluxes of desire. The real flows. The two aspects of the process come together: 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 the machines of desire an autonomy with respect to the deterritorialized social machine. Schizophrenia is desiring production as the limit of social production. Desiring production, and its difference of régime from social production, are therefore at the end, not at the beginning. From one to the other there is only a becoming which 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 analytic machine, the revolutionary machine, and the machines of desire.

SECTION 5

33In what way are machines of desire really machines, independent of any metaphor? A machine defines itself as a system of cuts. It is in no way a question of the cut considered as separation from reality; the cuts operate in variable dimensions according to the character considered. Every machine, in the first place, is in relation to a continuous material flux (*hylè*) into which it cuts. It functions like a ham-slicing machine: the cuts operate 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 sonorous 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* in fact designates 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 series having theoretically only a single origin," a unique pellet extended to the bounds of the universe.{30} Far from the cut being opposed to continuity, it conditions it, it implies or defines what it cuts as ideal continuity. For, 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 cut. But it is so only in relation to a third machine which ideally, that is to say relatively, produces an infinite continuous flux. Thus the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth-machine and the flux of the herd ("and then, and then, and then…"). In short, every machine is cut of flux in relation to the one to which it is connected, but itself flux or production of flux in relation to the one that is connected to it. Such is the law of production of production. That 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 very 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}

34Connecticut, Connect - I - cut, cries little Joey. Bettelheim paints the picture of this child who lives, eats, defecates or sleeps only by connecting to machines equipped with motors, wires, lamps, carburetors, propellers and steering wheels: electric food machine, auto-machine for breathing, anal light machine. Few examples manifest so well the régime of desiring production, and the manner in which breakage is part of the very functioning, or the cut, of machinic connections. Doubtless it will be said that this mechanical, schizophrenic life expresses the absence and destruction of desire rather than desire, and presupposes certain extreme parental attitudes of negation to which the child reacts by making itself a machine. But even Bettelheim, favorable to an Oedipal or pre-Oedipal causality, recognizes that the latter can intervene only in response to autonomous aspects of the child's productivity or activity, even if it then determines in the child an unproductive stasis or an attitude of absolute withdrawal. Therefore there is 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 bear witness to the loss or repression of desire (what Bettelheim translates in terms of autism). We always find the same problem again: how did the process of desire's production, how did the child's machines of desire begin turning in the void to infinity, so as to produce the machine-child? how did the process transform itself into a goal? or else how was it the victim of a premature interruption, or of a horrible exasperation? It is only in relation to the body without organs (eyes closed, nose pinched, ears stopped up) that something is produced, counter-produced, that diverts or exasperates the whole production of which it is nevertheless 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 bachelor machines through which Joey passes, as Bettelheim's therapy progresses.

35Every machine entails, in the second place, a sort of code that is machined, stored within it. This code is inseparable not only from its registration and its transmission in the different regions of the body, but from the registration of each region in its relations with the others. An organ can be associated with several fluxes according to different connections; it can hesitate between several régimes, and even take upon 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 to other producers or anti-producers (the place of the little brother)? Must one, or must one not, choke on what one eats, swallow air, shit with one's mouth? Everywhere registrations, informations, transmissions form a grid of disjunctions, of a different type than the preceding connections. The credit goes to Lacan for having discovered this rich domain of a code of the unconscious, coiling the signifying chain or chains; and for having thereby transformed analysis (the base 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 hardly speak of a chain or even of a desiring code. The chains are called 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 in it are of any nature whatsoever, indifferent to their support (or is it not the support that is indifferent to them? The support is the body without organs). They have no plan, work at every level and in every connection; each speaks its own tongue, and establishes with others syntheses all the more direct in the transversal that they remain indirect in the dimension of the elements. The disjunctions proper to these chains still imply no exclusion, exclusions only being able to arise through a play of inhibitors and repressors that come to determine the support and fix a specific and personal subject.{33} No chain is homogeneous, but resembles a parade of letters from different alphabets, in which there would suddenly arise an ideogram, a pictogram, the little image of an elephant passing or a sun rising. Suddenly in the chain that 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 code of the orchid "draws" the figure of a wasp: phenomenon of surplus-value of code. It is a whole system of switchings and lots-drawn that forms partially dependent aleatory phenomena, close to a Markov chain. The registrations and transmissions, coming from internal codes, from the exterior milieu, from one region of the organism to another, cross according to the perpetually ramified pathways of the great disjunctive synthesis. If there is writing here, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real, strangely polyvocal and never bi-univocized, linearized, a transcursive and never discursive writing: the whole domain of the "real inorganization" of the passive syntheses, where one would search in vain for something one could call the Signifier, and which never ceases to compose and decompose the chains into signs that have no vocation to be signifying. To produce desire, such is the sole vocation of the sign, in every sense in which it is machined.

36These chains are unceasingly the seat of detachments in all directions, everywhere schizzes that hold value for themselves and which above all must not be filled in. Such, therefore, is the second character of the machine: cuts-detachments, which are not to be confused with cuts-extractions. The latter bear on continuous fluxes, and refer back to partial objects. The former concern heterogeneous chains, and proceed by detachable segments, mobile stocks, like blocks or flying bricks. Each brick must be conceived as emitted at a distance, and itself composed of heterogeneous elements: not only enclosing an inscription with signs from 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 presuppose the stocks or bricks of registration, in the coexistence and interaction of all the syntheses. How could there be partial extraction upon a flux, without fragmentary detachment in a code that comes to inform the flux? If we were saying just now that the schizo is at the limit of the decoded fluxes of desire, this had to be understood with regard to 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, takes place by mobile bricks. Diaschisis and diaspasis, said Monakow: either a lesion extends along fibers that link it to other regions and provokes there at a distance phenomena incomprehensible from a purely mechanist (but not machinic) point of view; or a disturbance of humoral life entails a derivation of nervous energy and the institution of broken, fragmented directions in the sphere of instincts. The bricks are the essential pieces of the machines of desire from the point of view of the procedure of registration: at once component parts and products of decomposition which only localize themselves spatially at this or that moment, in relation to the great chronogenic machine that is the nervous system (melodic machine of the "music-box" type, with non-spatial localization).{34} What makes for the unequaled character of Monakow and Mourgue's book, 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 presupposes — having introduced desire into neurology.

37The third cut of the machine of desire is the residual cut or residue, which produces a subject alongside the machine, an adjacent piece to the machine. And if this subject has no specific or personal identity, if it traverses the body without organs without breaking its indifference, it is because it is not only a part alongside the machine, but a part itself partitioned, to which there return parts corresponding to the detachments of chain and the extractions of flux operated by the machine. So it consumes the states through which it passes, and it is born of these states, always concluded from these states as a part made of parts, each of which fills the body without organs in a moment. Which allows Lacan to develop a machinic rather than etymological play, parere — to procure, separare — to separate, se parere — to engender oneself — while marking the intensive character of such a play: 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…, this is why the subject can procure for itself what here concerns it, a state we shall qualify as civil. Nothing in anyone's life unleashes more relentlessness to get there. To be pars, he would gladly sacrifice a great part of his interests"…{35} No more than the other cuts does the subjective cut designate a lack, but on the contrary a part that returns to the subject as share, a revenue that returns to the subject as residue (here again, how bad a model the Oedipal model of castration is!). For the cuts are not the work of an analysis, they are themselves syntheses. It is the syntheses that produce the divisions. Consider the example of the return of milk in the child's burp; 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 the connective synthesis, and mobilizes the libido as energy of extraction. The second, to the disjunctive synthesis, and mobilizes the Numen as energy of detachment. The third, to the 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 registration, production of consumption. To extract, to detach, to "remain," is to produce, and is to effectuate the real operations of desire.

SECTION 6

38In the machines of desire everything functions at the same time, but in hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and misfirings, intermittences and short-circuits, distances and parcelings out, in a sum that never reunites its parts into a whole. It is because the cuts there are productive, and are themselves reunions. Disjunctions, as disjunctions, are inclusive. Consumptions themselves are passages, becomings and returnings. It was Maurice Blanchot who knew how to pose the problem in all its rigor, at the level of a literary machine: how to produce, and to think, fragments which have among themselves relations of difference as such, which have for relations among themselves their own difference, without reference to an originary totality even if lost, nor to a resultant totality even if to come?{36} Only the category of multiplicity, employed as a substantive and going beyond the multiple no less than the One, going beyond the predicative relation of the One and the multiple, is capable of accounting for desiring production: desiring production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, affirmation irreducible to unity. We are in the age of partial objects, of bricks and remainders. We no longer believe in those false fragments which, like the pieces of the antique statue, await being completed and reglued to compose a unity which is just as well the unity of origin. We no longer believe in an originary totality nor in a totality of destination. We no longer believe in the grayness of an insipid evolutive dialectic, which claims to pacify the pieces because it rounds off their edges. We believe only in totalities alongside. And if we encounter such a totality alongside parts, it is a whole of those parts, but which does not totalize them, a unity of all those parts, but which does not unify them, and which is added to them as a new part composed apart. "It arises, but applying itself this time to the whole, as such a piece composed apart, born of an inspiration" — Proust says of the unity of Balzac's work, but just as well of his own. And it is striking, in the literary machine of the Recherche du temps perdu, to what point all the parts are produced as dissymmetrical 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 puzzle, 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, with always remainders. It is the schizoid work par excellence: one would say that guilt, the declarations of guilt are there only as a joke. (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 only express in appearance the protestation of the One, and on the contrary find their true object in the absolution of parceled universes, where the law reunites nothing into a Whole, but on the contrary measures and distributes the gaps, the dispersions, the burstings of what draws its innocence from madness — that is why, with the apparent theme of guilt, there interlaces in Proust a wholly other theme that negates it, that of vegetal ingenuousness in the partitioning of the sexes, in the encounters of Charlus as in the sleeps of Albertine, there where the flowers reign and the innocence of madness reveals itself, the proven madness of Charlus or the supposed madness of Albertine.

39Therefore Proust said that the whole is produced, that it is itself produced as a part alongside the parts, that it neither unifies nor totalizes, but applies itself to them by instituting only aberrant communications between non-communicating vessels, transversal unities between elements that retain all their difference in their own dimensions. Thus, in the train journey, there is never totality of what one sees nor unity of points of view, but only in the transversal that the panicked traveler traces from one window to another, "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 body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its place, in the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes. And when it applies itself to them, folds back upon them, it induces transversal communications, transfinite summations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions, on its own surface where the functional cuts of partial objects do not cease to be re-cut by the cuts of signifying chains and those of a subject that locates itself there. The whole not only coexists with the parts, it is contiguous to them, itself produced apart, and applying itself to them: the geneticists show this in their fashion by saying that "amino-acids are assimilated individually in the cell, then are arranged in the proper order by a mechanism analogous to a mold in which the characteristic side-chain of each acid places itself in its own position."{37} As a general rule, the problem of the part-whole relations remains as poorly posed by classical mechanism as by classical vitalism, as long as one considers the whole as a totality derived from the parts, or as an originary totality from which the parts emanate, or as a dialectical totalization. Mechanism, no more than vitalism, has grasped the nature of the machines of desire, and the double necessity of introducing production into desire as much as desire into the mechanical.

40There is no evolution of the drives that would make them progress, along with their objects, toward a whole of integration, any more than there is a primitive totality from which they would derive. Melanie Klein made the marvelous discovery of partial objects, that world of explosions, rotations, vibrations. But how to explain that she nevertheless misses the logic of these objects? It is that, first of all, she thinks them as phantasies, 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) that impose upon her an idealist conception of the partial object. She does not attach it to a veritable process of production that would be that of the machines of desire. In the second place, she does not rid herself of the idea that schizo-paranoid partial objects refer to a whole, either originary in a primitive phase, or to come in the later depressive position (the complete Object). Partial objects therefore appear to her to be extracted from global persons; not only will they enter into totalities of integration concerning *le moi*, the object, and the drives, but they already constitute the first type of object-relation among *le moi*, the mother, and the father. Now it is indeed there that everything is decided in the end. It is certain that partial objects have in themselves a charge sufficient to blow up Oedipus, and to depose it of its silly pretension to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to capture all of desiring production. The question posed here is by no means that of a relative importance of what can be called pre-oedipal in relation to Oedipus (for "pre-oedipal" is still in evolutionary or structural reference to Oedipus). The question is that of the Absolutely an-oedipal character of desiring production. But because Melanie Klein conserves the point of view of the whole, of global persons and complete objects — and also perhaps because she is keen to avoid the worst with the International Psychoanalytic Association which has written on its door "let none enter here who is not oedipal" —, she does not make use of partial objects to blow up the carcan 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 the earliest ages.

41And if we choose the example of the least Oedipianizing of psychoanalysts, it is precisely to show what forcing she must do in order to measure desiring production against Oedipus. All the more so for ordinary psychoanalysts who are no longer even conscious of the "movement." This is not suggestion, it is terrorism. Melanie Klein writes: "The first time that Dick came to me, he showed no emotion when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had prepared, he looked at them without the least interest. I took a large train and placed it beside a smaller one and designated them by the names 'papa train' and 'Dick train.' Thereupon he picked up the train I had called 'Dick,' rolled it to the window and said 'Station.' I explained to him that 'the station is mama; Dick is going into mama.' He let go of the train, ran to position himself between the inner door and the outer door of the room, shut himself in saying 'dark' and at once ran out again. He repeated this manoeuvre several times. I explained to him that 'it is dark inside mama; Dick is in the dark of mama'… 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 you'll get a slap. Now the psychoanalyst no longer even asks: "What are your machines of desire?" but cries out: "Answer papa-mama when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein… So all of desiring production is crushed, folded back onto the parental images, aligned with the pre-Oedipal stages, totalized in Oedipus: the logic of partial objects is thereby reduced to nothing. Therefore Oedipus now becomes for us the touchstone of logic. Because, as we sensed at the outset, partial objects are only apparently extracted from global persons; they are really produced by extraction from a non-personal flux or *hylè*, with which they communicate by connecting themselves to other partial objects. The unconscious is ignorant of persons. Partial objects are not representatives of parental personages nor supports of familial relations; they are pieces in the machines of desire, referring to a process and to relations of production that are irreducible and primary with respect to what allows itself to be registered in the figure of Oedipus.

42When one speaks of the Freud-Jung rupture, one too often forgets the modest and practical point of departure: Jung remarked that the psychoanalyst in transference often appeared as a devil, a god, a sorcerer, and that his roles singularly overflowed the parental images. Everything turned out badly afterward, but the point of departure was good. So it is with children's play. A child does not only play at papa-mama. He also plays at sorcerer, at cowboy, at cops and robbers, at trains and at little cars. The train is not necessarily papa, nor the station mama. The problem does not bear on the sexual character of the machines of desire, but on the familial character of this sexuality. One admits that, having grown up, the child finds himself caught in social relations that are no longer familial. But since these relations are supposed to come about afterward, there are only two possible paths: either one admits that sexuality sublimates itself or neutralizes itself in social (and metaphysical) relations, in the form of an analytic "afterward," or else that these relations bring into play a non-sexual energy, which sexuality in turn was content to symbolize as an anagogic "beyond." It is here that things turn out 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 so. Consider a child who plays, or who, crawling, explores the rooms of the house. He contemplates an electric outlet, he machines his body, he uses a leg as an oar, he enters the kitchen, the study, he manipulates little cars. It is obvious 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 everything he touches is lived as representing the parents. From birth on, the cradle, the breast, the pacifier, the excrements are machines of desire in connection with the parts of his body. It seems contradictory to us to say at once that the child lives among partial objects, and that what he grasps in the partial objects are the parental persons even in pieces. That the breast is extracted from the mother's body, this is not strictly true, because it exists as a piece of a machine of desire, in connection with the mouth, and extracted from a non-personal flux of milk, rare or dense. A machine of desire, a partial object represents nothing: it is not representative. It is indeed a support of relations and a distributor of agents; but these agents are not persons, no more than these relations are intersubjective. They are relations of production as such, agents of production and of anti-production. Bradbury shows this well when he describes the nursery as a site of desiring production and of group fantasy, which combines only partial objects and agents.{39} The small child is ceaselessly in the family; but in the family and from the beginning, he immediately leads a formidable non-familial experience that psychoanalysis lets escape. Lindner's painting.

43It is not a question of denying the vital and amorous importance of parents. It is a question of knowing what their place and function are in desiring production, instead of doing the inverse and folding the entire play of machines of desire back onto the restricted code of Oedipus. How are places and functions formed that parents will occupy as special agents, in relation to other agents? For Oedipus exists from the start only as open onto the four corners of a social field, of a field of production directly invested by libido. It seems evident that parents arrive on the registration surface of desiring production. But that is precisely the whole 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 contain it by itself? how does it form a type of inscription for experiences and machinations that overflow it on all sides? It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the child relates the breast as partial object to the person of the mother, and never ceases to consult the maternal face. "To relate" does not designate here a natural productive relation, but a report, an inscription within the inscription, within the *Numen*. The child from its earliest age has a whole desiring life, a whole set of non-familial relations with the objects and machines of desire, which does not relate itself to the parents from the point of view of immediate production, but is related to them (with love or hate) from the point of view of the registration of the process, and under such very particular conditions of this registration, even if these react upon the process itself (feed-back).

44It 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 "carried back" to the parents and can receive only a provisional answer in familial relations. "I remember, from the age of eight, and even before, always having asked myself who I was, what I was and why to live; I remember at the age of six in a house on the boulevard de la Blancarde in Marseille (no. 59 exactly) having asked myself at snack-time, bread-and-chocolate which a certain woman called mother used to give me, having asked myself what it was, to be and to live, what it was to see oneself breathe, and having wanted to breathe myself in order to experience the fact of living and to see whether it suited me and in what way it suited me."{40} This is what is essential: a question poses itself to the child, which will perhaps be "carried back" to the woman called mama, but which is not produced as a function of her, which is produced in the play of the machines of desire, for example at the level of the mouth-air machine or of the snack machine — what is it to live? what is it to breathe? what is *moi*? what is the breathing-machine on my body without organs? The child is a metaphysical being. As with the Cartesian cogito, the parents are not in those questions. And one is wrong to confuse the fact that the question is carried back to the parents (in the sense of being recounted, expressed) with the idea that it relates itself to them (in the sense of a natural relation with them). By framing the life of the child within 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 directly upon the unconscious, in particular the whole play of originary repression, of the machines of desire and of the body without organs. For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself in the identity of nature and man. The auto-production of the unconscious arises at the very point where the subject of the Cartesian cogito discovered itself without parents, there too where the socialist thinker discovered in production the unity of man and nature, there where the cycle discovers its independence with respect to the indefinite parental regression.

45Ja na pas

46to papa-mama

47We have seen how the two senses of "process" merged: process as metaphysical production of the demonic in nature, and process as social production of machines of desire in history. Social relations and metaphysical relations do not constitute an after or a beyond. These relations must be recognized in all psycho-pathological instances, and their importance will be all the greater when we are dealing with psychotic syndromes presenting themselves under the most stupefied and most desocialized aspects. Now it is already in the child's life, 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. For lack of seeing from the beginning what the nature of this desiring production is, and how, under what conditions, under what pressures the Oedipal triangulation intervenes in the registration of the process, we find ourselves caught in the snares of a diffuse and generalized Oedipianism that radically disfigures the child's life and its sequels, the neurotic and psychotic problems of the adult, and sexuality as a whole. Let us recall, let us not forget Lawrence's reaction to psychoanalysis. With him, at least, his reticence did not come from a fright 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 kind of artificial triangle quite disgusting, which stifled all sexuality as production of desire, in order to remake of 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 was managing to "disinfect the dirty little secret," but it was no better for that, poor and dirty secret of modern Oedipus-tyrant. Is it possible that psychoanalysis is thus taking up an old attempt to lower us, to debase us, and to render 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 whole of bourgeois society in the 19th century, and entrusting to the family functions through which the responsibility of its members and their eventual culpability were evaluated. Now, insofar as psychoanalysis envelops madness in a "parental complex," and rediscovers the avowal of guilt in the figures of self-punishment that result from Oedipus, it does not innovate, but completes what 19th-century psychiatry had begun: to bring forth a familial and moralized discourse of mental pathology, to bind madness "to the half-real half-imaginary dialectic of the Family," to decipher in it "the incessant attack against the father," "the muted thrust of the instincts against the solidity of the familial institution and against its most archaic symbols."{41} So, instead of participating in an enterprise of effective liberation, psychoanalysis takes part in the most general work of bourgeois repression, that which has consisted in maintaining European humanity under the yoke of papa-mama, and in not having done with that problem.

CHAPTER 2 - Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family

SECTION 1

48Restricted Oedipus is the figure of the papa-mama-me triangle, the familial constellation in person. But when psychoanalysis makes a dogma of it, it does not ignore the existence of so-called pre-Oedipal relations in the child, exo-Oedipal in the psychotic, para-Oedipal in other peoples. The function of Oedipus as dogma, or "nuclear complex," is inseparable from a forcing by which the psychoanalytic theorist raises himself to the conception of a generalized Oedipus. On the one hand, he gives an account, for each subject of one or the other sex, of an intensive series of drives, affects and relations that unite the normal and positive form of the complex with its inverse or negative form: serial Oedipus, such as Freud presents it in The Ego and the Id, and which permits, if need be, the attachment of the pre-Oedipal phases to the negative complex. On the other hand, he gives an account of the coexistence in extension of the subjects themselves, and of their multiple interactions: group Oedipus, which gathers together collaterals, descendants and ascendants (it is thus that the visible resistance of the schizophrenic to Oedipianization, the obvious absence of the Oedipal bond, can be drowned in a grandparental constellation, whether one judges an accumulation of three generations necessary to make a psychotic, or whether one discovers an even more direct mechanism of intervention by the grandparents in psychosis, and one thus forms Oedipuses of Oedipus squared: neurosis is father-mother, but granny is psychosis). Finally, the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic permits the disengagement of an Oedipal structure as a system of places and functions that are not to be confused with the variable figure of those who come to occupy them in such or such social or pathological formation: structural Oedipus (3 + 1), which is not to be confused with a triangle but operates all possible triangulations by distributing, in a determined domain, desire, its object and the law.

49It is certain that the two preceding modes of generalization find their true scope only in structural interpretation. It is this that makes of Oedipus a kind of universal Catholic symbol, beyond all imaginary modalities. It makes Oedipus an axis of reference for pre-Oedipal phases as well, for para-Oedipal varieties, for exo-Oedipal phenomena: the notion of "foreclosure," for example, seems to indicate a properly structural lacuna, by virtue of which the schizophrenic is naturally replaced upon the Oedipal axis, put back into the Oedipal orbit, in the perspective of the three generations for example, where the mother was not able to posit her desire vis-à-vis her own father, nor, henceforth, the son vis-à-vis the mother. A disciple of Lacan can write: we are going to consider "the biases by which Oedipal organization plays a role in the psychoses; then what the forms of psychotic pregenitality are and how they can maintain the Oedipal reference." Our preceding critique of Oedipus therefore risks being judged altogether superficial and petty, as if it applied only to an imaginary Oedipus and bore on the role of parental figures, without making any inroad into the structure and its order of symbolic places and functions. Yet the problem for us is to know whether that is indeed where the difference passes. Would the true difference not be between Oedipus, structural as much as imaginary, and something else, which all the Oedipuses crush and repress — that is, desiring production — the machines of desire which no more let themselves be reduced to the structure than to persons, and which constitute the Real in itself, beyond or beneath the symbolic as well as the imaginary? We do not claim in the least to resume an attempt like that of Malinowski, showing that the 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 altogether elsewhere: is there adequation between the productions of the unconscious and this invariant (between the machines of desire and the Oedipal structure)? Or does the invariant express only the history of a long error, across all its variations and modalities, the effort of an interminable repression? What we put into question is the frenzied Oedipianization to which psychoanalysis devotes itself, practically and theoretically, with the conjugated resources of the image and the structure. And despite the fine books written recently by certain disciples of Lacan, we ask whether Lacan's thought really goes in this direction. Is it a matter only of Oedipianizing even the schizo? Or is it not a matter of something else, and even of the contrary?{42} To schizophrenize, to schizophrenize the field of the unconscious, and also the historical social field, so as to blow apart the yoke of Oedipus and rediscover everywhere the force of desiring productions, to reknot upon the Real itself the link of the analytic machine, of desire and of production? For the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it no more symbolizes 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.

50But what is this long history, if we consider it only in the period of psychoanalysis? It does not proceed without doubts, detours, and second thoughts. Laplanche and Pontalis remark that Freud "discovers" the Oedipus complex in 1897 in his self-analysis; but that he gives a first generalized theoretical formula of it only in 1923, in *The Ego and the Id*; and that, between the two, Oedipus leads a rather 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 because, they say, a certain abandonment by Freud of the theory of trauma and seduction opens not onto a univocal determination of Oedipus, but just as well onto the description of a spontaneous infantile sexuality of endogenous character. Now everything happens as though "Freud did not manage to articulate Oedipus and infantile sexuality to one another," the latter referring back to a biological reality of development, the former to a psychic reality of fantasy: Oedipus is what was nearly lost "to the benefit of a biological realism."{43}

51But is it exact to present things in this way? Did the imperialism of Oedipus require only the renunciation of biological realism? Or was not something else, and infinitely more powerful, 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 exclusive, conjunctions without specificity, partial objects and flux. The machines of desire rumble, hum in the depths 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 those neurobiologico-desiring machines. And this discovery of the 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, at once 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 repression to this oppression. It is all of this that will be lost, or at least singularly compromised, with the installation of sovereign Oedipus. Free association, instead of opening onto polyvocal connections, closes back into 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 requirements of representation, to the dreary play of representative and represented in representation. And this is the essential: the reproduction of desire gives way to a simple representation, in the process of the cure as much as in theory. The productive unconscious gives way to an unconscious that no longer knows how to do anything but express itself — 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 taking into account 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 put a little order into it, an order become classical from the old Greek theater. For what does it mean: Freud discovers Oedipus in his self-analysis? Is it in his self-analysis, or rather in his classical Goethean culture? In his self-analysis he discovers something of which he says to himself: look, this resembles Oedipus! And this something, he first considers it as a variant of the "family romance," paranoiac registration by 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 dependency of Oedipus, and that he neuroticizes everything in the unconscious at the same time as he oedipianizes, that he closes the family triangle back onto the whole unconscious. The schizo — there is the enemy. Desiring production is personalized, or rather personologized, imaginarized, structuralized (we have seen that the true difference or frontier did 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 theater, scene and staging. And not even an avant-garde theater, such as there were in Freud's time (Wedekind), but classical theater, the classical order of representation. The psychoanalyst becomes director for a private theater — instead of being the engineer or mechanic who mounts units of production, who battles with collective agents of production and anti-production.

52Psychoanalysis is like the Russian revolution, one does not know when it begins to turn bad. One must always go further back. With the Americans? with the first International? with the secret Committee? with the first ruptures, which mark renunciations on Freud's part as much as betrayals on the part of those who break with him? with Freud himself, from the "discovery" of Oedipus on? Oedipus is the idealist turn. And yet one cannot say that psychoanalysis began to ignore desiring production. The fundamental notions of the economy of desire, labor and investment, retain their importance, but subordinated to the forms of an expressive unconscious and no longer to the formations of the productive unconscious. The anoedipal nature of the production of desire remains present, but folded back upon the coordinates of Oedipus, which translate it into "pre-oedipal," "para-oedipal," "quasi-oedipal," etc. The machines of desire are still there, but they no longer function except behind the wall of the consulting room. Behind the wall or in the wings — such is the place that the originary phantasy concedes to the machines of desire, when it folds everything back onto the oedipal scene{44}. They nonetheless continue to make a hellish racket. The psychoanalyst himself cannot ignore it. So his attitude is rather one of denegation: all that is quite true, but it is still papa-mama. On the pediment of the consulting room one writes: leave your machines of desire at the door, abandon your orphan and bachelor machines, your tape recorder and your little bicycle, enter and let yourself be oedipianized. Everything follows from this, beginning with the unrecountable character of the cure, its highly contractual interminable character, flux of words against flux of money. Then what is called a psychotic episode suffices: a flash of schizophrenia, one day we bring our tape recorder into the analyst's consulting room, 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 excluded third, we have introduced the third, the machine of desire in person.{45} And yet every psychoanalyst should know that, beneath Oedipus, through Oedipus, behind Oedipus, what he is dealing with is the machines of desire. In the beginning, psychoanalysts could not fail to be conscious of the forcing operated in order to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the whole of the unconscious. Then Oedipus folded back, it appropriated desiring production as if all the productive forces of desire emanated from it. The psychoanalyst became the coatrack of Oedipus, the great agent of anti-production in desire. The same history as that of Capital, and of its enchanted, miraculated world (in the beginning too, Marx said, the first capitalists could not fail to be conscious…).

SECTION 2

53That the problem is first of all practical, that it concerns above all the practice of the cure, one sees easily. For the process of frenzied oedipianization takes shape 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 to dare 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 short references to the memory of the father? On several occasions, Freud's text marks to what extent he feels the difficulty: at first it appears difficult to assign as cause, even merely occasional, of the illness a "thrust of homosexual libido" upon 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 ascent, we take rights that can only be justified by their advantages from the point of view of our comprehension of the delirium (296, 298). Yet, the more Freud enunciates such scruples, the more he pushes them back, the more he sweeps them away in an assured response. And this response is double: it is not my fault if psychoanalysis bears witness to a great monotony, and rediscovers the father everywhere, in Flechsig, in God, in the sun; it is the fault of sexuality and of its obstinate symbolism (301). On the other hand, it is not surprising that the father returns constantly in actual deliria under the least recognizable and most hidden forms, since he returns indeed everywhere and in more visible manner in the ancient myths and the religions, which express forces or mechanisms acting eternally in the unconscious (298, 323). One must note that President Schreber did not only know the destiny of being sodomized in his lifetime by the rays of heaven, but the posthumous destiny 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 such things. Invoked are only a sexual argument, which consists in operating the welding of sexuality and the familial 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."

54This last argument is very important, and it is not by chance that Freud, here, declares his agreement with Jung. In a certain way this agreement subsists after their rupture. For, if one considers that the unconscious expresses itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but these two ways have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious by myth, and which, from the start, has substituted simple expressive forms for productive formations. The fundamental question: why return to myth? why take it as a model? is ignored, pushed aside. Then the supposed adequation can be interpreted in a so-called anagogic manner, toward the "high." Or, inversely, in an analytic manner, toward the "low," by relating myth to the drives — but, since the drives are traced from myth, deducted from myth while taking the transformations into account… We mean that it is from the same postulate that Jung is led to restore the most diffuse, the most spiritualized religiosity, 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 to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation. But rendering religion unconscious or rendering the unconscious religious is always to inject the religious into the unconscious (and what would Freudian analysis be without the famous feelings of guilt attributed to the unconscious?). And what has happened in the history of psychoanalysis? Freud clung to his atheism, in the manner of a hero. But, around him, more and more, he was let to speak respectfully, the old man was let to speak, even if it meant preparing 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 what way we too are still pious! Let us recall Marx's great declaration: he who denies God does only a "secondary thing," for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, in order to put man in God's place (taking the transformation into account){46}. But he who knows that the place of man is altogether elsewhere, in the coextensivity of man and nature, that one does not even leave subsisting 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, myth, he no longer has need to pass through this mediation, the negation of the existence of God, because he has reached those regions of an auto-production of the unconscious, where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan, immediately orphan, immediately atheist. And no doubt the examination of the first argument would lead us to a similar conclusion. For, by welding sexuality to the familial complex, by making Oedipus the criterion of sexuality in analysis, the test of orthodoxy par excellence, Freud has himself posited the ensemble of social and metaphysical relations as a beyond-after or a beyond, which desire was incapable of investing immediately. It then becomes rather indifferent whether this beyond derives from the familial complex by analytic transformation of desire or is signified by it in an anagogic symbolization.

55Let us consider another text of Freud's, later, where Oedipus is already designated as "nuclear complex": A Child Is Being Beaten (1919). The reader cannot defend himself against an impression of disquieting strangeness. Never has the paternal theme been less visible, and yet never has it been affirmed with so much passion, so much resolution: the imperialism of Oedipus founds itself here on absence. For after all, of the three moments 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 in which the father shines with all his fires, "clearly unequivocal" — but precisely "this second phase never has any real existence; remaining unconscious, it can never on that account be evoked by memory and is only an analytic reconstitution, but a necessary reconstitution." What in fact is at stake in this fantasy? Boys are being beaten by someone, the schoolteacher for example, under the eyes of the little girls. From the start one witnesses a double Freudian reduction, which is in no way imposed by the fantasy, but demanded by Freud in the manner of a presupposition. On the one hand Freud deliberately wants to reduce the group character of the fantasy to a purely individual dimension: the children being beaten must in some way be the *moi* ("substitutes of the subject himself") and the beater must be the father ("substitute of the father"). On the other hand the variations of the fantasy must organize themselves into disjunctions whose use must be strictly exclusive: thus there will be a girl-series and a boy-series, but dissymmetrical, the feminine fantasy having three moments of which the last is "boys are being beaten by the schoolteacher," the masculine fantasy having only two moments of which the last is "my mother is beating me." The only common moment (the second of the girls and the first of the boys) affirms unequivocally the prevalence of the father in both cases, but it is the famous nonexistent moment. And it is always thus in Freud. Something common to the two sexes is needed, but in order to be lacking to the one as to the other, in order to distribute the lack into two non-symmetrical series, and to found the exclusive use of disjunctions: you are girl or boy! Thus it is with Oedipus and its "resolution," different in the boy and the girl. Thus it is with castration, and with its relation to Oedipus in both cases. Castration is at once the common lot, that is to say the prevalent and transcendent Phallus, and the exclusive distribution that presents itself in girls as desire for the penis, and in boys as fear of losing it or refusal of the passive attitude. This something common must found the exclusive use 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 the male protest, in short "assumption of sex."{47} This something common, the great Phallus, the Lack with two non-superposable faces, is purely mythical: it is like the One of negative theology, it introduces lack into desire, and makes emanate the exclusive series to which it fixes a goal, an origin, and a resigned course.

56One should say the contrary: at once there is nothing in common between the two sexes, and they do not cease communicating with each other, in a transversal mode where each subject possesses the two, but compartmentalized, 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 use that we will have to analyze. And, to say this contrary, Freud had a concept at his disposal, that of bisexuality; but it is no accident that he was never able, or willing, to give to this concept the analytic position and extension that it demanded. Without even going that far, a lively controversy arose when certain analysts, following Mélanie Klein, tried to define the unconscious forces of the feminine sexual organ by positive characters in terms of partial objects and fluxes: this slight shift, which did not suppress mythical castration, but which made it depend secondarily on the organ instead of the organ being supposed to depend on it, met with great opposition from Freud.{48} Freud maintained that the organ, from the point of view of the unconscious, could only be understood on the basis of a lack or a primary privation, and not the reverse. There is here a properly analytic paralogism (which will be found again to a high degree in the theory of the signifier), 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 a fixed *moi* under one or another sex, which necessarily lives its subordination to the tyrannical complete object as a lack. It is perhaps no longer so when the partial object is posited for itself on the body without organs, with as its sole subject, not a "*moi*," but the drive that forms the machine of desire with it, and that enters into relations of connection, disjunction, conjunction with other partial objects, within the corresponding multiplicity each element of which can only be defined positively. One must speak of "castration" in the same sense as of oedipianization, and it is its crowning: 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 onto a single mythical place, the unary trait of the signifier. We have not finished singing the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it is ignorant of castration no less than of Oedipus, just as it is ignorant of parents, gods, law, lack… The women's liberation movements are right to say: we are not castrated, fuck you.{49} And far from being able to get out of it through the miserable trick that would consist, for men, in responding that this is precisely the proof that they are — or even in consoling them by saying that men are too, while rejoicing that they are so on the other face, the one that is not superposable —, one must recognize that the feminine liberation movements bring 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. Nor will it be said either that the question is not whether women are castrated or not, but only whether the unconscious itself "believes it," for the entire ambiguity is there: what does belief mean applied to the unconscious, 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 ones, but on the contrary too reasonable and conforming to the established order?

57Let us return to the fantasy "a child is being beaten, children are being beaten": this is typically a group fantasy, in which desire invests the social field and its repressive forms themselves. If there is a *mise en scène*, it is the *mise en scène* 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 *moi* conducting its own affair with its papa and its mama. We must on the contrary consider the ensemble and the complementarity girl-boy, parents-agents of production and of 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 the boys have themselves beaten-initiated by the schoolmaster on the erotic scene of the little girl (seeing-machine) and have themselves come masochistically over the mama (anal machine). So much so that they cannot see except by becoming little girls, and that the girls cannot experience the pleasure of punishment except by becoming boys. It is a whole chorus, a montage: back in the village after an expedition to Vietnam, in the presence of the weeping sisters, the Marine scum have themselves beaten by the instructor, on whose knees the mama is seated, and have themselves come from having been so wicked, from having tortured so well. How wrong it is, but how good it is! Perhaps one recalls a sequence from the film *Seventeenth Parallel*: there one sees Colonel Patton, the general's son, declare that his guys are terrific, that they love their father, their mother, and their country, that they weep at religious service for their dead comrades, brave 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 that the colonel too is the father, and that the mother herself too is still the father, it folds all desire back onto 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 coming to such a furtive place among the collective agents. The terms of Oedipus do not form a triangle, but exist exploded at every corner of the social field, the mother on the schoolmaster's knees, the father next to the colonel. The group fantasy is connected to, machined onto the *socius*. To be buggered by the *socius*, to desire to be buggered by the *socius*, does not derive from the father and the mother, although the father and the mother have their role in it as subaltern agents of transmission or execution.

58When 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 from individual fantasy. It appeared that group fantasy was inseparable from the "symbolic" articulations that define a social field as real, whereas individual fantasy folded this entire field back onto "imaginary" givens. 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 kind of transcendence or immortality under whose shelter the individual, *le moi*, 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 a decisive bearing on the death drive, insofar as the immortality conferred upon the existing social order draws into *le moi* all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of "*sur-moi*-ization" and of castration, all the resignation-desires (to become a general, to become a small, middle, or upper executive), including the resignation of dying in the service of this order, while the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not from here!). The revolutionary pole of group fantasy appears, on the contrary, in the power to live the institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them in accordance with the articulations of desire and of the social field, making of the death drive a veritable institutional creativity. For this is indeed the at-least-formal criterion between the revolutionary institution and the enormous inertia that the law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says, churches, armies, States — of all these dogs, which is the one that wants to die? From this follows a third difference between group fantasy and so-called individual fantasy: the latter has as its subject *le moi* as determined by the legal and legalized institutions in which it "imagines itself," to the point that, even in its perversions, *le moi* conforms to the exclusive use of disjunctions imposed by the law (Oedipal homosexuality, for example). But group fantasy no longer has as 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 its singularities, enters into relation with the other according to the communication proper to partial objects: each passes into the body of the other on the body without organs. Klossowski has shown well in this regard the inverse relation that pulls fantasy apart in two directions, according to whether economic law establishes perversion in "psychic exchanges," or whether psychic exchanges on the contrary promote a subversion of the law: "Anachronistic relative to the institutional level of gregariousness, the singular state can, according to its more or less strong intensity, effect a de-actualization of the institution itself and denounce it as anachronistic in its turn"{50}. The two types of fantasy, or rather the two régimes, are therefore distinguished according to whether the social production of "goods" imposes its rule on desire through the intermediary of a *moi* 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 nothing but drives. If one must still speak of utopia in this latter sense, in Fourier's manner, it is certainly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. And, in his recent works, Klossowski indicates to us the only means of going beyond the sterile parallelism in which we struggle between Freud and Marx: in discovering the way in which social production and the relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself. For they do form part of it, they are present in it in every way, creating within the economic forms their own repression as well as the means for breaking this repression.

59The development of the distinctions between group fantasy and individual fantasy shows sufficiently, in the end, that there is no individual fantasy. There are rather two sorts of groups, group-subjects 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. It must still be said that the two sorts of groups are in perpetual sliding, a group-subject always being threatened with subjection, a subjected group being able in certain cases to be forced to assume a revolutionary role. It is only the more disquieting to see how Freudian analysis retains of fantasy only its lines of exclusive disjunction, and crushes it onto its individual or pseudo-individual dimensions which by nature relate it to subjected groups, instead of performing the inverse operation, and disengaging in fantasy the underlying element of a revolutionary group potentiality. When one learns that the instructor, the schoolteacher, is papa, and the colonel too, and the mother too, when one thus folds all the agents of social production and anti-production back onto the figures of familial reproduction, one understands that the panicked libido no longer risks leaving Oedipus, and interiorizes it. It interiorizes it in the form of a castrating duality between subject of the statement and subject of enunciation, characteristic of the pseudo-individual fantasy ("I, as a man, understand you, but as a judge, as a boss, as a colonel or general, that is to say as a father, I condemn you.") But this duality is artificial, derivative, and presupposes a direct relation of the statement to collective agents of enunciation in the group fantasy.

60Between the repressive asylum, the legalist hospital on one side, and on the other contractual psychoanalysis, institutional analysis tries to trace its difficult path. From the start, the psychoanalytic relation has been molded on 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 so-called limitation in time which belies itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by feeding an inexhaustible transference, by nourishing ever-new "conflicts." One is astonished to hear it said that a terminated analysis is by that very fact a failed analysis, even when this proposition is accompanied by a fine smile from the analyst. One is astonished to hear a seasoned analyst mention, in passing, that one of his "patients" still dreams of being invited to tea or to apéritif at his home, after several years of analysis, as if there were not in this the minuscule sign of an abject dependence to which analysis reduces patients. How is one to conjure away in the cure this abject desire to be loved, the hysterical and whining desire that makes us bend our knees, lays us on the couch and keeps us there? Let us consider a third and final text of Freud, *Analysis Terminable and Interminable* (1937). We must not follow a recent suggestion according to which it would be better to translate "Finite Analysis, Infinite Analysis." Because finite-infinite, that is almost mathematics or logic, for a singularly practical and concrete problem: does this story have an end, can one have done with an analysis, can the process of the cure terminate, yes or no, can it be accomplished or is it condemned to continuation to infinity? As Freud says, can one exhaust a currently given "conflict," can one forearm the patient against later conflicts, can one even awaken new conflicts with a preventive aim? A great beauty animates this text of Freud: a kind of despair, of disenchantment, of weariness, and at the same time a serenity, a certainty of the work accomplished. It is Freud's testament. He is going to die, and knows it. He knows that something is not right in psychoanalysis: the cure tends more and more to be interminable! He knows that he will no longer be there, soon, to see how it turns out. So he takes inventory of the obstacles to the cure, with the serenity of one who senses what the treasure of his work is, but also already the poisons that have slipped into it. Everything would go well if the economic problem of desire were only quantitative; it would be a matter of reinforcing the *moi* against the drives. The famous strong and matured *moi*, the "contract," the "pact" between a *moi* that is normal in spite of everything and the analyst… Only, there are qualitative factors in the desiring economy, which precisely obstruct the cure and which Freud reproaches himself for not having sufficiently taken into account.

61The first of these factors is the "rock" of castration, the rock with two non-symmetrical slopes, which introduces in us an incurable alveolus and against which analysis comes up. The second is a qualitative aptitude for conflict, which means that the quantity of libido does not divide itself into two variable forces corresponding to heterosexuality and homosexuality, but rather creates in most people irreducible oppositions between the two forces. The third, finally, of an economic importance such that it relegates dynamic and topical considerations, concerns a kind of non-localizable resistance: one would say that certain subjects have a libido so viscous, or on the contrary so liquid, that nothing manages to "take" on them. It would be wrong to see in this remark of Freud's only an observation of detail, an anecdote. It is in fact a matter of what is most essential in the phenomenon of desire, namely the qualitative fluxes of the libido. André Green, in some fine pages, has recently taken up the question again by drawing up the table of three types of "sessions," the first two of which carry counter-indication, the third alone constituting the ideal session in analysis{51}. According to type I (viscosity, resistance of hysterical form), "the session is dominated by a heavy, ponderous, swampy climate. The silences are leaden, the discourse is dominated by the actual, ... is uniform, it is a descriptive narrative in which no reference to the past is detectable, it unfolds along a continuous thread, unable to permit itself any breakage... Dreams are recited, ... the enigma that the dream is is taken up in secondary elaboration which makes the dream as narrative and as event take precedence over the dream as work upon thoughts.. Glued-up transference...". According to type II (liquidity, resistance of obsessional form), "the session is dominated by an extreme mobility of representations of all sorts, ... language is loosened, rapid, almost torrential, ... everything passes through, ... the patient could just as well say the contrary of everything he puts forward without that fundamentally changing anything in the analytic situation... All of this is without consequence, because the analysis slides over the couch as water over a duck's feathers. There is no hooking by the unconscious, no mooring in the transference. The 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 uttered signifiers refers, but is constituted by the process, the suture, the concatenation of the linked elements... Any interpretation furnished by (the patient) can give itself as an already-signified awaiting its signification. In this respect, interpretation is always retrospective, like signification perceived. So that is what this meant...".

62What is serious is that Freud never calls into question the process of the cure. Doubtless it is too late for him, but afterwards…? These things he interprets as obstacles to the cure, and not as insufficiencies of the cure itself, or as effects, counter-effects of its procedure. For castration as an analyzable state (or unanalyzable, ultimate rock) is rather the effect of castration as psychoanalytic act. And Oedipal homosexuality (the qualitative aptitude for conflict) is rather the effect of Oedipianization, which the cure doubtless does not invent, but which it precipitates and accentuates in the artificial conditions of its exercise (transference). And, inversely, when flux of libido resist the practice of the cure, rather than a resistance of *le moi*, it is the immense clamor of all desiring production. We already knew that the pervert lets itself be Oedipianized only with difficulty: why would it let itself be done, since it has invented other territorialities for itself, still more artificial and more lunar than that of Oedipus? We knew that the schizo is not Oedipianizable, because it is outside territoriality, because it has carried its flux as far as into the desert. But what remains, when we learn that "resistances" of hysterical or obsessional form bear witness to the anoedipal quality of the flux of desire on the very ground of Oedipus? This is indeed what the qualitative economy shows: flux ooze, pass through the triangle, disjoin its vertices. The Oedipal stopper does not take on these flux, no more than on 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, so they say? A flux that lets itself be stoppered by Oedipus; partial objects that let themselves be subsumed under a complete object even when absent, the phallus of castration; cuts-flux that let themselves be projected onto a mythic site; 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 use; disjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in an exclusive, limitative use; conjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in a personal and segregative use… For what does "so this was what that meant" signify? 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, "the whole story in a new version"… We are not saying that Oedipus and castration are nothing: we are Oedipianized, we are castrated, and it is not psychoanalysis that invented these operations to which it only lends the resources and the new procedures of its genius. But is this enough to silence this clamor of desiring production: we are all schizos! we are all perverts! we are all libidos too viscous or too fluid… and not by taste, but there where the deterritorialized flux have carried us… What somewhat serious neurotic is not propped upon the rock of schizophrenia, rock this time mobile, aerolite? Who does not haunt the perverse territorialities, beyond the kindergartens of Oedipus? Who does not feel in the flux of its desire both lava and water? And above all, what are we sick from? From schizophrenia itself as process? Or rather from the frenzied neuroticization to which we are delivered, and for which psychoanalysis has invented new means, Oedipus and castration? Are we sick 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 a goal (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: whether to be measured against that cross, or to ascertain 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 refuse, against the schizophrenization that should cure us of the cure.

SECTION 3

63Given the syntheses of the unconscious, the practical problem is that of their use, legitimate or not, and of the conditions that define a use of synthesis as legitimate or illegitimate. Take the example of homosexuality (but it is something quite other than an example). We were noting how, in Proust, the famous pages of *Sodome et Gomorrhe* interweave two openly contradictory themes, one on the fundamental guilt of the "accursed races," the other on the radical innocence of flowers. People are quick to apply to Proust the diagnosis of an Oedipal homosexuality, by fixation on the mother, with depressive dominance and sadomasochistic guilt. More generally, in phenomena of reading people are too quick to discover contradictions, either to declare them irreducible, or to resolve them or show that they are merely apparent, according to taste. In truth, there are never contradictions, apparent or real, but only degrees of humor. And, since reading itself has its degrees of humor, from black to white, by which it evaluates the coexisting degrees of what it reads, the only problem is always that of a distribution on a scale of intensities that assigns the place and the 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. In this respect Charlus's caddish warning may well be prophetic: "Couldn't care less about your old grandmother, eh, little rascal!" For what is going on in the *Recherche*, one and the same infinitely varied story? It is clear that the narrator sees nothing, hears nothing, is a body without organs, or rather like a folded-up spider, frozen on its web; who observes nothing, but responds to the slightest signs, to the slightest vibration by leaping on its prey. Everything begins with nebulae, with statistical sets with blurred contours, with 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" take shape, series are organized, persons figure themselves in these series, under strange laws of lack, of absence, of asymmetry, of exclusion, of non-communication, of vice and of guilt. Then again, everything blurs anew, comes undone, but this time in a pure and molecular multiplicity, where the partial objects, the "boxes," the "vessels" all equally have their positive determinations, and enter into aberrant communication following a transversal that runs through the whole work, an immense flux that each partial object produces and re-cuts, reproduces and cuts at once. More than vice, says Proust, what is disquieting is 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 no longer of any time, of any milieu, of any school.

64Such is the case 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 Albertine's person disengages itself, across a series of planes that are like her distinct personalities, Albertine's face leaping from one plane to another as the narrator's lips approach the cheek. Finally, in the exaggerated proximity, everything comes undone like a vision on the sand, Albertine's face bursts into molecular partial objects, while those of the narrator's face rejoin the body without organs, eyes closed, nose pinched, mouth filled. But, more still, it is love in its entirety that tells the same story. From the statistical nebula, from the molar set of male-female loves, there disengage the two cursed and guilty series that bear witness to one same castration under two non-superposable faces, the Sodom series and the Gomorrah series, each excluding the other. Yet this is not the last word, since the vegetal theme, the innocence of flowers, brings us yet another message and another code: each is bisexed, each has the two sexes, but partitioned, non-communicating; man is only the one in whom the male part statistically dominates, woman, the one in whom the female part statistically dominates. So that at the level of elementary combinations, at least two men and two women must be brought in to constitute the multiplicity in which transversal communications are established, connections 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 all guilt ceases, because it cannot fasten onto those flowers. To the alternative of the exclusions "either… or," there is opposed the "be it" of combinations and permutations where the differences come back to the same without ceasing to be differences.

65We are heterosexuals statistically or molarly, but homosexuals personally, without knowing it or knowing it, and finally trans-sexed elementarily, molecularly. That is why Proust, the first to disavow any oedipianizing interpretation of his own interpretations, opposes two types of homosexuality, or rather two regions of which only one is oedipal, exclusive and depressive, while the other is schizoid an-oedipal, included and inclusive: "Some, those whose childhood was no doubt the most timid, scarcely concern themselves with the material kind of pleasure they receive, provided they can refer it to a masculine face. Whereas others, having no doubt more violent senses, give their material pleasure imperious localizations. These latter would perhaps shock the average of the world by their avowals. They live perhaps less exclusively under the satellite of Saturn, for to them women are not entirely excluded as they are for the first… The second seek out those who love women, who can take precedence over a young man for them, increase the pleasure they have in finding themselves with him; what is more, 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 approximately what they find in a man…".{52}

66What is opposed here are two usages of the connective synthesis: a global and specific usage, a partial and non-specific usage. In the first usage, desire receives at once a fixed subject, *moi* specified under one sex or another, and complete objects determined as global persons. The complexity and the foundations of such an operation appear better if one considers the mutual reactions between the different syntheses of the unconscious according to one usage or another. In fact, it is first the synthesis of registration which poses, on its surface of inscription under the conditions of Oedipus, a *moi* determinable or differentiable in relation to parental images serving as coordinates (mother, father). There is here a triangulation which in its essence implies a constituting prohibition, and which conditions the differentiation of persons: forbidden to commit incest with the mother, and to take the place of the father. But it is by a strange reasoning that one concludes that, since it is forbidden, that itself was desired. In truth, global persons, the very form of persons, do not pre-exist the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them, any more than they pre-exist the triangulation into which they enter: it is at the same time that desire receives its first complete objects, and sees them forbidden to it. Therefore it is indeed the same Oedipal operation which founds the possibility of its own "solution," by way of differentiation of persons in conformity with the prohibition, and the possibility of its failure or its stagnation, by fall into the undifferentiated as the reverse side of the differentiations that the prohibition 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 pre-exist the prohibition. One thus sees the property the prohibition has of displacing itself, since from the start 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, in fact, that the prohibition existed under two forms, the one negative which bears above all on the mother and imposes differentiation, the other positive which concerns the sister and commands exchange (obligation to take as wife someone other than my sister, obligation to reserve my sister for someone else; to leave my sister to a brother-in-law, to receive my wife from a father-in-law){53}. And, although new stases or falls are produced at this level, like new figures of incest and homosexuality, it is certain that the Oedipal triangle would have no means of transmitting and reproducing itself without this second degree: the first degree elaborates the form of the triangle, but only the second ensures 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 getting out of Oedipus, but just as well reproducing it, transmitting it rather than dying all alone, incestuous, homosexual, and zombie.

67Thus the parental or familial use of the synthesis of registration is extended into a conjugal use, or use of alliance, of the connective syntheses of production: a régime of conjugation of persons is substituted for the connection of partial objects. Overall, the connections of organ-machines proper to desiring production give way to a conjugation of persons under the rules of familial reproduction. Partial objects now appear to be extracted from persons, instead of being extracted from non-personal fluxes passing from some to others. This is because persons are derived from abstract quantities, in place of fluxes. Partial objects, instead of a 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 when he defines 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 one person becomes proprietor of the sexual organs of another person{54}. One need only consult a religious manual of sexual casuistry to see with what restrictions the connections of organs-machines of desire remain tolerated under the régime of the conjugation of persons, which legally fixes their extraction from the body of the spouse. But, better still, the difference of régime appears each time a society allows an infantile state of sexual promiscuity to subsist, in which everything is permitted up to the age at which the young man in turn enters under the principle of conjugation that regulates the social production of children. No doubt the connections of desiring production obeyed a binary rule; and we have even seen that a third term intervened in this binarity, the body without organs which reinjects producing into the product, prolongs the connections of machines and serves as a surface of registration. But precisely no bi-univocal operation is produced here that would fold production back onto representatives; no triangulation appears at this level that would relate the objects of desire to global persons, nor desire to a specific subject. The sole subject is desire itself on the body without organs, insofar as it machines partial objects and fluxes, extracting and cutting some by means of others, passing from one body to another, following connections and appropriations that each time destroy the factitious unity of a possessing or proprietary *moi* (anoedipal sexuality).

68The triangle is formed in parental usage, and is reproduced in conjugal usage. We do not yet know what forces determine this triangulation, which insinuates itself into the registration of desire in order to transform all its productive connections. But we can at least follow, summarily, the way these forces proceed. We are told that partial objects are caught up in an intuition of precocious totality, just as *le moi* is caught up 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 which the partial objects and the subjects of desire "lack." From then on, everything is played out: one finds everywhere the analytic operation that consists in extrapolating a 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 *moi* under this or that face of its absence, and to impose an exclusive sense on the disjunction of the sexes. 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 analytic mystification culminates. This something common, transcendent and absent, will be named phallus or law, to designate "the" signifier that distributes throughout the chain the effects of signification and introduces the exclusions therein (whence the Oedipianizing interpretations of Lacanianism). Now it is this that acts as formal cause of the triangulation, that is to say that makes possible both the form of the triangle and its reproduction: thus Oedipus has the formula 3 + 1, the One of the transcendent phallus without which the terms considered would not form a triangle.{55} Everything happens as if the so-called signifying chain, made of elements that are themselves non-signifying, of a polyvocal writing and of detachable fragments, were the object of a special treatment, of a crushing that extracted from it a detached object, despotic signifier to whose law the whole chain henceforth seems suspended, each link triangulated. There is here a curious paralogism that implies a transcendent use of the syntheses of the unconscious: one passes from detachable partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by assignation of lack. For example, in the capitalist code and its trinitarian formula, money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only under the fetishist aspect of stock and lack. The same goes for the Oedipal code: libido as energy of extraction and detachment is converted into phallus as detached object, the latter existing only under the transcendent form of stock and lack (something common and absent that is no less lacking in men than in women). It is this conversion that tips all sexuality into the Oedipal framework: this projection of all the cuts-fluxes onto a single mythic site, of all the non-signifying signs into a single major signifier. "Effective triangulation permits the specification of sexuality to sex. The partial objects have lost nothing of their virulence and efficacy. However, reference to the penis gives castration its full sense. Through it are signified, after the fact, all the external experiences linked to privation, to frustration, to the lack of partial objects. The whole prior history is recast in a new version in the light of castration."{56}

69This is precisely what worries us, this recasting of history, and this "lack" attributed to partial objects. And how would partial objects not have lost their virulence and their efficacy, once introduced into a use of synthesis which remains fundamentally illegitimate with regard 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. More than that, castration and Oedipianization engender a fundamental illusion that makes us believe that real desiring production is answerable to higher formations which integrate it, submit it to transcendent laws and make it serve a superior social and cultural production: there appears then a kind of "detachment" of the social field with respect to the production of desire, 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 forces this apparent movement. It itself secures this conversion of the unconscious. In what it calls pre-Oedipal, it sees a stage that must be surpassed 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 outside, it is a product of Oedipianization, and a counter-effect of the cure which reinforces it. The problem in truth in no way concerns pre-Oedipal stages which would still have Oedipus as their axis, but the existence and nature of an an-Oedipal sexuality, of an an-Oedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, of an an-Oedipal castration: the cuts-fluxes of desiring production do not let themselves be projected onto a mythical place, the signs of desire do not let themselves be extrapolated into a signifier, trans-sexuality lets arise 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 instead of securing, of tending to secure the reversion of the entire unconscious onto the an-Oedipal form and content of desiring production, analytic theory and practice never cease to promote the conversion of the unconscious to Oedipus, form and content (we will see in fact what psychoanalysis calls "resolving" Oedipus). This conversion, it therefore promotes first of all by making a global and specific use of the connective syntheses. This use can be defined as transcendent, and implies a first paralogism in the psychoanalytic operation. If we are using Kantian terms once again, it is for a simple reason. Kant proposed, in what he called critical revolution, to discover criteria immanent to knowledge in order to distinguish the legitimate use and the illegitimate use of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of a transcendental philosophy (immanence of the criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as it appeared in metaphysics. We must say in the same way that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics, namely Oedipus. And that a revolution, this time materialist, can pass only by way of the critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious such 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

70When Oedipus slips into the disjunctive syntheses of desiring registration, he imposes upon them the ideal of a use, limitative or exclusive, that merges with the form of triangulation — being papa, mama, or child. This is the reign of the Either/Or in the differentiating function of the prohibition of incest: there it is mama who begins, there it is papa, and there it is you. Stay in your place. Oedipus's misfortune is precisely no longer knowing where who begins, nor who is who. And "being parent or child" is also accompanied 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 shall be zombie and hermaphrodite. It is indeed 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, familial triangulation represents the minimum condition under which a "*moi*" receives the coordinates that differentiate it at once with respect to generation, with respect to sex, and with respect to state. And religious triangulation confirms this result in another mode: thus in the trinity, the effacement of the feminine image to the benefit of a phallic symbol shows how the triangle displaces itself toward its own cause and attempts to integrate it. This time it is a question of the maximum of conditions under which persons differentiate themselves. That is why the Kantian definition mattered to us, which posits God as the a priori principle of the disjunctive syllogism, inasmuch as every thing derives from it by limitation of a greater reality (*omnitudo realitatis*): Kant's humor, which makes God the master of a syllogism.

71The proper character of Oedipal registration is to introduce an exclusive, limitative, negative use of the 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 this taste for exclusive disjunctions exercised everywhere in psychoanalysis, in Freud. It appears, however, that schizophrenia gives us a singular extra-Oedipal lesson, and reveals to us an unknown force of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be exclusive or limitative, but fully affirmative, unlimitative, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that nonetheless affirms the disjoined terms, affirms them across their entire distance, without limiting one by the other or excluding the other from the one — this is perhaps the highest paradox. "Either… or," instead of "either/or." 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, registration number 54161001) litanizes the parallel series of the masculine and the feminine, and places himself on each side: "Mat Albert 5416 ricu-le sultan Roman vesin," "Mat Désiré 1001 ricu-la sultane romaine vesine."{58} The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of the two as the endpoint of a distance over which it glides in flight. It is child or parent, not the one and the other, but the one at the end of the other like the two ends of a stick in an indecomposable space. Such is the sense of the disjunctions in which Beckett inscribes his characters and the events that happen to them: everything divides, but into itself. Even the distances are positive, at the same time as the included disjunctions. It would be entirely to misrecognize this order of thought to act as if the schizophrenic substituted for disjunctions vague syntheses of identification of contradictories, like the last of the Hegelian philosophers. It does not substitute syntheses of contradictories for disjunctive syntheses; rather, for the exclusive and limitative use of the disjunctive synthesis, it substitutes an affirmative use. It is and remains in disjunction: it does not suppress the disjunction by identifying contradictories through deepening; it affirms it, on the contrary, by flying over an indivisible distance. It is not simply bisexual, nor between the two, nor intersexual, but trans-sexual. It is trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild. It does not identify two contraries with the same, but affirms their distance as that which relates them to one another as different. It does not close itself on contradictories; on the contrary, it opens itself, and, like a sack swollen with spores, releases them as so many singularities that it had unduly enclosed, of which it claimed to exclude some and retain others, but which now become sign-points, 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 that closed box to which I owed having been so well preserved, but a partition came down," which frees a space where Molloy and Moran no longer designate persons, but singularities rushing in from all sides, evanescent agents of production. This is the free disjunction; the differential positions perfectly subsist, 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 to say, he is everywhere there is a singularity, in all the series and in all the branches marked by a singular point, because he is himself this distance that transforms him into a woman, at the endpoint of which he is already mother of a new humanity and can at last die.

72This is why the schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion, although they are concerned with the same syllogism. In *Le Baphomet*, Klossowski opposed to God as master of exclusions and limitations in the reality that derives from him 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 question of a synthesis that would surpass in an originary reality of the God-Man the negative disjunctions of derived reality, it is a question of an inclusive disjunction that itself operates the synthesis by drifting from one term to another and following the distance. There is nothing originary. It is like the famous: "It is midnight. The rain whips the windowpanes. It was not midnight. It was not raining." Nijinsky wrote: I am God I was not God I am God's clown; "I am Apis, I am an Egyptian, a red-skinned Indian, a Negro, a Chinese, a Japanese, a foreigner, a stranger, I am the seabird and the one that flies over dry land, I am Tolstoy's tree with its roots." "I am the bridegroom and the bride, I love my wife, I love my husband…"{59} 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 use. No originary nor derived, but a generalized drift. One would say that the schizo liberates a raw, unlimitative genealogical matter, where it can place itself, inscribe itself, and locate itself in all the branchings at once, on all sides. It blows up the Oedipal genealogy. Beneath the relations of near to near, it operates absolute overflights of indivisible distances. The mad-genealogist grids the body without organs with a disjunctive network. Thus God, who designates nothing other than the energy of registration, can be the greatest enemy in paranoid inscription, but also the greatest friend in miraculating inscription. In any case, the question of a being superior to nature and to man is not posed at all. Everything is on the body without organs, both what is inscribed and the energy that inscribes. On the unengendered body, the indecomposable distances are necessarily overflown, at the same time as the disjoined 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.

73The disjunctive synthesis of registration thus leads us to the same result as the connective synthesis: it too is capable of two uses, one immanent, the other transcendent. And why, here again, does psychoanalysis support the transcendent use, which introduces exclusions, limitations into the disjunctive network everywhere, and topples the unconscious into Oedipus? And why is this precisely what oedipianization is? It is because the exclusive relation introduced by Oedipus is not played only between the diverse disjunctions conceived as differentiations, but between the ensemble of these differentiations that it imposes and an undifferentiated that it presupposes. Oedipus tells us: if you do not follow the lines of differentiation, papa-mama-*moi*, and the exclusives that mark them out, you will fall into the black night of the undifferentiated. Let us understand that the exclusive disjunctions are not at all the same as the inclusive ones: God does not have the same use there, nor do the parental appellations. The latter no longer designate intensive states through which the subject passes on the body without organs and in the unconscious that remains orphan (yes, I have been…), but designate global persons that do not preexist the prohibitions that found them, and differentiate them among themselves and in relation to the *moi*. So that the transgression of the prohibition correlatively becomes a confusion of persons, an identification of the *moi* with the persons, in the loss of differentiating rules or differential functions. But we must say of Oedipus that it creates both, both the differentiations that it orders and the undifferentiated with which it 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 as object the differentiated parental persons, and forbids the correlative *moi* from satisfying its desire on these persons, in the name of the same exigencies of differentiation, brandishing then the threats of the undifferentiated. But this undifferentiated, it is Oedipus that creates it as the reverse of the differentiations it creates. Oedipus tells us: either you will interiorize 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 set one term in play as if it were superfluous in relation to the two others, and you will reproduce in every direction the dual relations of identification in the undifferentiated. But, on one side as on the other, it is Oedipus. And everyone knows what psychoanalysis calls resolving Oedipus: interiorizing it the better to find it again outside in social authority, and thereby disseminating it, passing 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 with all outlets barred. Between the impossible return to what precedes the state of culture and the growing malaise that the latter provokes, it is not certain either that a point of equilibrium can be found."{60} Oedipus is like the labyrinth, one gets out of it only by going back in (or by making someone else go in). Oedipus as problem or as solution, these are the two ends of a ligature that arrests all desiring production. The screws are tightened, nothing more can pass through from production, except a rumor. The unconscious has been crushed, triangulated, put into a choice that was not its own. All outlets blocked: there is no longer any possible use of the inclusive, incitative disjunctions. They have given parents to the unconscious!

74Bateson calls *double bind* the simultaneous emission of two orders of messages of which one contradicts the other (for example the father who says to his son: go on, criticize me, but who strongly implies that any effective criticism, at least a certain type of criticism, would be unwelcome). Bateson sees in it a particularly schizophrenizing situation, which he interprets as a "non-sense" from the point of view of Russell's theory of types.{61} It rather seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse, is a current situation, oedipianizing par excellence. And, if it must be formalized, it refers to the other kind of Russellian non-sense: an alternative, an exclusive disjunction is determined in relation to a principle which nevertheless constitutes its two terms or its two sub-sets, and which itself enters into the alternative (case entirely different from what happens when the disjunction is inclusive). Such is the second paralogism of psychoanalysis. In short, the "double bind" is nothing other than the ensemble of Oedipus. It is in this sense that Oedipus must be presented as a series, or oscillates between two poles: neurotic identification, and so-called normative interiorization. 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 exit than neurosis, the solution no less blocked than the problem: therefore one falls back upon the body without organs.

75It seems that Freud himself had a vivid awareness of the fact that Oedipus was inseparable from a double impasse into which he 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." One sees this even better when Freud lays out the entire historico-mythical series: at one end Oedipus is knotted by murderous identification, at the other end it is reknotted by the restoration and interiorization of paternal authority ("re-establishment of the ancient order on a new plane").{62} Between the two, latency, the famous latency, doubtless the greatest psychoanalytic mystification: this society of "brothers" who forbid themselves the fruits of the crime, and spend all the time necessary interiorizing. But we are warned: the society of brothers is quite dreary, unstable and dangerous, it must prepare the recovery of an equivalent of parental authority, it must make us pass to the other pole. In conformity with a suggestion of Freud's, 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." It is up to 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 one pole of Oedipus 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 of machines of desire; on the contrary, it spreads the veil of latency. As for those who do not let themselves be oedipianized, under one form or another, at one end or the other end, the psychoanalyst is there to call for help from the asylum or the police. The police are with us! never has psychoanalysis better shown its taste for backing the movement of social repression, and for participating in it with all its forces. Let no one believe that we are alluding to folkloric aspects of psychoanalysis. It is not because, on Lacan's side of things, one forms another conception of psychoanalysis, that one must hold to be minor what the reigning tone is in the most recognized associations: see Dr. Mendel, the Drs. Stéphane, the state of rage they enter into, and their literally police-like invocation, at the idea that someone might claim to remove themselves from the mousetrap of Oedipus. Oedipus is like those things that become all the more dangerous the less anyone still believes in them; then the cops are there to replace the high priests. The first profound example of an analysis of double bind, in this sense, one would find in Marx's Jewish Question: between the family and the State — the Oedipus of familial authority and the Oedipus of social authority.

76Oedipus is strictly useless, except for ligaturing the unconscious on both sides. We shall see in what sense Oedipus is strictly "undecidable," following the language of the mathematicians. We are profoundly weary of these stories where one is in good health through Oedipus, sick with Oedipus, and afflicted with various illnesses under Oedipus. It happens that an analyst has had enough of this myth that makes up the trough and the burrow of psychoanalysis, and returns to the sources: "Freud finally did not get out of the world of the father, nor of 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 hold of the father over man. The possibility of living beyond the law of the father, beyond any law, is perhaps the most essential possibility that Freudian psychoanalysis brings. But, paradoxically, and perhaps because of Freud himself, everything leads one to think that this deliverance, which psychoanalysis makes possible, will accomplish itself, is already accomplishing itself, outside of it."{64} We cannot however share either this pessimism or this optimism. For there is a great deal of optimism in thinking that psychoanalysis makes possible a true solution to Oedipus: Oedipus is like God; the father is like God; the problem is only solved when one suppresses both the problem and the solution. Schizo-analysis 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 any law," where the problem can no longer even be posed. Thus, we likewise do not share the pessimism that consists in believing that this change, this deliverance, can only accomplish itself outside of psychoanalysis. We believe on the contrary in the possibility of an internal reversion, which makes the analytic machine an indispensable piece of the revolutionary apparatus. Moreover, the objective conditions seem at present to be given.

77Everything therefore happens as though Oedipus had two poles by itself: a pole of imaginary identificatory 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. So one transmits the crisis to others, and it begins again. Such is the oedipal disjunction, the pendulum movement, the exclusive inverse ratio. 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, however much one replaces the traditional papa-mama with a mother-function, a father-function, we do not see clearly what is gained thereby, except to ground the universality of Oedipus beyond the variability of the images, to weld desire still better to the law and to the prohibition, and to push to the limit the process of oedipianization of the unconscious. Oedipus here finds its two extremes, its minimum and its maximum, according to whether it is considered as tending toward an undifferentiated value of its variable images, or toward the differentiating power of its symbolic functions. "When one approaches material imagination, the differential function diminishes, one tends toward equivalences; when one approaches the formative elements, the differential function increases, one tends toward distinctive valences."{65} One will hardly be surprised to learn that Oedipus as structure is the Christian trinity, whereas Oedipus as crisis is a familial trinity insufficiently structured by faith: always the two poles in inverse ratio, Oedipus for ever!{66} How many interpretations of Lacanianism, openly or secretly pious, have thus invoked a structural Oedipus to form and close the double impasse, to lead us back to the question of the father, to oedipianize even the schizo, and to show that a hole in the symbolic referred us back to the imaginary, and conversely that imaginary smudges or confusions referred us back to the structure. As a famous predecessor said to his animals, you have already made a refrain of it… This is why we for our part could not make any difference of nature, any frontier, any limit pass between the imaginary and the symbolic, any more than between Oedipus-as-crisis and Oedipus-as-structure, or between the problem and the solution. It is only a matter of a correlative double impasse, of a pendulum movement charged with sweeping the whole unconscious, and which, ceaselessly, refers from one pole to the other. A double pincer that crushes the unconscious in its exclusive disjunction.

78The 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 anoedipal use of inclusive, unlimitative disjunctions and the oedipal use of exclusive disjunctions, whether this latter use borrows the paths of the imaginary or the values of the symbolic. So Lacan's warnings about the Freudian myth of Oedipus had to be heeded, which "could not hold the playbill indefinitely in those forms of society where the sense of tragedy is being lost more and more…: a myth is not satisfied with 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 at this remove, Lacan further says: the sole foundation of the society of brothers, of fraternity, is "segregation" (what does he mean?). In any case it was not fitting to tighten the screws there where Lacan had just loosened them; to oedipianize the schizo, there where on the contrary he had just schizophrenized even neurosis, passing through a schizophrenic flux capable of subverting the field of psychoanalysis. The object a erupted in the midst of the structural equilibrium in the manner of an infernal machine, the machine of desire. A second generation of Lacan's disciples arises, less and less sensitive to the false problem of Oedipus. But the first, if they were tempted to close the yoke of Oedipus back up, is it not to the degree that Lacan seemed to maintain a sort of projection of the signifying chains onto a despotic signifier, and to suspend everything from a missing term, missing to itself and reintroducing lack into the series of desire upon which it imposed an exclusive use? Was it possible to denounce Oedipus as a myth, and yet to maintain that the castration complex, for its part, was not a myth, but on the contrary something real? (Was this not to take up Aristotle's cry: "one must indeed stop somewhere," that Freudian Anankè, that Rock?)

SECTION 5

79We have seen how, in the third synthesis, conjunctive synthesis of consumption, the body without organs was truly an egg, traversed by axes, banded with zones, localized with areas or fields, measured with gradients, traveled by potentials, marked with thresholds. We believe in this sense in the possibility of a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in connection with the biochemistry of drugs), which will be more and more 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 body without organs, 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 somehow arrived at the present from the most primitive form of life" (the body without organs), "I was looking at, no, I was rather feeling before me a terrifying voyage."{68} There, it is no more a metaphor to speak of a voyage than just now to speak of the egg, and of what takes place in it and on it, morphogenetic movements, displacements of cell 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 left all extension, just as the interior voyage has left all form and quality, so as to make shine, within as without, nothing more than pure intensities coupled together, almost unbearable, through which a nomadic subject passes. It is not a hallucinatory experience nor a delirious thought, but a feeling, a series of emotions and feelings as consumption of intensive quantities, which form the material of subsequent hallucinations and deliria. Intensive emotion, affect, is at once the common root and the principle of differentiation of deliria and hallucinations. So one would believe that everything mingles in these intense becomings, passages and migrations, all this drifting that ascends and descends time — countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, historical, geographical and even news-item appellations. (I feel that) I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogabalus, and the Great Mongol, a Chinese, a redskin, 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 ones: Szondi rather than Freud and his Oedipus. "It is perhaps in wanting to be Worm that I shall finally be Mahood! Then I shall only have to be Worm. Which I shall doubtless attain by striving to be So-and-so. Then I shall only have to be So-and-so." But if everything mingles thus, it is in intensity, there is no confusion of spaces and forms since these are precisely undone, to the benefit of a new order, the intense, intensive order.

80What is this order? What is distributed first on the body without organs are races, cultures and their gods. It has not been sufficiently remarked to what extent the schizo makes history, hallucinates and raves universal history, and swarms races. Every delirium is racial, and that does not necessarily mean racist. It is not that the regions of the body without organs "represent" races and cultures. The filled body represents nothing at all. On the contrary, it is races and cultures that designate regions on this body, that is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Within these fields are produced phenomena of individualization, of sexualization. From one field to another one passes by crossing thresholds: one never stops migrating, one changes individual as one changes sex, and to depart 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 the great migrants behind whom nothing more grows when they pass — although these destructions, we shall see, can be carried out in two very diverse ways. How could the crossing of a threshold not imply ravages elsewhere? The body without organs closes back over the places left behind. The theater of cruelty, we cannot separate it from the struggle against our culture, and from the confrontation of "races," and from Artaud's great migration toward Mexico, its powers and its religions: individuations are produced only in fields of forces expressly defined by intensive vibrations, fields which animate cruel personages only as induced organs, parts of machines of desire (the mannequins){69}. *Une saison en enfer*, how can one separate it from the denunciation of the families of Europe, from the call for destructions that do not come quickly enough, from the 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 feeling 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 a 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…"

81And Zarathustra, can it be separated from "grand politics," and from the animation of races that makes Nietzsche say: I am not a German, I am Polish. Here again individuations occur only within complexes of forces that determine persons as so many intensive states incarnated in a "criminal," ceaselessly crossing a threshold by destroying the factitious unity of a family and of a *moi*: "I am Prado, I am Prado's father, I venture to say that I am Lesseps too: I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new notion, that of an honest criminal. I am Chambige, another honest criminal… What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom every name in history is I."{70} Yet it is never a matter of identifying with personages, as is wrongly said of a madman who would "take himself for…". It is a matter of something else entirely: identifying races, cultures, and gods with fields of intensity on the body without organs, identifying personages with states that fill these fields, with effects that flash through and traverse these fields. Hence the role of names, in their proper magic: there is no *moi* 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 on causes, but the filling of a domain, the effectuation of a system of signs. This is clearly seen 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…

82On the lack of reality, the loss of reality, the lack of contact with life, autism and athymia, everything has been said, the schizophrenics themselves have said everything — quick to flow into the expected clinical mold. Black world, growing desert: a solitary machine drones on the beach, an atomic factory 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 in order to be everywhere where some real is produced, everywhere where some 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 a divisible abstract quantity, whereas the real was distributed into qualified units, distinct qualitative forms. But now, the real is a product that envelops distances within intensive quantities. The indivisible is enveloped, and means 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 So-and-so. It is a young girl only by being an old man miming or simulating the young girl. Or rather, by being someone simulating an old man in the process of simulating a young girl. Or rather by simulating someone…, etc. This was already the wholly Oriental art of the Roman emperors, Suetonius' twelve paranoiacs. In a marvelous book by Jacques Besse, one finds, once again, the double promenade of the schizo, the exterior geographical voyage following indecomposable distances, the interior historical voyage following enveloping intensities: Christopher Columbus calms his mutinous crew and becomes admiral again only by simulating a (false) admiral simulating a whore who dances{71}. But simulation must be understood as identification was understood a moment ago. It expresses these indecomposable distances always enveloped in the intensities that divide into one another while changing form. If identification is a naming, a designation, simulation is the writing that corresponds to it, a writing strangely polyvocal flush with the real. It carries the real outside its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the machine of desire. This point where the copy ceases to be a copy to become the Real and its artifice. To seize an intensive real such as it is produced in the coextension of nature and history, to ransack the Roman empire, the Mexican cities, the Greek gods and the discovered continents in order to extract from them this always-more of reality, and to form the treasure of paranoiac tortures and bachelor glories — all the pogroms of history, that's me, and all the triumphs too, as if a few simple univocal events disengaged themselves from this extreme polyvocity: such is the "histrionism" of the schizophrenic, 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 unknown contact with life, the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, at an intense point that merges with the production of the real, and that makes Reich say: "What characterizes schizophrenia is the experience of this vital element, … with respect to their feeling for life, the neurotic and the pervert are to the schizophrenic what the sordid shopkeeper is to the great adventurer."{72} 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 fold back onto a body without organs become deaf, blind and mute again?

83It is said: he takes himself for Louis XVII. Nothing of the sort. In the Louis XVII affair, or rather in the finest case, that of the pretender Richemont, there is at the center a machine of desire or bachelor machine: the horse with short articulated legs, into which the dauphin would have been put, in order to make him And then, all around, there are agents of production and of 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 pretender passes. Moreover, the stroke of genius of the pretender Richemont is not simply to "give an account" of Louis VII, nor to give an account of the other pretenders by denouncing them as false. It is to give an account of the other pretenders by assuming them, by authenticating them, that is to say by making them, too, into states through which he has passed: I am Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau who said they were Louis XVII{73}. Richemont does not identify himself with Louis XVII, he claims the premium that accrues to whoever passes through all the singularities of the series converging around the machine for abducting Louis XVII. There is no *moi* at the center, no more than there are persons distributed around the perimeter. Nothing but a series of singularities in the disjunctive network, or of intensive states in the conjunctive tissue, and a transpositional subject over the whole circle, passing through all the states, triumphing over some as over his enemies, savoring the others as his allies, gathering up everywhere the fraudulent premium of his avatars. Partial object: a local scar, moreover uncertain, is a better proof than all the childhood memories the pretender lacks. The conjunctive synthesis can then express itself: so it is I, the king! so it is to me that the kingdom returns! But this *moi* is only the residual subject that traverses the circle and concludes itself from its oscillations.

84Every delirium has a historico-world, political, racial content; it draws in and stirs together races, cultures, continents, kingdoms: one asks whether this long drift constitutes anything more than a derivative of Oedipus. The familial order bursts apart, families are repudiated, son, father, mother, sister — "I hear of families like mine, who derive everything from the declaration of the rights of man!", "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 against divinity, … the deepest objection against my thought of the eternal return!" The question is whether the historico-political, racial and cultural belongs only to a manifest content and depends formally 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 conceals from us. Must the rupture with families be held to be a sort of "family romance" which, precisely, would bring us back to families once again, would refer us to an event or a structural determination interior to the family itself? Or is it the sign that the problem must be posed altogether otherwise, because it is posed elsewhere for the schizo itself, 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 the Oedipal genealogy? Does history have the dead father for its signifier? Let us consider once again the delirium of President Schreber. Certainly, the use of races, the mobilization or the notion of history occur there in a quite other manner than in the authors we invoked previously. Still, Schreber's *Memoirs* are filled with a theory of peoples elected by God, and of the dangers run by the people currently elected, the Germans, menaced by the Jews, the Catholics, the Slavs. In his metamorphoses and intense passages, Schreber becomes a pupil with the Jesuits, burgomaster of a town where Germans fight against Slavs, a young girl defending Alsace against the French; finally he crosses the Aryan gradient or threshold to become a Mongol prince. What does this becoming-pupil, becoming-burgomaster, becoming-young-girl, becoming-Mongol mean? There is no paranoid delirium that does not stir such historical, geographical and racial masses. The mistake would be to conclude from this, for example, that fascists are paranoiacs pure and simple; it would be a mistake, precisely, because, in the present state of things, this would still amount to bringing back the historical and political content of the delirium to an internal familial determination. And what we find still more troubling is that this whole enormous content disappears entirely from the analysis carried out by Freud: no trace of it subsists, everything is crushed, ground down, triangulated in Oedipus, everything is folded back onto the father, in such a way as to reveal in the crudest manner the insufficiency of an Oedipal psychoanalysis.

85Let us consider yet another paranoid delirium of particularly rich political character, such as the one reported by Maud Mannoni. The example strikes us as all the more striking in that we have great admiration for Maud Mannoni's work and the way she knows how to pose institutional and anti-psychiatric problems. Here, then, is a Martiniquan who locates himself in his delirium in relation to the Arabs and the Algerian war, to the Whites and the events of May, etc.: "I fell ill through the Algerian problem. I had done the same stupid thing as them (sexual pleasure). They adopted me as a brother of their race. I have Mongol blood. The Algerians have controverted me in all my realizations. I had racist ideas… I am descended from the dynasty of the Gauls. By that title I have the value of nobility… Let my name be determined, let it be determined scientifically and I will then be able to establish a harem." Now, while recognizing the character of "revolt" and "truth for all" implied in psychosis, Maud Mannoni wants the bursting apart of familial relations in favor of themes that the subject himself declares racist, political and metaphysical to have its origin inside the familial structure as matrix. This origin is therefore found in the symbolic void or "the initial foreclosure of the signifier of the father." The name to be determined scientifically, and which haunts the history, is nothing more than the paternal name. In this case as in others, the use of the Lacanian concept of foreclosure tends toward the forced oedipianization of the rebel: the absence of Oedipus is interpreted 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 the imaginary identifications in the maternal undifferentiated. The law of the double bind functions implacably, throwing us back 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 it is the entire historico-political theme that is interpreted as a set of imaginary identifications under the dependency of Oedipus, or of what the subject "lacks" in order to let himself be oedipianized.{74} And certainly the question is not whether familial determinations or indeterminations have a role. It is evident that they do. But is it an initial role of symbolic organizer (or disorganizer) from which the floating contents of the historical delirium would derive, like so many shards of an imaginary mirror? The void of the father, and the cancerous development of the mother and sister — is that the trinitarian formula of the schizo that brings him back to Oedipus, constrained and forced? And yet, as we have seen, if there is a problem that does not arise in schizophrenia, it is that of identifications… And if to cure is to oedipianize, one understands the convulsions of the patient who "does not want to be cured," 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 conspires to make him undergo (social repression before psychoanalysis)?

86The schizophrenic egg is like the biological egg: they have a similar history, and their knowledge has run up against the same difficulties, the same illusions. It was at first believed, in the development and differentiation of the egg, that veritable "organizers" determined the destiny of the parts. But it was realized on the one hand that all sorts of variable substances had the same action as the stimulus envisaged, and on the other hand that the parts themselves had specific competences or potentialities escaping the stimulus (grafting experiments). Hence the idea that stimuli are not organizers, but simple inducers: at the limit, inducers of any nature whatsoever. All sorts of substances, all sorts of materials, killed, boiled, triturated, have the same effect. What carried the illusion were the beginnings of development: the simplicity of the beginning, consisting for example in cellular divisions, could suggest a sort of adequation between the induced and the inducer. But we know well that a thing is always badly judged from its beginnings, because, in order to appear, it is forced to mime structural states, to flow into states of forces that serve it as masks. More: from the beginning one can recognize that it makes a quite other use of them, and that already, beneath the mask, through the mask, it invests the terminal forms and the specific higher states that it will posit for themselves later on. Such is the history of Oedipus: the parental figures are in no way organizers, but inducers or stimuli of any value whatsoever that trigger processes of a quite other nature, endowed with a sort of indifference to the stimulus. And no doubt one may believe that, at the beginning (?), the stimulus, the Oedipal inducer, is a veritable organizer. But to believe is an operation of consciousness or of the preconscious, an extrinsic perception and not an operation of the unconscious on itself. And, from the beginning of the child's life, it is already a question of a quite other enterprise that pierces through the mask of Oedipus, another flux that flows through all its fissures, another adventure which is that of desiring production. Now, this, one cannot say that psychoanalysis has not recognized in a certain manner. In his theory of the originary fantasy, of the traces of an archaic heredity and of the endogenous sources of *le surmoi*, Freud constantly affirms that the active factors are not the real parents, nor even the parents such as the child imagines them. Likewise and a fortiori Lacan's disciples, when they take up the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, when they oppose the name of the father to the imago, and "foreclosure" which concerns the signifier, to a real absence or deficiency of the paternal character. One could not better recognize that the parental figures are inducers of any kind whatsoever, and that the true organizer is elsewhere, on the side of the induced and not of the inducer. But it is there that the question begins, the same as for the biological egg. For, under these conditions, is there any other issue 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 symbolic a priori bound to prematuration? Worse still: it is evident that in invoking such an a priori one does not at all escape from familialism in the narrowest sense, which burdens all of psychoanalysis; on the contrary, one sinks into it and generalizes it. The parents have been put in their true place in the unconscious, which is that of inducers 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 of its Oedipal matrix. Once more there is no exit: one has only found the means to render the family transcendent.

87This is it, the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, framing the unconscious within Oedipus, ligaturing it on either side, crushing desiring production, conditioning the patient to answer papa-mama, to consume papa-mama always. Foucault was therefore entirely right when he said that psychoanalysis in a certain way completed, accomplished what nineteenth-century asylum psychiatry, with Pinel and Tuke, had set out to do: to weld madness to a parental complex, to bind it "to the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the family" — to constitute a microcosm in which "the great massive structures of bourgeois society and its values" are symbolized, Family-Children, Fault-Punishment, Madness-Disorder — to make disalienation pass by the same path as alienation, Oedipus at both ends, thus to ground the moral authority of the doctor as Father and Judge, Family and Law — and to end up finally at the following paradox: "Whereas the mental patient is entirely alienated within 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 by enveloping 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 a certain intensive use of the family. Certainly, this use 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 became necessary to confront psychosis once again, the family at the same stroke re-deployed itself in extension, and was considered for itself as the gradimeter of the forces of alienation and disalienation. Thus the study of the families of schizophrenics relaunched Oedipus by making it reign in the extensive order of a deployed family, where not only did each one combine his triangle more or less well with that of the others, but where the whole 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.

88Jacques Hochman analyzes interesting varieties of psychotic families under a single "fusional postulate": the strictly fusional family, where differentiation no longer exists except between the inside and the outside (those who are not of the family); the scissional family that institutes blocs, clans, or coalitions within itself; the tubular family, where the triangle multiplies to infinity, each member having his own that fits together with others without one being able to recognize the limits of a nuclear family; the foreclosing family, where differentiation finds itself at once included and warded off in one of its members who has been eliminated, annulled, foreclosed.{76} One understands that a concept such as that of foreclosure functions within this extensive frame of a family where several generations, at least three, form the condition for the fabrication of a psychotic: for example, the mother's troubles vis-à-vis her own father make it so that the son, in turn, cannot even "posit his desire" vis-à-vis the mother. Hence the strange idea that if the psychotic escapes Oedipus, it is only because he is there squared, in a field of extension that includes the grandparents. The problem of the cure becomes rather close to an operation of differential calculus, where one proceeds by depotentialization in order to recover the first functions and restore the characteristic or nuclear triangle — always a holy trinity, access to a three-way situation… It is evident that this familialism in extension, where the family receives the proper powers of alienation and disalienation, entails an abandonment of psychoanalysis's base positions concerning sexuality, despite the formal conservation of an analytic vocabulary. A veritable regression to the benefit of a taxonomy of families. One sees this clearly in the attempts at community psychiatry or so-called family psychotherapy, which effectively shatter asylar existence, but nonetheless retain all of its presuppositions, and fundamentally reconnect with nineteenth-century psychiatry, following the slogan proposed by: "from the family to the hospital institution, from the hospital institution to the familial institution, … therapeutic return to the family"!

89But, even in the progressive or revolutionary sectors of institutional analysis on the one hand, of anti-psychiatry on the other, the danger of this familialism in extension persists, 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 therapeutic quasi-families. Once it has been said that it is no longer a matter of re-forming frameworks of familial and social adaptation or integration, but of instituting original forms of active groups, the question that arises is to know 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 moment being folded back into the framework of a structural Oedipus whose lacuna is diagnosed and whose integrity is restored, holy trinity that continues to strangle desiring production and to stifle its problems. The political and cultural content, historical-worldly and racial, remains crushed in the oedipal grinder. This is because 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, "mediatizes" 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 frees himself better from familialism, thanks to the resources of a flux come from the Orient). "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 mediatized 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 electric machine or by men from another planet. These constructions, however, are to a large extent 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 so-called psychotic."{77} Even the essential thesis of anti-psychiatry, which posits at the limit an identity of nature between social alienation and mental alienation, must be understood as a function of a maintained familialism, and not of its refutation. For it is insofar as the family-microcosm, the family-gradimeter, 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 is the right one"?).

90In the general conception of microcosm-macrocosm relations, Bergson introduced a discrete revolution to which it is necessary to return. The assimilation of the living being to a microcosm is an ancient commonplace. But if the living being was similar to the world, it was, so it was said, because it was or tended to be an isolated system, naturally closed: the comparison of microcosm and macrocosm was therefore 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 the two wholes. If the living being resembles the world, it is on the contrary insofar as it opens onto the opening of the world; if it is a whole, it is insofar as the whole, that of the world as of the living being, is always in the process of making itself, of producing itself or progressing, of inscribing itself in an irreducible and non-closed temporal dimension. We believe that 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 oozing triangle, exploded triangle from which the fluxes of desire escape toward other places. It is curious that we had to wait for the dreams of the colonized to perceive that, at the summits of the pseudo-triangle, mama was dancing with the missionary, papa was getting buggered by the tax collector, while *le moi* was being beaten by a white man. It is precisely this coupling of the parental figures with agents of another nature, their embrace like wrestlers, that prevents the triangle from closing back upon itself, from holding good for itself, and from pretending to express or represent this other nature of the agents that are in question in the unconscious itself. When Fanon encounters a case of persecution psychosis linked to the death of the mother, he first asks himself whether he is "in the presence of an unconscious guilt complex such as Freud described in *Mourning and Melancholia*"; but he soon learns that the mother was killed by a French soldier, and that the subject himself murdered the wife of a colonist, whose disemboweled ghost perpetually comes to drag along, to tear apart the memory of the mother.{78} One can always say that these limit-situations of war trauma, of the colonial state, of extreme social misery, etc., are scarcely conducive to the construction of Oedipus — and that it is precisely thereby that they favor a psychotic development or explosion —, but we sense that the problem lies elsewhere. For, besides the fact that one admits that a certain comfort of the bourgeois family is required to furnish Oedipalized subjects, one keeps pushing back ever further the question of knowing what is really invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus.

91The revolutionary is the first to be able to say by right: Oedipus, never heard of him — because the disjointed pieces remain stuck to every corner of the historical social field, as a field of battle and not a bourgeois theater stage. Too bad if the psychoanalysts roar. But Fanon noted that troubled periods had unconscious effects not only on active militants, but also on neutrals and those who claim to remain outside the affair, to keep out of politics. The same will be said of apparently peaceful periods: grotesque error to believe that the child-unconscious knows only papa-mama, and does not know "in its way" that the father has a boss who is not a father of a father, or again that he is himself a boss who is not a father… So that it is for all cases that we posit the following rule: father and mother exist only in pieces, and are never organized in a figure or in a structure capable both of representing the unconscious, and of representing in it the various agents of the collectivity, but always burst into fragments that flank these agents, confront them, oppose them or conciliate with them as in a hand-to-hand combat. Father, mother and *moi* are at grips, and in direct contact with the elements of the historical and political situation, the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the protester or the resistant, the boss, the boss's wife, who at every instant break any triangulation, and prevent the whole of the situation from folding back onto the family complex and being interiorized in it. In short, the family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even when inscribed in a larger circle that it would mediate and express. The family is by nature off-center, decentered. We are told of fusional, scissional, tubular, foreclosing families. But from where do the cuts and their distribution come vibrating, which precisely prevent the family from being an "interior"? There is always an uncle in America, a brother who has gone wrong, an aunt who has left with a soldier, a cousin who is unemployed, bankrupt or who has suffered the crash, an anarchist grandfather, a grandmother in the hospital, mad or senile. The family does not engender its cuts. Families are cut 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 of this forms the complexes of the unconscious, more efficacious than the sempiternal Oedipus. And it is indeed a matter of the unconscious. If there are structures, 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 immediate impossible real. As Gombrowicz says, the structuralists "seek their structures in culture, I in 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 forth in the sphere of the inter-human, destroying everything that had until then been venerable."{79}

92The Hellenists are right to recall that, even in venerable Oedipus, it was already a matter of "politics." They are simply wrong to conclude that the libido, accordingly, has nothing to do with it. It is quite the contrary: what the libido invests through the disjoined elements of Oedipus, and precisely insofar as these elements never form an autonomous expressive mental structure, are these extrafamilial, sub-familial cuts, these forms of social production in relation with desiring production. Schizo-analysis therefore does not hide that it is a political and social psychoanalysis, a militant analysis: not because it would generalize Oedipus in culture, under the ridiculous conditions that have prevailed up to 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 producing an intimist work, he goes further than the proponents of a populist or proletarian art who content themselves with describing the social and the political in "voluntarily" expressive works. For his part, he is interested in the manner in which the Dreyfus affair, then the war of '14 cut across families, introduce into them new cuts and new connections that bring about a reworking of heterosexual and homosexual libido (for example in the decomposed milieu of the Guermantes). It belongs to the libido to invest the social field in unconscious forms, and thereby to hallucinate all of history, to deliriate civilizations, continents and races, and to "feel" intensely a worldwide becoming. No signifying chain without a Chinese, an Arab, a Black who sticks his head through and comes to trouble the night of a paranoid White. Schizo-analysis proposes to undo the Oedipal expressive 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 any value whatever, an inductor that is neither organizing nor disorganizing. 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 indeed recognized the indifference of the actual parental images, the irreducibility of the response to the stimulation they operate. But it has contented itself with comprehending the response on the basis of an expressive symbolism that is still familial, instead of interpreting it in an unconscious system of production as such (analytic economy).

93The 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 nevertheless refuse the point of view of genesis. At least at the beginning, the unconscious would express itself in a state of family relations and constellations where the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic would be intermingled. Social and metaphysical relations would arise afterward, like a beyond. And since the beginning always comes in twos (it is even the condition for not getting out of it), one invokes a first pre-Oedipal beginning, "the primitive undifferentiation of the earliest stages of the personality" in the relation with the mother, then a second beginning, Oedipus himself with the law of the father and the exclusive differentiations he prescribes within the family — finally latency, the famous latency, after which the beyond begins. But since this beyond consists in making others (the children to come) traverse the same path again, and also since the first beginning is called "pre-Oedipal" only in order to mark from the start its belonging to Oedipus as axis of reference, it is quite obvious that one has simply closed the two ends of Oedipus, and that the beyond or the afterward will always be interpreted in terms of Oedipus, in relation to Oedipus, within the frame of Oedipus. Everything will be folded back onto it, as the discussions of the comparative role of infantile factors and present-day factors in neurosis attest: how could it be otherwise, so long as the "present-day" factor is conceived in this form of the afterward? But, in truth, we know that the present-day factors are there from childhood on, and determine the libidinal investments as a function of the cuts and the connections they introduce into the family. Over the heads of the family people, or beneath them, it is desiring production and social production that experience in childhood experience their identity of nature and their difference of *régime*. Consider three great books of childhood: Jules Vallès's *L'Enfant*, Darien's *Bas les cœurs*, Céline's *Mort à crédit*. 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 breathing? why be poor? why are there rich people? are the object of investments in which the parents have only the role of particular agents of production or of anti-production, always grappling with other agents whom they express all the less in that they are locked with them in the heaven and hell of the child. And the child asks: why? The Rat Man does not wait until he is a man to invest the rich woman and the poor woman who constitute the present-day factor of his obsession. It is for unavowable reasons that the existence of an infantile sexuality is denied, but it is also for hardly avowable reasons that this sexuality is reduced to desiring mama and wanting to take the place of the father. The Freudian blackmail consists in this: either you recognize the Oedipal character of infantile sexuality, or you abandon every position of sexuality. Yet it is not even in the shadow of a transcendent phallus that unconscious effects of the "signified" come to bear 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 desiring production, and the comparative *régime* of this production with social production, from which there follow the state of desire and of its repression, the distribution of agents, and the degree of Oedipianization of sexuality. Lacan says clearly that in terms of the crises and the cuts of science, there is a drama of the scientist that sometimes goes as far as madness, and that "could not here include itself in Oedipus, except by calling it into question," as a consequence.{80} Each child is in this sense a little scientist, a little Cantor. And one may go back through the ages as far as one likes, one will never find a child caught up in an autonomous, expressive, or signifying familial order. In its games as in its feedings, its chains and its meditations, even the nursling finds itself already caught up in a present-day desiring production in which the parents play the role of partial objects, of witnesses, of reporters and agents, within the current of a process that overflows them on every side, and that puts desire into immediate relation with a historical and social reality. It is true that nothing is pre-Oedipal, and that Oedipus must be pushed back to the earliest age, but within the order of a repression of the unconscious. It is no less true that everything is anoedipal within the order of production; that there is the non-Oedipal, the anoedipal that 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 auto-production of the unconscious, the orphan-unconscious, the playful unconscious, the meditative and social unconscious.

94The operation of Oedipus consists in establishing an ensemble of bi-univocal relations between the agents of social production, reproduction and anti-production on the one hand, and on the other hand the agents of 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 folded down into 3 (3 + 1, to designate the transcendent factor that operates the folding). It is therefore inevitable that the collective agents be interpreted as derivatives or substitutes of parental figures, in a system of equivalence that finds the father, the mother and the *moi* everywhere. (And one only pushes the difficulty back if one considers the ensemble of the system, by making it depend then on the transcendent term, phallus.) There is here a faulty use of the conjunctive synthesis, which makes one say "so it was your father, so it was your mother…" And that one discovers only afterwards that all that was the father and the mother is in no way surprising, since one supposes that it is so from the start, but that it is subsequently forgotten-repressed, only to be rediscovered afterwards in relation to the after. Whence the magical formula that marks the bi-univocization well, that is to say the crushing of the polyvocal real to the benefit of a symbolic relation between two articulations: so that is what this meant. 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 prehistoric origin, or as structural foundation. It is a wholly ideological beginning, for ideology. In fact, Oedipus is always and only an arrival ensemble for a departure ensemble constituted by a social formation. Everything is applied to it, in the sense that the agents and relations of social production, and the libidinal investments that correspond to them, are folded down onto the figures of familial reproduction. In the departure ensemble there is the social formation, or rather the social formations; races, classes, continents, peoples, kingdoms, sovereignties; Joan of Arc and the Great Mogul, Luther and the Aztec Serpent. In the arrival ensemble, there is nothing more than papa, mama and *moi*. 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 body without organs 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 inoffensive and pass, appear to pass within the social formation itself. Schizophrenia or desiring production is the limit between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization must now pass within the molar organization, must apply itself to a factitious and submitted territoriality. One senses then what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it interiorizes it. Better a people of neurotics than a single successful schizophrenic, not autisticized. Incomparable instrument of gregariousness, Oedipus is the ultimate submitted and private territoriality of European man. (Moreover, the displaced, conjured limit passes within Oedipus, between its two poles.)

95A word on the shame of psychoanalysis in history and politics. The procedure is well known: one brings together the Great Man and the Crowd. 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 is the great man defined oedipally: he has therefore killed the father, with that murder that never ends, either to annihilate him and identify with the mother, or to internalize him, take his place or reconcile with him (and, in the detail, so many variants corresponding to the neurotic, psychotic, perverse, or "normal," that is, sublimatory, solutions…). In any case, the great man is already great because, for good or ill, he has found a certain original solution to the oedipal conflict. Hitler annihilates the father and unleashes in himself the forces of the bad-mother, Luther internalizes the father and establishes a compromise with *le surmoi*. On the other side, one has the crowd, itself also defined oedipally, by parental images of the second order, collective; the encounter can therefore 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 by "homosexual transfusion" and in relation to the feminine crowd; Luther plays the role of woman in relation to the God of the Christians). Of course, to guard himself against the historian's just anger, the psychoanalyst specifies that he is concerned only with a certain order of causes, that the "other" causes must be taken into account, but that he cannot do everything. Besides, he concerns himself with the other causes just enough to give us a foretaste: he takes into account the institutions of an epoch (the Roman church in the sixteenth century, capitalist power in the twentieth) if only to see in them… parental images of yet another new order, associating father and mother, which are going to be dissociated and otherwise regrouped in the action of the great man and of the crowd. It matters very little whether the tone of these books is orthodox Freudian, culturalist, archetypal. Such books are nauseating. Let no one dismiss them by saying that they belong to the distant past of psychoanalysis: such books are still being written in our day, and many of them. Let no one say that it is a question of an imprudent use of Oedipus: what other use do you wish to make of it? Nor is it any more a question of an ambiguous dimension of "applied psychoanalysis"; for it is all of Oedipus, Oedipus in itself, that is already an application, in the strict sense of the word. And when the best psychoanalysts forbid themselves the historico-political applications, one cannot say that things go much better, since they fall back upon the rock of castration presented as the site of an irreducible "unbearable truth": they shut themselves up in a phallocentrism which determines them to consider analytic activity as having always to evolve in a familial microcosm, and they still treat the direct investments of the social field by libido as simple imaginary dependencies of Oedipus, where one would have to denounce "a fusional dream," "a fantasy of return to Unity." Castration, they say, this is what separates us from the political, this is what makes our originality, ours as analysts, who do not forget that society too is triangular and symbolic!

96If it is true that Oedipus is obtained by folding-down or application, it itself presupposes a certain type of libidinal investment of the social field, of the production and formation of this field. There is no more an individual Oedipus than there is an individual fantasy. Oedipus is a means of integration into the group, both in the adaptive form of its own reproduction which makes it pass from one generation to another, and in its maladapted neurotic stases which block desire onto 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 that depend on Oedipal projections and identifications, but quite the contrary: it is the Oedipal applications that depend on the determinations of the subjected group as the initial set, and on their libidinal investment (from thirteen on I worked, rising in the social scale, the promotion, being part of the exploiters…). There is therefore a segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses in the unconscious which does not coincide with the divisions of classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominant class: it is this use that constitutes the feeling of "being one of ours," of belonging to a superior race threatened by the enemies from without. Thus the Poor-White son of pioneers, the Protestant Irishman who commemorates the victory of his ancestors, the fascist of the master race. Oedipus depends on such a nationalist, religious, racist feeling, and not the inverse: it is not the father who projects himself into the leader, but the leader who applies himself to the father, either to tell us "you will not surpass your father," or to tell us "you will surpass him by rediscovering our forefathers." Lacan has profoundly shown the link of Oedipus with segregation. Not however in the sense in which segregation would be a consequence of Oedipus, underlying the fraternity of the brothers once the father is dead. On the contrary, the segregative use is a condition of Oedipus, to the extent that the social field folds down onto the familial bond only by presupposing an enormous archaism, an incarnation of the race in person or in spirit — yes, I am one of yours…

97It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field, which coexists with but does not necessarily coincide with preconscious investments, or with what preconscious investments "ought to be." That 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 ought to determine them to combat, it is not enough to say: they were deceived, the masses were deceived. It is not an ideological problem, of misrecognition and illusion, it is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure. Preconscious investments are made, or ought to be made, according to the interests of opposed classes. But unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the desiring subject, individual or collective. They can ensure the general submission to a dominant class, making cuts and segregations pass 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, in whole or in part, independently of the interest of the desiring subject. It is not by metaphor, even 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 budding money, money that produces money? There are economico-social "complexes" which are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and which communicate a *Voluptas* from top to bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do here, because they depend on it instead of being at the principle. For it is a question of flux, of stocks, of cuts and of fluctuations of flux; desire is everywhere that something flows and runs, drawing along interested subjects, but also drunken or sleeping subjects, toward deadly mouths.

98Such is therefore the goal of schizo-analysis: 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 who desires (whence the role of the death drive in the connection of desire and the social). All this happens not in ideology, but well beneath it. An unconscious investment of fascist or reactionary type can coexist with a revolutionary conscious investment. Inversely, it may 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 the reactionary unconscious investment as conforming to the interest of the dominant class, but proceeding on its own account, in terms of desire, through the segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus follows: I am of the superior race. The revolutionary unconscious investment is such that desire, still on its own mode, intersects the interest of the dominated, exploited classes, and makes flux flow capable of breaking at once all segregations and their Oedipal applications, capable of hallucinating history, of raving races and setting continents ablaze. No, I am not one of yours, I am the outside and the deterritorialized, "I am of inferior race for all eternity, … I am a beast, a negro." Here again it is a matter of an intense power to invest and counter-invest in the unconscious. Oedipus jumps, because its conditions themselves have jumped. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is opposed to the segregative and bi-univocal use. Delirium has as it were two poles, racist and racial, paranoid-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 by crossing Aryan segregation. Hence the ambiguity of the texts in great authors, when they handle the theme of races, fertile in equivocation like destiny. Schizo-analysis must here disentangle 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, a montage of machines of desire, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary power. The "So it is!" or Igitur's meditation on race, in essential relation with madness.

SECTION 6

99Inexhaustible and always current, the *sottisier* of Oedipus. We are told that fathers died "throughout thousands of years" (well, well) and that the corresponding "internalization" of the paternal image was produced during the paleolithic up to the beginning of the neolithic, "around 8,000 years ago."{81} Either one does history or one doesn't. But really, as for the death of the father, the news travels slowly. One would be wrong to drag Nietzsche into that story. For Nietzsche is not the one who ruminates over the death of the father, and who spends his whole paleolithic internalizing it. On the contrary: Nietzsche is deeply weary of all these stories made up 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 in fashion in his Hegelian time. Alas, he was mistaken, the discourses have continued. But Nietzsche wanted us at last to get to serious matters. Of the death of God, he gives twelve or thirteen versions, for good measure and so that no more be said about it, to render the event comical. And he explains that this event has strictly no importance, that it really interests only the last pope: God dead or not dead, the father dead or not dead, it comes to the same thing, since the same repression and the same originary repression continue, here in the name of God or of a living father, there in the name of man or of the internalized dead father. Nietzsche says that what matters is not the news that God is dead, but the time it takes to bear its fruits. Here the psychoanalyst pricks up his ear, he thinks he is on familiar ground: it is well known that the unconscious takes time to digest a piece of news, one can even cite a few texts of Freud on the unconscious which ignores time, and which conserves its objects like an Egyptian sepulchre. 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 for the unconscious. The fruits of the news are not the consequences of the death of God, but this other piece of news, that the death of God has no consequence. In other terms: that God, that the father never existed (or then, so long ago, during the paleolithic perhaps…). One has only ever killed a dead man, throughout all time. The fruits of the news of the death of God suppress the death-flower as much as the bud of life. For, alive or dead, it is only a question of belief, one does not get out of the element of belief. The announcement of the dead father constitutes one last belief, "the belief in the virtue of unbelief," of which Nietzsche says: "This violence always manifests the need of a belief, of a support, of a structure…" Oedipus-structure.

100Engels 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: one would really say that Bachofen believes in it, that he believes in the myths, in the Erinyes, in Apollo and Athena.{82} The same reproach applies even more to the psychoanalysts: one would say that they believe in it, in the myth, in Oedipus, in castration. They reply: the question is not whether we believe in it, but whether the unconscious itself believes in it. But what is it, this unconscious reduced to the state of belief? Who is injecting it with belief? Psychoanalysis can become a rigorous discipline only if it proceeds to a bracketing of belief, that is, 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 diverts and stifles effective production. That is why the 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 that are only its conscious expressions, we relate it to independent existences—the father, the mother, the progenitors—which do not yet comprehend their elements as internal elements of desire. The question of the father is like that of God: born of abstraction, it presupposes the bond of man and nature broken, the bond of man and world broken, so that man must be produced as man by something exterior to nature and to man. On this point Nietzsche makes a remark altogether similar to those of Marx or Engels: "We burst out laughing at the mere sight of *man and world* placed side by side, separated by the sublime pretension of the little word *and*."{83} Quite other is the coextensivity, the coextension of man and nature; circular movement by which the unconscious, remaining always 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 the subject of it. 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 the service of generation, it is the generation of bodies that is in the service of sexuality as auto-production of the unconscious. It is not sexuality that represents a premium for the ego in exchange for its subordination to the process of generation; on the contrary, it is generation that is the consolation of the ego, its prolongation, the passage from one body to another through which the unconscious only reproduces itself in itself. It is indeed in this sense that one must say: the unconscious has always been an orphan, that is to say, it engendered 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, so much does it amount to the same to affirm or deny such a being, to live it or to kill it: one and the same misconstrual of the nature of the unconscious.

101But psychoanalysts hold to producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this way, and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression or regression: your father, and your father's father, Oedipal snowball all the way to the father of the horde, God and the Paleolithic. It is Oedipus who makes us man, for better or for worse, says the book of stupidities. On this point the tone can vary, but the substance remains the same: you will not escape Oedipus, you have the choice only between the "neurotic outcome" and the "non-neurotic outcome." The tone can be that of the rabid 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 disturbing play on words does the analyst become the promoter of anality? Or else the psychoanalyst-priest, the pious psychoanalyst who sings the incurable insufficiency of being: do you not see that Oedipus saves us from Oedipus, he is our misery, but also our grandeur, depending on whether one lives him neurotically, or lives the structure of him, mother of holy belief (J. M. Pohier). Or else the techno-psychoanalyst, the reformist obsessed with the triangle, who envelops within Oedipus the splendid gifts of civilization, identity, depressive mania and liberty under an infinite progression: "In Oedipus, the individual learns to live the triangular situation, pledge of his identity, and at the same time discovers, sometimes in the depressive mode, sometimes in that of exaltation, fundamental alienation, his irremediable solitude, price of his liberty. The fundamental structure of Oedipus must not only be generalized in time to all of the child's triangular experiences with his parents, it must be generalized in space to triangular relations other than parent-child relations."{84}

102The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, but solely problems of use. The question of desire is not "what does it mean?", but how does it work. How do they function, the machines of desire, yours, mine, with what misfirings forming part of their use, how do they pass from one body to another, how do they hook onto 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 is being prepared. What connections, what disjunctions, what conjunctions, what is the use 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 entrance. The problem of language could only be posed to the extent that linguists and logicians evacuated meaning; and the highest power of language was discovered when the work was considered as a machine producing certain effects, answerable to a certain use. Malcolm Lowry says of his work: it is whatever you want, so long as it functions, "and it functions, you can be sure, because I have experienced it" — a machinery{85}. Only, that meaning is nothing other than use becomes a firm principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of determining the legitimate uses, by opposition to the illegitimate uses, which on the contrary refer use back to a supposed meaning and restore a sort of transcendence. 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 the sense that it carries out the critique of Oedipus, or carries Oedipus to the point of its own auto-critique. It proposes to explore a transcendental unconscious, instead of metaphysical; material, instead of ideological; schizophrenic, instead of oedipal; non-figurative, instead of imaginary; real, instead of symbolic; machinic, instead of structural; molecular, micropsychic and micrological, instead of molar or gregarious; productive, instead of expressive. And what is at stake here are practical principles as directions of the "cure."

103We have therefore seen previously how the immanent criteria of desiring production allowed legitimate uses of syntheses to be defined, entirely distinct from the Oedipal uses. And in relation to this desiring 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 was opposed to 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 on a paralogism of extrapolation, which constituted in the end the formal cause of Oedipus, and whose illegitimacy weighed on the whole of the operation: extracting from the signifying chain a complete transcendent object, as despotic signifier on which the entire chain then seemed to depend, assigning a lack to each position of desire, soldering desire to a law, engendering the illusion of a detachment. In the second place, an inclusive or unlimitative use of disjunctive syntheses is opposed to their Oedipal use, exclusive, limitative. This limitative use in turn has two poles, imaginary and symbolic, since it leaves no choice except between the exclusive symbolic differentiations and the undifferentiated imaginary, correlatively determined by Oedipus. This time it shows how Oedipus proceeds, what the procedure of Oedipus is: paralogism of the double bind, of the double impasse (or perhaps it would be better to translate, following a suggestion of Henri Gobard, "double hold," as in a double clinch in wrestling, to better show the treatment to which the unconscious is subjected when it is ligatured at both ends, leaving it no chance other than to respond Oedipus, to recite Oedipus, in sickness as in health, in its crises as in its dénouement, in its solution as in its problem; for, in any case, the double bind is not the schizophrenic process, but rather, 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 is opposed to 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, etc., moment, which constitutes by segregation a starting set always presupposed by Oedipus, even in an entirely implicit manner; then a familial moment which constitutes the arrival set 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 folding-back of libidinal investments onto the eternal papa-mama. Still we have not exhausted all the paralogisms that practically orient the cure in the direction of a frenzied Oedipianization, betrayal of desire, putting the unconscious in the nursery, narcissistic machine for little chattering and arrogant *moi*s, perpetual absorption of capitalist surplus-value, flux of words against flux of money, the interminable story, psychoanalysis.

104The three errors concerning 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 however much one interprets these notions in the terms of a combinatorics that makes of lack an empty place, and no longer a privation, of law a rule of the game, and no longer a commandment, of the signifier a distributor, and no longer a meaning, one cannot prevent them from dragging behind them their theological cortège, insufficiency of being, guilt, signification. Structural interpretation rejects every belief, raises itself above images, retains of father and mother only functions, defines the interdict and transgression as structural operators: but what water will wash these concepts of their background, of their backworlds — religiosity? Scientific knowledge as unbelief is truly the last refuge of belief, and, as Nietzsche says, there has only ever been 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 nothing but production of fantasy; but the sign does not produce fantasies, it is production of the real and positing of desire in reality. As soon as one welds desire back onto the law, one does not realize how right one is in recalling that it is a thing known from all time, that there is no desire without law — therefore one recommences 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 sign of the law, it is sign of power — and who would dare call law this fact that desire posits and develops its power, and that everywhere it is, it makes fluxes flow and cuts substances ("I refrain from speaking of chemical laws, the word has a moral aftertaste.")? As soon as one makes desire depend on the signifier, one places desire back 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 cut-fluxes that do not let themselves be signified in the unary trait of castration, always a point-sign of several dimensions, polyvocity as basis of a punctual semiology.

105The unconscious is black, it is said. Reich and Marcuse are often reproached for their "Rousseauism," their naturalism: a certain overly idyllic conception of the unconscious. But precisely, are we not lending 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 how much 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 forces other than psychoanalysis for Oedipianizing the unconscious, making it guilty, castrating it. But psychoanalysis backs the movement, it invents a last priest. Oedipal analysis imposes on all the syntheses of the unconscious a transcendent use that secures their conversion. Therefore the practical problem of schizo-analysis is the contrary reversion: returning the syntheses of the unconscious to their immanent use. To de-Oedipianize, to undo the father-mother spider's web, to undo beliefs in order to reach the production of machines of desire, and the economic and social investments where militant analysis is at stake. Nothing is done so long as one does not touch the machines. This implies very concrete interventions in truth: for the benevolent pseudo-neutrality of the Oedipal analyst, who wants and hears only of father and mother, substitute a malevolent activity, openly malevolent — you're pissing me off with Oedipus, if you keep at it we stop the analysis, or else an electric shock, stop saying papa-mama — of course, "Hamlet lives in you as Werther lives in you," and Oedipus too, and anything you like, but "you grow uterine arms and legs, uterine lips, a uterine moustache; in reliving reminiscent deaths, your *moi* becomes a sort of mineral theorem constantly demonstrating the vanity of life… Were you born Hamlet? Did you not rather give birth to Hamlet within you? Why return to myth?".{86} In renouncing myth, it is a matter of putting a bit of joy, a bit of discovery back into psychoanalysis. For it has become quite dreary, quite sad, quite interminable, everything done in advance. Will it be said that the schizo is not joyous either? But does its sadness not come from the fact that it can no longer bear the forces of Oedipianization, of Hamletization that hem it in on all sides? Rather to flee, onto the body without organs, and shut oneself inside it, close it back on oneself. The small joy 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 the domains of the productive unconscious, he would feel as out of place there, with his theater, as an actress of the Comédie-Française in a factory, a medieval priest on an assembly line. To set up units of production, to connect machines of desire: what goes on in this factory, what this process is, its agonies and its glories, its pains and its joys, remain still unknown.

SECTION 7

106We have tried to analyze the form, the reproduction, the (formal) cause, the procedure, the condition of the Oedipal triangle. But we have postponed the analysis of the real forces, of the real causes upon which triangulation depends. The general line of the answer is simple, has been traced out by Reich: it is social repression, the forces of social repression. Yet this answer leaves two problems standing, and even gives them greater urgency: on the one hand the specific relation of originary repression with repression; on the other hand the particular situation of Oedipus in the repression-originary repression system. The two problems are obviously linked, because, if originary repression bore on incestuous desires, it would thereby acquire an independence and a primacy, as the condition of constitution of exchange or of any society, in relation to repression, which would now concern only the returns of the repressed in a constituted society. We must therefore consider the second question first: does originary repression bear on the Oedipus complex as the adequate expression of the unconscious? Must we even say with Freud that the Oedipus complex, following its two poles, is either undergoing originary repression (not without leaving traces and returns that will run up against the prohibitions), or suppressed (but not without being passed on to the children, with whom the same story begins again)?{87} The question is whether Oedipus effectively expresses desire; if it is desired, then it is indeed upon it that originary repression bears. Now Freud's argument is enough to leave one pensive: Freud takes up a remark of Frazer's 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 pushes us toward 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 is not desired...). Once again, it is this confidence in the law that leaves us pensive, this ignorance of the ruses and procedures of the law.

107The immortal father of *Death on the Installment Plan* cries out: so you want to make me die, that's what you want, eh, say? Yet we wanted nothing of the sort. We did not want the train to be papa, nor the station mama. We wanted only innocence and peace, and to be left to machine our little machines, oh desiring production. Of course, bits of the mother's body and the father's body are caught up in the connections, parental appellations arise in the disjunctions of the chain, the parents are there as just any old stimuli that trigger the becoming of adventures, of races and continents. But what a strange Freudian mania, to refer to Oedipus what overflows it on all sides, beginning with the hallucination of books and the delirium of apprenticeships (the schoolteacher-substitute of the father, and the book-family-romance…). Freud could not bear a simple joke from Jung, saying that Oedipus could not have any really real existence since even the savage prefers a young pretty woman to his mother or his grandmother. If Jung betrayed everything, it was not through this joke, which can only suggest that the mother functions as a pretty girl just as much as the pretty girl as mother, the principal thing being for the savage or for the child to form and make his machines of desire run, 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 itself guilty? One acts as if one could conclude directly from the repression to the nature of the repressed, and just as well from the prohibition to the nature of what is prohibited. Here we have, typically, a paralogism, yet another one, a fourth paralogism that should be called displacement. For it happens that the law prohibits something perfectly fictive in the order of desire or of the "instincts," in order to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. It is even the only way for the law to bite into intention, and to culpabilize the unconscious. In short, we do not find ourselves before a two-term system in which one could conclude from the 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 the repression; the repressed representative, on which repression really bears; the displaced represented, which gives of the repressed a rigged apparent image by which desire is supposed to let itself be taken in. That is 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 a factitious product of repression. It is only the represented, insofar as it is induced by repression. Repression cannot act without displacing desire, without raising up a desire of consequence, all ready for the punishment, all hot for the punishment, and putting it in place of the antecedent desire on which it bears in principle or in reality ("ah, so that's what it was!"). Lawrence, who does not lead a struggle against Freud in the name of the rights of the Ideal, but who speaks in virtue of the flux of sexuality, of the intensities of the unconscious, and who is grieved and aghast at what Freud is in the process of doing when he encloses sexuality in the Oedipal nursery, senses this operation of displacement and protests with all his strength: no, Oedipus is not a state of desire and of drives, it is an idea, nothing but an idea that repression inspires in us concerning desire, not even a compromise, but an idea in the service of repression, of its propaganda or its propagation. "The incest motive is a logical deduction of the human reason, which, by recourse to this last extremity, saves itself… It is first and foremost a logical deduction of the reason, even effected unconsciously, and which is then introduced into the passional sphere where it becomes a 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 has anything in the least of a concept, and consequently nothing personal, since the form of persons, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mentally subjective *moi*. Such 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."{89}

108Oedipal desires are in no way repressed, and have no need to be. They are nevertheless in an intimate relationship with repression, but in another way. They are the lure, or the disfigured image by which repression catches desire in its trap. 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 which models it for desire and plasters it onto desire. One may, moreover, doubt that incest is a true obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim. We have seen others… The true danger lies elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, however small, has what it takes to call into question the established order of a society: not that desire is a-social, on the contrary. But it is upsetting; there is no machine of desire that can be posited without blowing up entire social sectors. Whatever certain revolutionaries may think, desire is in its essence revolutionary — desire, not the festival! — and no society can tolerate a position of true desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude and hierarchy being compromised. If a society is identified 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, servitude may themselves be desired. It is altogether vexing 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 that 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 an open sea, and convey strange fluxes that do not let themselves be stockpiled within an established order. Desire does not "want" the revolution, it is revolutionary by itself and as if involuntarily, by wanting what it wants. Since the beginning of this study, we have maintained both that social production and desiring production are one and the same, but that they differ in régime, such that a social form of production exercises an essential repression on desiring production, and also that desiring production (a "true" desire) has what it takes, potentially, to blow up the social form. But what is a "true" desire, since repression, too, is desired? How to distinguish them — we demand the rights of a very slow analysis. For, let us not be mistaken, even in their opposed usages, they are the same syntheses.

109One sees clearly what psychoanalysis expects from a supposed bond, in which Oedipus would be the object of repression, and even its subject by way of *le surmoi*. It expects from it a cultural justification of repression, which brings repression to the foreground and considers the problem of suppression only as secondary from the point of view of the unconscious. That is why critics have been able to identify a conservative or reactionary turn in Freud, from the moment he gave repression an autonomous value as the condition of culture exercising itself against incestuous drives: Reich even says that the great turn of Freudianism, the abandonment of sexuality, is when Freud accepts the idea of a primary anxiety that would trigger repression endogenously. Consider the 1908 article on "civilized sexual morality": Oedipus is not yet named there, repression is considered there as a function of suppression, which provokes a displacement, and which exercises itself on the partial drives insofar as they represent in their own way a kind of desiring production, before exercising itself against the incestuous or other drives threatening legitimate marriage. But thereafter it is evident that, the more the problem of Oedipus and incest will occupy the front of the stage, the more repression and its correlates, suppression and sublimation, will be founded in supposedly transcendent exigencies of civilization, at the same time as psychoanalysis will sink further into a familialist and ideological vision. We do not have to begin again the recounting of the reactionary compromises of Freudianism, and even of its "theoretical capitulation": this work has been done several times, profoundly, in a rigorous and nuanced manner.{90} We see no particular problem in the coexistence, within one and the same theoretical and practical doctrine, of revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements. We refuse the "take it or leave it" stroke, on the pretext that theory justifies practice, having been born from it, or that one can contest the process of the "cure" only on the basis of elements drawn from this same cure. As if every great doctrine were not a combined formation, made of pieces and bits, of codes and diverse flux 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 has been done, and well done, on the other hand the history of the movement has not even been sketched: the structure of the psychoanalytic group, its politics, its tendencies and its foci, its self-applications, its suicides and its madnesses, the enormous group *surmoi*, all that took place on the filled body of the master. What is conventionally called Jones's monumental work does not pierce the censorship, it codifies it. And how three elements coexisted: the exploratory and pioneering, revolutionary element, which was discovering desiring production; the classical cultural element, which folds everything back onto a scene of Oedipal theatrical representation (the return to myth!); and finally the third element, the most disquieting, a kind of racket thirsty for respectability, which will not rest until it is recognized and institutionalized, a formidable enterprise of absorption of surplus-value, 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 something of all this, a fantastical Christopher Columbus, a brilliant bourgeois reader of Goethe, of Shakespeare, of Sophocles, a masked Al Capone.

110Reich's strength is to have shown how repression depended on suppression. This implies no confusion of the two concepts, since suppression precisely needs repression in order to form docile subjects and assure the reproduction of the social formation, including in its repressive structures. But, far from social suppression having to be understood on the basis of a familial repression coextensive with civilization, it is the latter that must be understood as a function of a suppression inherent in a given form of social production. Suppression bears on desire, and not only on needs or interests, only through sexual repression. The family is indeed the delegated agent of this repression, insofar as it assures "a psychological mass reproduction of the economic system of a society." One will certainly not conclude from this that desire is Oedipal. On the contrary, it is the suppression of desire or sexual repression, that is, the stasis of libidinal energy, that actualize Oedipus and engage desire in this willed impasse, organized by repressive society. Reich was the first to pose the problem of the relation of desire 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 summary 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 did not manage to determine the insertion of desire into the economic infrastructure itself, the insertion of drives into social production. From then on, revolutionary investment seemed to him such that desire coincided in it simply with an economic rationality; as for reactionary mass investments, they still seemed to him to refer back to ideology, so much so that psychoanalysis had as its sole role to explain the subjective, the negative, and the inhibited, without directly participating as such in the positivity of the revolutionary movement or in desiring creativity (was this not in a certain way to reintroduce error or illusion?). The fact remains that Reich, in the name of desire, made a song of life pass through psychoanalysis. In the final resignation of Freudianism, he denounced a fear of life, a resurgence of the ascetic ideal, a culture-broth of bad conscience. Better to set off in search of Orgone, he said, the vital and cosmic element of desire, than to continue being a psychoanalyst under those conditions. No one forgave him, whereas Freud received the great pardon. He was the first to have tried to make the analytic machine and the revolutionary machine function together. And, in the end, he had nothing left but his own machines of desire, his paranoiac, miraculating, bachelor boxes with metal walls of wool and cotton genies.

111That 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 expresses well the difference in nature. But one cannot conclude from it to any real independence. Repression is such that suppression becomes desired, ceasing to be conscious; and it induces a desire as consequence, a rigged image of that which it bears upon, which gives it an appearance of independence. Repression properly speaking is a means in the service of suppression. That which it bears upon is also the object of suppression: desiring production. But precisely it implies a double original operation, one by which the suppressive social formation delegates its power to a repressing agency, the other by which, correlatively, repressed desire is as it were covered over by the displaced and rigged image that repression raises up of it. There is at once a delegation of repression by the social formation, and a disfiguration, 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 is the incestuous drives. The Oedipus complex, oedipianization, is therefore the fruit of the double operation. It is in one and the same movement that suppressive social production has itself replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter gives of desiring production a displaced image which represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives. The family-drives relation is thus substituted for the relation of the two productions, in a diversion in which the whole 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 ward off the power of revolt and revolution of desire. By holding out to it the deforming mirror of incest (eh, is that what you wanted?), desire is shamed, it is stupefied, it is put into a situation without exit, it is easily persuaded to renounce "itself" in the name of the higher interests of civilization (and what if everyone did the same, what if everyone married their mother, or kept their sister for themselves? there would no longer be any differentiation, nor any possible exchange…). One must act fast and early. A shallow slandered stream, incest.

112But if one sees the interest of the operation from the standpoint of social production, one sees less well what makes it possible from the standpoint of desiring production itself. We nonetheless have the elements of an answer. It would be necessary that social production dispose, on the registration surface of the *socius*, of an agency capable of biting in as well, of inscribing itself as well on the registration surface of desire. Such an agency exists, the family. It belongs essentially to the registration of social production, as the system of the reproduction of the producers. And doubtless, at the other pole, the registration of desiring production on the body without organs is done through a genealogical network that is not familial: the parents intervene there only as partial objects, fluxes, signs and agents of a process that overflows them on all sides. At most the child innocently "reports" to the parents something of the astonishing productive experience he conducts with his desire; but this experience does not relate itself to them as such. Yet it is precisely here that the operation arises. Under the precocious action of social repression, the family slips in, insinuates itself into the network of desiring genealogy, it alienates the entire genealogy to its own account, it confiscates the Numen (but come now, God, that's papa…). One acts as if desiring experience "related itself" to the parents, and as if the family were its supreme law. One submits the partial objects to the famous law of totality-unity acting as "lacking." One submits the disjunctions to the alternative of the undifferentiated or of exclusion. The family therefore introduces itself into the production of desire, and from the earliest age will operate upon it a displacement, an unheard-of repression. It is delegated to repression by social production. And if it can slip in this way into the registration of desire, it is because the body without organs on which this registration is done already exercises on its own account, as we have seen, an originary repression upon desiring production. It belongs to the family to take advantage of this, and to superimpose upon it the secondary repression properly so called, which is delegated to it or to which it is delegated (psychoanalysis has indeed shown the difference between these two repressions, but not the scope of this difference or the distinction of their régime). That is why repression properly so called is not content with repressing real desiring production, but gives of the repressed an apparent displaced image, by substituting a familial registration for the registration of desire. The whole of desiring production takes on the well-known Oedipal figure only in the familial translation of its registration, translation-betrayal.

113We say sometimes that Oedipus is nothing, almost nothing (in the order of desiring production, even in the child), sometimes that it is everywhere (in the enterprise of domesticating the unconscious, of representing desire and the unconscious). And certainly we have never dreamed of saying 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 misfortune, I am sure of it, came from the distance of my father and the little affection my mother gave me. I decided then that one day I would show them…" If even the artists set to it, one would be wrong to hold back and to have the ordinary scruples of an applied psychoanalyst. If a musician tells us that music bears witness, 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 barely — Freud-musician. No, psychoanalysts invent nothing, although they have invented much in another manner, legislated much, reinforced much, injected much. What psychoanalysts do is only to support the movement, to add a last impulse to the displacement of the entire 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, an Oedipus of transference, an Oedipus of Oedipus in the consulting room, particularly noxious and virulent, but where the subject finally has what it wants, and sucks at its Oedipus on the filled body of the analyst. And that is already too much. But Oedipus is made in the family, not in the analyst's consulting room which acts only as the last territoriality. And Oedipus is not made by the family. The oedipal usages of synthesis, oedipianization, triangulation, castration, all this refers back to forces a little more powerful, a little more subterranean than psychoanalysis, than the family, than ideology, even combined. There we have all the forces of social production, reproduction and repression. For forces truly powerful are needed 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, artist, productive and conquering in the unconscious itself. It is in this sense, we have seen, that Oedipus is an application, and the family a delegated agent. And, even by application, it is hard, it is difficult for a child to live itself as an angle,

SECTION 8

114Freud, in 1924, proposed a simple criterion of distinction between neurosis and psychosis: in neurosis *le moi* obeys the demands of reality, even at the cost of repressing the drives of *le ça*, whereas in psychosis it is under the sway of *le ça*, even at the cost of breaking with reality. Freud's ideas often took a certain time before passing into France. Yet not this one; that same year, Capgras and Carrette presented a case of schizophrenia with the illusion of doubles, in which the patient manifested an intense hatred of the mother and an incestuous desire for the father, but under conditions of loss of reality in which the parents were experienced as false parents, as "doubles." They drew from it an illustration of the inverse relation: in neurosis the objectal function of reality is conserved, but on condition that the causal complex be repressed; in psychosis the complex invades consciousness and becomes its object, at the price of a "repression" which now bears on reality itself or on the function of the real. Freud no doubt insisted on the schematic character of the distinction; for the rupture is also found in neurosis with the return of the repressed (hysterical amnesia, obsessional undoing), and in psychosis a recovery of reality appears with delirious reconstruction. The fact remains that Freud never renounced this simple distinction.{92} And it seems important that, by an original route, he rediscovers an idea dear to traditional psychiatry: the idea that madness is fundamentally tied to a loss of reality. Convergence with the psychiatric elaboration of the notions of dissociation, of autism. Which is why, perhaps, the Freudian exposition is so rapidly diffused.

115Now, what interests us is the precise role of the Oedipus complex in this convergence. For if it is true that familial themes often erupt into psychotic consciousness, one will be all the more astonished, following a remark of Lacan's, that Oedipus should have been "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 familial complex appears precisely as a stimulus of any value whatever, a simple inducer not having the role of organizer, the intensive investments of reality bearing on something altogether different (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 then suffices that one measure psychosis by this rigged measure, that one bring it back to this false criterion, Oedipus, for one to obtain the effect of loss of reality. This is not an abstract operation: an Oedipal "organization" is imposed on the psychotic, were it only to assign its lack in him, at his place. It is an exercise in the full flesh, in the full soul. He reacts by autism and loss of reality. Could it be that the loss of reality is not the effect of the schizophrenic process, but the effect of its forced Oedipianization, that is to say of its interruption? Must we correct what we were saying just before, and suppose that some tolerate Oedipianization less well than others? The schizo would not be sick from Oedipus, from an Oedipus that would surge up all the more in his hallucinated consciousness inasmuch as it would be lacking in the symbolic organization of "his" unconscious. On the contrary, he would be sick from the Oedipianization made to be undergone by him (the most somber organization), and which he can no longer bear, having departed on a distant voyage, as if one ceaselessly brought back to Bécon the one who drifts continents and cultures. He does not suffer from a divided ego, from a shattered Oedipus, but on the contrary from being brought back to all that which he has left. Fall of intensity down to the body without organs = 0, autism: he has no other means of reacting to the barrage of all his investments of reality, a barrage opposed to him by the Oedipal repression-originary repression system. As Laing says, they are interrupted on the voyage. They have lost reality. But when did they lose it? on the voyage or in the interruption of the voyage?

116Therefore another possible formulation of an inverse relation: there would be as it were two groups, the psychotics and the neurotics, those who cannot bear oedipianization, and those who bear it and even content themselves with it, evolving within it. Those on whom the oedipal imprint does not take, and those on whom it does. "I believe that my friends got started at the beginning of the New Age as a group, with forces of practical explosion that launched them into a paternalist deviation which I believe to be vicious… A second group of isolates, of which I am one, no doubt constituted by centers of clavicles, was lifted out of any possibility of individual success at the moment when they were undertaking heavy studies in infused science. As for me, my rebellion against the paternalism of the first group put me, from the second year on, into an increasingly stifling social difficulty. Uh, do you believe that these two groups are capable of junction? I don't hold too much against those bastards of virile paternalism, I am not vindictive… In any case, if I have won, there will be no more struggle between the Father and the Son!… I am speaking of the persons of God, naturally, and not of those neighbors who prime themselves to…"{94} What is opposed across the two groups is the registration of desire on the uncreated body without organs, and the familial registration on the *socius*. Infused science in psychosis and the experimental neurotic sciences. It is the eccentric schizoid circle and the triangle for neurosis. It is more generally the two sorts of uses of synthesis. It is the machines of desire on the one hand, and on the other the oedipal-narcissistic machine. To understand the details of this struggle, one must consider that the family carves, does not cease carving into desiring production. Inscribing itself in the registration of desire, slipping its grip into it, it operates a vast capture of the productive forces, it displaces and reorganizes in its own fashion the ensemble of cuts that characterized the machines of desire. All these cuts, it makes fall into the place of universal castration which itself conditions it ("a dead rat's ass," says Artaud, "suspended from the ceiling of the sky"), but it also redistributes them according to its own laws and the demands of social production. The family cuts following its triangle, by distinguishing what is of the family and what is not. It also cuts within, following the lines of differentiation that form the global persons: there is papa, there is mama, there 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 primary function of the family is retention: it is a matter of knowing what it will reject from desiring production, what it will retain of it, what it will connect onto the dead-end paths that lead to its own undifferentiated (cloaca), what it will conduct on the contrary onto the paths of a swarmable 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 which are only distinguished in appearance. And, during this time, what does desiring production do? The retained elements do not enter into the new use of synthesis which imposes upon them so profound a transformation, without making the whole triangle resonate. The machines of desire are at the door, they make everything vibrate when they enter. Moreover, what does not enter perhaps makes things vibrate even more. They reintroduce or attempt to reintroduce their aberrant cuts. The child feels the task to which it is being summoned. But what to put in the triangle, how to select? The father's nose and the mother's ear, would that do the trick, can that be retained, would that make a good oedipal cut? And the bicycle horn? What is part of the family? It belongs to the triangle to vibrate, to resonate, under the pressure of what it retains as well as of what it pushes back. Resonance (there again stifled or public, shameful or glorious) is the second function of the family. The family is at once an anus that retains, a voice that resonates, and also a mouth that consumes: its three syntheses of its own, since it is a matter of connecting desire to the ready-made objects of social production. Buy madeleines from Combray to have resonances.

117But, as a result, one cannot hold to the simple opposition of two groups, which would allow neurosis to be defined as an intra-Oedipal disturbance, 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 possibility of discerning them directly that poses a problem. How is one 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 hold that it is in the process of securing over the machines of desire, or as a function of those machines slipping away from its imprint and making it lose its grip? Where is the limit of resonance? A family romance expresses an effort to save the Oedipal genealogy, but also a free thrust of non-Oedipal genealogy. Fantasies are never pregnant forms, they are border or frontier phenomena ready to tip to one side or the other. In short, Oedipus is strictly undecidable. One can find it everywhere all the more easily because it is undecidable; it is correct in this sense to say that it serves strictly no purpose. Let us return to Nerval's beautiful story: he wants Aurélie, the beloved woman, to be the same as Adrienne, the little girl of his childhood; he "perceives" them as identical. And Aurélie and Adrienne, both in one, are the mother. Will it be said that identification, as "identity of perception," is here a sign of psychosis? One then falls back on the criterion of reality: the complex invades psychotic consciousness only at the price of a rupture with the real, whereas in neurosis identity remains that of unconscious representations and does not compromise perception. But what has been gained by inscribing everything within Oedipus, even psychosis? One step further, and Aurélie, Adrienne, and the mother are the Virgin. Nerval is searching for the limit of the triangle's vibration. "You are looking for a drama," says Aurélie. One does not inscribe everything in Oedipus without everything, at the limit, fleeing out of Oedipus. The identifications were not identifications of persons from the standpoint of perception, but identifications of names with regions of intensity, which give the starting-point toward other still more intense regions, any stimuli whatever that trigger an altogether different voyage, stases that prepare other breakthroughs, other movements where one no longer encounters the mother, but the Virgin and God: *and three times victorious I crossed the Acheron*. Thus the schizo will accept that everything be reduced to the mother, since it has no importance: it is sure of being able to draw everything back out of the mother, and to retrieve from her for its secret use all the Virgins that had been put there.

118Everything 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 an Oedipal interpretation for neuroses, 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 which is the cause, the ultimate cause either of the psychotic subversions which break Oedipus or submerge it, or of the neurotic resonances which constitute it. Such a principle takes on its full sense if it is related 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 are distinguished from infantile familial factors; all the great dissensions were tied to this evaluation. And the difficulties bore on several aspects. First, the nature of these factors (somatic, social, metaphysical? the famous "problems of life," through which a very pure desexualized idealism reintroduced itself 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 arose afterward, and signified "recent," in opposition to the infantile or to what was older and was sufficiently explained by the familial complex? Even an author like Reich, so concerned to bring desire into relation with the forms of social production, and thereby to show that there is no psycho-neurosis which is not also an actual neurosis, continues to present actual factors as acting through repressive privation (the "sexual stasis"), and as arising afterward. Which leads him to maintain a kind of diffuse Oedipianism, since the stasis or the privative actual factor defines only the energy of the neurosis, but not the content, which for its part refers back to the infantile Oedipal conflict, this old conflict being reactivated by the actual stasis.{95} But the Oedipianists say nothing different when they remark that an actual privation or frustration can only be experienced within an older internal qualitative conflict, which blocks not only the paths forbidden by reality, but equally those it leaves open and which *le moi* in turn forbids itself (formula of the double impasse): "would one find examples" illustrating the schema of actual neuroses "in the prisoner or the camp inmate or the worker harassed by work? It is not certain that they would furnish a large contingent of them… Our systematic tendency is not to accept without inventory the evident iniquities of reality, without attempting to discern in what way the disorder of the world derives from subjective disorder, even if it is with time inscribed in more or less irreversible structures."{96} We understand this sentence, and yet cannot help finding it has a disquieting ring. The following choice is imposed on us: either the actual factor is conceived in a wholly privative, external 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).

119In a wholly different direction, if we consider the idealist deviations of psychoanalysis, we see in them an interesting attempt to give actual factors a status other than privative and ulterior. For 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 disturbance, and the concern to go further than Oedipus, further even than the pre-Oedipal, to ascend 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 actual factors that overflow precisely the familial images in the transference, and as archaic factors infinitely older, and of another antiquity than the infantile factors themselves. But nothing has thereby been gained, since the actual 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 analytically depending on it. So that the after-the-fact reintroduces itself necessarily into the difference of temporality, as is attested by the astonishing distribution Jung proposes: 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 measuring proceeds in two opposite directions. But what does it matter, in the end, whether morality or religion find in Oedipus an analytic and regressive sense, or Oedipus finds an anagogic and prospective sense in morality or religion?

120We 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 which it effects therein. Desiring production as taken up in this relation, this conflict and these modalities — such is the actual factor. Therefore this factor is neither privative nor ulterior. Constitutive of the full life of desire, it is contemporaneous with earliest infancy, and accompanies it at every step. It does not supervene after Oedipus, it in no way presupposes an oedipal organization, nor a pre-oedipal pre-organization. On the contrary, it is Oedipus that depends on it, either as a stimulus of whatever value, a simple inducer through which the an-oedipal organization of desiring production is brought about from infancy onward, or as an effect of the repression-repression that social reproduction imposes on desiring production through the family. Actual is not so named because more recent, and because it would be opposed 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 a 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 *afterwards* seemed to us a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; 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 on the contrary apply themselves to the oedipal sub-ensemble defined by reaction, or else 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 against desiring production: one is greatly mistaken to consider this formation for itself, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

121Yet that is what psychoanalysis does, by shutting itself up in Oedipus, and by determining progressions and regressions as a function of Oedipus, or even in relation to it: so the idea of pre-oedipal regression by which one sometimes tries to characterize psychosis. It is like a Cartesian diver; regressions and progressions only take place inside the artificially closed vessel of Oedipus, and in truth depend on a changing state of forces, but always actual and contemporary, in anoedipal desiring production. Desiring production has no existence other than the actual; progressions and regressions are only the effectuations of a virtuality which finds itself always filled as perfectly as it can be by virtue of the states of desire. Among the rare psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who have known how to institute with schizophrenics, adults or children, a direct relation truly inspired, Gisela Pankow and Bruno Bettelheim trace new paths by their theoretical force and their therapeutic efficacy. It is not by chance that both put into question the notion of regression. Taking the example of bodily care given to a schizophrenic — massages, baths, wrappings — Gisela Pankow asks whether the point is to reach the patient at the point of his regression, in order to give him indirect symbolic satisfactions that would permit him to reconnect with a progression, to resume a progressive march. Now it is not a question, she says, "of giving the care that the schizophrenic did not receive when he was an infant. But it is a matter of giving the patient tactile and other bodily sensations that lead him to a recognition of the limits of his body… It is a matter of the recognition of an unconscious desire, and not of the satisfaction of the latter."{99} To recognize desire is precisely to set desiring production back in motion on the body without organs, at the very place where the schizo had withdrawn in order to silence and stifle it. This recognition of desire, this position of desire, this Sign, refers to an order of real and actual productivity, which is not to be confused with an indirect or symbolic satisfaction, and which, in its stoppages as in its settings-in-motion, is as distinct from a pre-oedipal regression as from a progressive restoration of Oedipus.

SECTION 9

122Between neurosis and psychosis there is no difference of nature, species, or group. No more than psychosis can neurosis be explained oedipally. It is rather the contrary: it is neurosis that explains Oedipus. So how are we to conceive the psychosis-neurosis relation? And does it not depend on other relations? Everything changes according to whether we call psychosis the process itself, or on the contrary an interruption of the process (and what kind of interruption?). Schizophrenia as process is desiring production, but such as it is at the end, as the limit of social production determined under the conditions of capitalism. It is our "illness," ours, men of modernity. End of history has no other meaning. In it the two senses of process meet, as the movement of social production which goes to the end of its deterritorialization, and as the movement of metaphysical production which carries off and reproduces desire in a new Earth. "The desert grows… the sign is near…" The schizo carries off the decoded fluxes, makes them traverse the desert of the body without organs, where it installs its machines of desire and produces a perpetual flowing of acting forces. It has crossed the limit, the schiz, which kept the production of desire always at the margin of social production, tangential and always repulsed. The schizo knows how to leave: 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 when displacing itself in space, it is a voyage in intensity, around the machine of desire which rises up and remains here. For it is here that lies the desert propagated by our world, 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 perhaps they do 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 is produced as a free, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous man, capable at last of saying and doing something simple in his own name, without asking permission, a desire that lacks nothing, a flux that crosses barrages and codes, a name that no longer designates any *moi*. He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. He lives himself as the sublime illness that will no longer touch him. What is a psychiatrist worth, what would one be worth here? In all of psychiatry, only Jaspers, and then Laing, had the idea of what process signified, and of its accomplishment (which is why they knew how to escape the familialism that makes the ordinary bed of psychoanalysis and psychiatry). "If the human species survives, men of the future will, I imagine, consider our enlightened epoch as a veritable century of obscurantism. They will doubtless be able to savor the irony of this situation with more amusement than we do. It is at us that they will laugh. They will know that what we called schizophrenia was one of the forms under which — often by the intermediary of utterly ordinary people — light began to break through the fissures of our closed minds… Madness is not necessarily a collapse (breakdown); it can also be a breaking-through (breakthrough)… The individual who undergoes the transcendental experience of the loss of the ego may or may not lose his balance, in various ways. He may then be considered mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, even if in our world the two terms have become complementary… Starting from the point of departure of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. This sanity is not a true sanity. 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 sane. The madness with which we deal in our sick is a coarse disguise, a sham, a grotesque caricature of what could be the natural healing of this strange integration. True sanity implies in one manner or another the dissolution of the normal ego…"{100}

123The visit to London is our visit to the Pythia. Turner is there. Looking at his paintings, one understands what it means to cross the wall and yet remain, to make fluxes pass through of which one no longer knows whether they carry us elsewhere or whether they are already returning upon us. The paintings are tiered into three periods. If the psychiatrist had something to say, he could speak about the first two, though these are in truth the most reasonable. The first canvases are end-of-the-world catastrophes, avalanche and storm. This is where Turner begins. The second are like the delirious reconstruction, where the delirium hides itself, or rather goes hand in hand with a high technique inherited from Poussin, from Lorrain, or from the Dutch tradition: the world is reconstructed, through archaisms having a modern function. But something incomparable happens at the level of the third paintings, the series of those Turner does not show, keeps secret. One cannot even say that he is far ahead of his time: something that belongs to 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 again here, their sense has changed. The canvas is truly broken, split by what pierces it. There floats only a background of fog and gold, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what comes to split it across its breadth: the schiz. Everything blurs, and it is there that the breakthrough is produced (not the collapse).

124Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from Lawrence to Lowry, from Miller to Ginsberg and Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to make fluxes pass, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They cross a limit, they break through a wall, the capitalist bar. And of course it happens that they fail the accomplishment of the process, they never stop failing 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 oscillated better from one of its poles to the other. But, through the impasses and the triangles, a schizophrenic flux flows, irresistible, sperm, river, sewer, gonorrhea or flood of words that do not let themselves be coded, libido too fluid and too viscous: a violence to syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense 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 upon it. People are recuperated, not works, which will always come to awaken a new sleeping young man, 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 emitted sign pierces that "form of content" which was trying to maintain it in the order of the signifier. Yet it has long been the case that Engels showed, already in connection with Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot stop himself from tracing and making flow fluxes that burst through the Catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and which necessarily feed a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style, asyntaxia, agrammaticality: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, still less by what makes it signifying, but by what makes it flow, stream, and burst — desire. For literature is altogether like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression.

125There 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 question 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 according to the dominant social codes. Thus 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 stirs and redistributes the unresolved conflicts of childhood, the other prospective, by which it invents the paths of a new solution that concerns the future of man. It is an interior conversion of the work that constitutes it, so they say, as a "cultural object." From this point of view, there is no longer even cause to apply psychoanalysis to the work of art, since it is the work of art itself that constitutes a successful psychoanalysis, sublime "transference" with exemplary collective virtualities. The hypocritical warning resounds: a bit of neurosis is good for the work of art, good material, but not psychosis, above all not psychosis; we distinguish the eventually creative neurotic aspect, and the psychotic aspect, alienating and destructive… As if the great voices, which knew how to operate a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and to make of all language a desire, did not speak from the depths of psychosis and did not show us an eminently psychotic revolutionary vanishing point. It is just to confront established literature with an oedipal psychoanalysis: for it deploys a form of *surmoi* proper to it, more harmful still than the unwritten *surmoi*. 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 *surmoi*ize literature, and to tell us: careful, no further! no "lapses of tact"! Werther yes, Lenz no! The oedipal form of literature is its market form. We are free to think that there is even, finally, less dishonesty in a psychoanalysis than in this kind of literature, for the neurotic pure and simple makes a solitary, irresponsible, illegible and unsellable work, which on the contrary must pay 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 it well: all writing is filth — that is to say, all literature that takes itself as its end, or fixes ends for itself, instead of being a process that "digs into the shit of being and its language," carries along the feeble-minded, the aphasic, the illiterate. At least spare us the sublimation. Every writer is a sell-out. The only literature is that which booby-traps its package, fabricating counterfeit money, making the *surmoi* of its form of expression burst, and the market value of its form of content. But some respond: Artaud is not literature, he is outside it because he is schizophrenic. And others: he is not schizophrenic, since he belongs to literature, and to the greatest, the textual. Both have at least in common to make for themselves the same puerile and reactionary conception of schizophrenia, and the same neurotic market conception of literature. 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, hindered, submitted discourse: therefore the opposite at every point 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 fellow that the psychotic's discourse is "involuntary, hindered, submitted"? No more is it the opposite, thank god. But these very oppositions are singularly irrelevant. Artaud is the smashing to pieces of psychiatry, precisely because he is schizophrenic and not because he isn't. Artaud is the accomplishment of literature, precisely because he is schizophrenic and not because he isn't. He long ago 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 flux of desire ("Van Gogh, the man suicided by 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).

126This schizophrenic wall or limit, they do operate what Laing calls the breakthrough: "perfectly ordinary people" nevertheless… But most approach the wall, and recoil in horror. Better to fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. So they displace the limit, they make it pass to the interior of the social formation, between social production and reproduction which they invest, and familial reproduction onto which they fold back, to which they apply all the investments. They make the limit pass to the interior of the domain thus described by Oedipus, between the two poles of Oedipus. They do not cease to involute and evolve between these two poles. Oedipus as last rock, and castration as alveolus: ultimate territoriality, even were it reduced to the analyst's couch, rather than the decoded fluxes of desire that flee, flow and carry us off where? Such is neurosis, displacement of the limit, to make oneself a little colonial land of one's own. But others want virgin lands, more really exotic, more artificial families, more secret societies which they sketch out and institute along the wall, in the sites of perversion. Still others, sickened by the utensility of Oedipus, but also by the trinkets and perverse aestheticism, reach the wall and rebound off it, sometimes with extreme violence. Then they immobilize themselves, fall silent, fold back upon the body without organs, still a territoriality, but this time entirely desert-like, upon which all desiring production halts, or, frozen, feigns to halt: 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 repression-repression system that manufactures neurotics. But a barer 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 against the limit and bumps up against it forever? To designate at once the eventual breakthrough and the possible collapse, and all the transitions, the intrications from one to the other? It is because, of the three preceding adventures, that of psychosis stands in the most intimate relation with the process: in the sense where Jaspers shows that the "demonic," ordinarily repressed-repressed, erupts under the favor of such a state or arouses such states which constantly risk tipping it over into collapse and disaggregation. One no longer knows whether it is the process that must really be called madness, the illness being only its disguise or caricature, or whether the illness is the only madness from which the process was supposed to cure us. But in any case the intimacy of the relation appears directly in inverse ratio: the schizo-entity emerges all the more as a specific product the more the process of production finds itself diverted from its course, brutally interrupted. That is why, conversely, we could not establish any 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 on the way in which each represents a mode of its interruption, a residual land to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the deterritorialized fluxes of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus, perverse territorialities of artifice, psychotic territoriality of the body without organs: sometimes the process is caught in the trap and turns in the triangle, sometimes it takes itself for its own end, sometimes it pursues itself in the void and substitutes for its accomplishment a horrible exasperation. Each of these forms has schizophrenia for its ground, 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 should one cross this wall, for it serves no purpose to strike it hard, one must undermine this wall and cross it with the file, slowly and with patience in my view."{101} And what is at stake is not only art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytic machine and the revolutionary machine will remain in the extrinsic relations that make them function within the deadened framework of the repression-repression system, or they will become parts and gears of one another in the flux that feeds one and the 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 Men

SECTION 1

127If the universal is at the end, body without organs and desiring production, under the conditions determined by an apparently victorious capitalism, how to find enough innocence to do universal history? Desiring production is also there from the start: there is desiring production as soon as there is social production and reproduction. But it is true that the precapitalist social machines are inherent to desire in a very precise sense: they code it, they code the fluxes of desire. To code desire — and the fear, the anguish of decoded fluxes — is the business of the *socius*. Capitalism is the only social machine, as we shall see, that has constructed itself as such on decoded fluxes, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Therefore capitalism liberates the fluxes of desire, but under social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it never ceases to counter 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 body without organs, the decoded fluxes throw themselves into desiring production. It is therefore correct to understand all of history retrospectively in the light of capitalism, on condition that one follow 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 required great accidents, astonishing encounters that could have occurred elsewhere, earlier, or might never have occurred, in order that the fluxes escape coding and, in escaping it, nonetheless constitute a new machine determinable as capitalist *socius*: thus the encounter between private property and commodity production, which yet present themselves as two very different forms of decoding, by privatization and by abstraction. Or, from the point of view of private property itself, the encounter between fluxes 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 way, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, the panicked fear they have of a flux that would slip away from their codes. On the other hand, if it is capitalism that determines the conditions and the possibility of a universal history, this is true only insofar as it has essentially to do with its own limit, its own destruction: as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least up to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, even in the movement that counters the tendency…).{102} In short, universal history is not only retrospective, it is contingent, singular, ironic and critical.

128The 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 filled body that falls back upon the productive forces and appropriates them as natural or divine presupposition. The soil may be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and use of the soil. It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the objects, means, and forces of labor are registered, on which the agents and products are distributed. It appears here as quasi-cause of production and object of desire (on it the bond of desire and its own repression is tied). The territorial machine is therefore the first form of *socius*, the primitive machine of inscription, "megamachine" that covers a social field. It is not confused with technical machines. In its simplest, so-called manual forms, the technical machine already implies a nonhuman element, acting, transmitting, or even motor, which prolongs the force of man and permits a certain release thereof. The social machine on the contrary has men for its parts, even if they are considered with their machines, and integrates them, interiorizes them in an institutional model at every level of action, transmission, and motricity. Thus it forms a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines. For the latter do not 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 will have to wait for capitalism to find a semi-autonomous régime of technical production, which tends to appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of man's exploitation; but precisely this régime presupposes a dismantling of the great preceding social machines. The same machine may 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 the 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 barbarian despotic institution): "If, more or less in agreement with the classical definition of Reuleaux, one may consider a machine as the combination of solid elements each having its specialized function and functioning under human control to transmit a motion and execute a labor, then the human machine was indeed a true machine."{103} The social machine is literally a machine, independently of any metaphor, insofar as it presents an immobile motor, and proceeds to the diverse sorts of cuts: extraction of flux, detachment of chain, distribution of shares. To code the fluxes implies all these operations. It is the highest task of the social machine, inasmuch as the extractions of production correspond to detachments of chain, and inasmuch as there results from this the residual share of each member, in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of registration, the productions of consumption. Fluxes of women and children, fluxes of herds and seeds, fluxes of sperm, shit, and menses, nothing must escape. The primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already social machine or megamachine, which codes the fluxes of production, of means of production, of producers and consumers: the filled body of the goddess Earth gathers upon itself the cultivable species, the agrarian instruments, and the human organs.

129Meyer 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 the progeny are fixed to the benefit of a determinate person."{104} We have in fact no reason to accept the postulate underlying exchangist 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 it or permits it. The procedure of the primitive territorial machine, in this sense, is the collective investment of organs; for the coding of fluxes is done only insofar as the organs respectively capable of producing them and cutting them find themselves circumscribed, 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 sense organs, anatomical parts, and joints. Prohibitions (not to see, not to speak) apply to those who, in such or such a state or occasion, do not have the enjoyment of a collectively invested organ. Mythologies sing the organs-partial objects, and their relation with a filled body that repels them 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, the other parts of the body were consulted to know which one would take charge of the burial…" Unities are never in persons, in the proper or "private" sense, but in series that determine the connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of organs. That is why phantasies are group phantasies. It is the collective investment of organs that connects desire to the *socius*, and reunites into a whole on the earth social production and desiring production.

130Our modern societies, on the contrary, have proceeded to a vast privatization of the organs, which corresponds to the decoding of fluxes become abstract. The first organ to be privatized, placed outside the social field, was the anus. It is the anus that gave privatization its model, at the same time as money expressed the new state of abstraction of fluxes. Hence the relative truth of the psychoanalytic remarks on the anal character of the monetary economy. But the "logical" order is the following: substitution of abstract quantity for the coded fluxes; collective disinvestment of the 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 the persons of the two sexes and organizing the Oedipal triangle, it is the anus that thus detaches it, it is the anus that carries off and sublimates the penis in a kind of *Aufhebung* constituting the phallus. Sublimation is profoundly linked to anality, but not in the sense in which the latter would furnish a matter to be sublimated, for want of another use. Anality does not represent the lower that would have to be converted into the higher. It is the anus itself that passes into the upper, under the conditions of its placement outside the field that we will have to analyze, and that do not presuppose sublimation, since on the contrary sublimation derives from it. It is not the anal that offers itself to sublimation, it is sublimation in its entirety that is anal; thus the simplest critique of sublimation is that it does not get us out of the shit at all (only the spirit is capable of shitting). Anality is all the greater the more the anus is disinvested. The essence of desire is indeed libido; but when libido becomes abstract quantity, the exalted and disinvested anus produces the global persons and the specific *moi*s that serve as units of measure for this same quantity. Artaud says it well: this "dead rat's ass suspended from the ceiling of the sky," from which issues the papa-mama-*moi* triangle, "the uterine mother-father of a frenzied anal" of which the child is only an angle, this "kind of casing eternally hanging from a something that is the *moi*." The whole of Oedipus is anal, and implies an individual over-investment of organ to compensate for the collective disinvestment. That 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 *surmoi*, no guilt. No identification of a specific *moi* with global persons — but always partial and group identifications, following the compact agglutinated series of ancestors, following the fragmented series of comrades or cousins. No anality — although there is, or rather because there is, anus invested collectively. Then what is left to make Oedipus?{105} The structure, that is to say a non-effectuated 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 fluxes and the collective disinvestment of organs, the becoming-abstract of the fluxes of desire and the becoming-private of the organs?

131The primitive territorial machine codes the fluxes, 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 registering, inscribing *socius*, insofar as it attributes to itself the productive forces and distributes the agents of production, resides in this — tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, initiating. Nietzsche defined "the morality of mores, or the true labor of man upon himself during the longest period of the human species, his entire prehistoric labor": a system of evaluations having force of law concerning the various members and parts of the body. Not only is the criminal deprived of organs according to an order of collective investments, not only is the one who is to be eaten so deprived according to social rules as precise as those that carve up and distribute an ox; but the man who fully enjoys his rights and his duties has the entire body marked under a régime that relates his organs and their exercise to the collectivity (the privatization of organs will begin only with "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 filled body, an earth, upon which his organs latch on, attracted, repelled, miraculated according to the exigencies of a *socius*. That the organs be cut out of the *socius*, and that the fluxes flow upon it. Nietzsche says: it is a matter of making man a memory; and man, who has constituted himself through an active faculty of forgetting, through a repression of biological memory, must make 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 very body: "Perhaps there is nothing more terrible and more disquieting in the prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics… It never went without torments, without martyrs and bloody sacrifices when man deemed it necessary to create a memory for himself; the most appalling holocausts and the most hideous pledges, the most repugnant mutilations, the cruelest rituals of all the religious cults… One will realize the difficulties there are on earth in raising a people of thinkers!"{106} Cruelty has nothing to do with some violence whatever or natural violence that one would charge with explaining the history of man; it is the movement of culture that operates itself in the bodies and inscribes itself upon them, plowing them. That is what cruelty means. 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, torments are desired, and are productions (cf. the history of fatalism). Out of men or their organs, it makes the parts and the gears of the social machine. The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in the bodies. And if one wishes to call this inscription in the very flesh "writing," then one must say in fact 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

132The notion of territoriality is ambiguous only in appearance. For if one understands by it a principle of residence or geographical distribution, it is evident that the primitive social machine is not territorial. Only the State apparatus will be territorial, which, following Engels's formula, "subdivides not the people, but the territory" and substitutes a geographical organization for the gentile organization. Yet, even where kinship seems to take precedence over the land, it is not difficult to show the importance of local ties. The fact is that the primitive machine subdivides the people, but does so on an indivisible earth on which are inscribed the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive relations of each segment with the others (thus, for example, the coexistence or complementarity of the segment chief and the guardian of the land). When the division bears on the land itself, by virtue of an administrative, land-tenure, and residential organization, one can no longer see in this a promotion of territoriality, but, on the contrary, the effect of the first great movement of deterritorialization upon the primitive communities. The immanent unity of the earth as immobile motor gives way to a transcendent unity of an entirely different nature, unity of the State; the filled body is no longer that of the earth, but that of the Despot, the Unengendered, who now takes charge of the fertility of the soil as of the rain from the sky, and of the general appropriation of the productive forces. The primitive savage *socius* was therefore the only territorial machine in the strict sense. And the functioning of such a machine consists in this: declining alliance and filiation, declining the lineages on the body of the earth, before there is a State.

133If the machine is one of declension, this is because it is impossible to deduce alliance simply from filiation, alliances from filiative lines. One would be wrong to grant alliance only a power of individuation over the persons of a lineage; rather, it produces a generalized discernibility. Leach cites cases of very diverse matrimonial régimes without one being able to infer from them a difference in the filiation of the corresponding groups. In many analyses, "the emphasis is placed on the internal links of the unilinear solidary group or on the links between different groups having a common filiation. The structural links that come from marriage between members of different groups have been largely ignored, or else assimilated to the universal concept of filiation. Thus Fortes, while recognizing in alliance links an importance comparable to that of filiation links, disguises the former under the expression complementary descent. This concept, which recalls the Roman distinction between the agnatic and the cognatic, essentially implies that every individual is linked to the parents of his father and mother because he is the descendant of each, and not because they are married… (Yet) the perpendicular links that laterally unite the related patrilineages are not conceived by the natives themselves as filiation links. The continuity in time of the vertical structure is adequately expressed by the agnatic transmission of a patrilineage name. But the continuity of the lateral structure is not expressed in such a way. 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."{107} Filiation is administrative and hierarchical, but alliance is political and economic, and expresses power insofar as it is neither confused with hierarchy nor deduced from it, economy insofar as it is not confused 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. To them correspond two memories, the one bio-filiative, the other, of alliance and of words. If production is registered in the network of filiative disjunctions on the *socius*, the connections of labor must still detach themselves from the productive process, and pass into this element of registration which appropriates them as quasi-cause. But it can do so only by taking up on its own account the connective régime, in the form of an alliance link or of 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 lines of his father or his mother, but inversely these inscribe him only through the intermediary of a connection represented by the marriage of the father and the mother. There is therefore no moment at which alliance would derive from filiation, but both compose an essentially open cycle in which the *socius* acts on production, and in which production reacts on the *socius*.

134The 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 in the determined system of dominance. This is why it is essential to consider how alliances concretely compose themselves with filiations on a given territorial surface. Leach has precisely brought out the instance of local lineages, insofar as they distinguish themselves from lineages of filiation and operate at the level of small segments: it is these groups of men residing in the same place, or in neighboring places, who machine 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 clearly that a village intervenes as a third term to permit matrimonial connections between elements that the disjunction of two moieties would forbid from the strict point of view of the structure: "the third term must be interpreted much more as a procedure than as a veritable structural element."{108} Each time one interprets relations of kinship in the primitive community in terms of a structure that would unfold in the mind, one falls back into an ideology of the great segments that makes alliance depend on major filiations, but which is belied 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 have been able to find nothing of the kind among the Mru… Each one behaves as if he were unaware 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 closed only to the extent that one cuts it 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.

135It is the entire enterprise of coding the flux that is at stake. How to ensure the reciprocal adaptation, the respective embrace of a signifying chain and of production flux? The great nomad hunter follows the flux, exhausts them on the spot and moves on with them. He reproduces in accelerated fashion his whole filiation, contracts it into a point that keeps him in direct relation with the ancestor or the god. Pierre Clastres describes the solitary hunter who has become one with his force and his destiny, and launches his chant in a language that grows ever more rapid and deformed: I, I, I, "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. For, in nomad space, the filled body of the *socius* is as it were adjacent to production, it has not yet folded back 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 an encampment where it is a matter of stocking, however little, of inscribing and distributing, of marrying and feeding oneself (Clastres shows well among the Guayaki how, to the connection between hunters and living animals, there succeeds in the encampment a disjunction between dead animals and hunters, a disjunction similar to a prohibition of incest, since the hunter cannot consume his own catch). 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 the bush and the pervert of the village. For, as soon as the *socius* fixes itself, and folds back upon the productive forces, attributing them to itself, the problem of coding can no longer be resolved by the simultaneity of a displacement from the point of view of the flux, and of an accelerated reproduction from the point of view of the chain. The flux must be the object of extractions that constitute a minimum of stock, and the signifying chain must 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 and wed each other. And it is already the highly perverse activity of the local groups who machine the marriages on the primitive territoriality: a normal or non-pathological perversity, as Henry Ey said of other cases where there is manifested "a psychic labor of selection, refinement and calculation." And this is so from the beginning, since there is no pure nomad who could content himself with riding the flux and chanting direct filiation, but always a *socius* waiting to fold back, already extracting and detaching.

136Extractions of flux constitute a filiative stock in the signifying chain; but inversely the detachments of chain constitute mobile debts of alliance, which orient and direct the fluxes. Upon the cover as familial stock, one circulates stones of alliance or cowries. There is as it were a vast cycle of fluxes of production and chains of inscription, and a tighter cycle, between the stocks of filiation that enchain or encase the fluxes, and the blocks 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 surface energy of inscription or registration, the potential energy of the apparent movement; but the debt is the actual direction of this movement, kinetic energy determined by the respective path of gifts and counter-gifts upon this surface. In the Kula, the circulation of necklaces and bracelets stops at certain places, on certain occasions, to reform a stock. There are no productive connections without disjunctions of filiation that appropriate them, but no disjunctions of filiation that do not reconstitute lateral connections through the alliances and conjugations of persons. Not only the fluxes and the chains, but the fixed stocks and the mobile blocks, insofar as they in turn imply relations between chains and fluxes in both directions, are in a state of perpetual relativity: their elements vary, women, consumer goods, 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 supposedly closed system extends in one direction and opens itself as the prestations become broader and more complex. But such a conception is in contradiction with the primitive "cold economy," without net investment, without money or market, without exchangist mercantile relation. The mainspring 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 fluxes of production, phenomena of excess and defect, of lack and accumulation, which find themselves compensated by non-exchangeable elements of the type acquired prestige or distributed consumption ("The chief converts perishable values into imperishable prestige by means of spectacular festivities; in this way the consumers of goods at the end are the producers at the beginning."){111} Surplus-value of code is the primitive form of surplus-value, insofar as it answers to Mauss's celebrated formula: the spirit of the thing given, or the force of things which makes it so that gifts must be returned in usurious fashion, being territorial signs of desire and power, principles of abundance and fructification of goods. Far from being a pathological consequence, disequilibrium is functional and principal. 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 surpluses-value of code at the level of the fluxes, from which derive differences of status for the filiative lines (for example, the higher or lower rank of givers and takers of women). Surplus-value of code effectuates the various operations of the primitive territorial machine, detaching segments of chain, organizing the extractions of flux, distributing the shares that come back to each.

137The 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 Judeo-Christian tragic consciousness which they wanted to credit with the "invention" of history. If history is what we call a dynamic and open reality of societies, in a state of functional disequilibrium or of oscillating, unstable, and always compensated equilibrium, comprising not only institutionalized conflicts but conflicts generative of changes, revolts, ruptures, and scissions, then primitive societies are fully within 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 indeed appears in the discordances where, as Lévi-Strauss says, "is discovered the mark, impossible to mistake, 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 between law and transgression; physically, as though it were a matter of a phenomenon of wear that makes the social machine no longer apt to treat its materials. But, here 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 has been shown precisely with respect to the segmentary system, always called to reconstitute itself upon its own ruins; likewise the organization of the political function in these systems, which is effectively exercised only by indicating its own impotence.{113} Ethnologists never cease to note 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 sets itself going again on condition of being blocked, and necessarily situates itself in a negative relation with the group. It is there that the identity of the social machine with the machine of desire appears: its limit is not wear, but the misfire; it functions only by grinding, by going haywire, by bursting in small explosions — the 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 on the contradictions it raises, on the crises it provokes, on the anxieties it engenders, and on infernal operations that reinvigorate it: capitalism has learned this, and has ceased to doubt itself, while even the socialists renounced believing in the possibility of its natural death by wear. No one has ever died of contradictions. And the more it goes haywire, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, American-style.

138But it is already from this point of view, though not in the same way, that one must consider the primitive *socius*, the territorial machine for declining alliances and filiations. This machine is the Segmentary, because, through its double tribal and lineage apparatus, it doles 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 their dominances and their alliances as well. "The point of separation between the tribal sections becomes the point of divergence of the clan structure of the lineages associated with each of the sections; the clans and their lineages are not distinct coherent groups, but are incorporated into local communities within which they function structurally."{114} The two systems intersect, each segment being associated with fluxes and chains, with stocks of fluxes and fluxes of passage, with extractions of flux and detachments of chains (certain works of production are carried out 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 kinds of penetrations that come from the variability and relativity of the segments. For each segment measures its length, and exists as such, only by opposition to other segments in a series of echelons ordered in relation to each other: the segmentary machine brews competitions, conflicts, and ruptures across the variations of filiation and the fluctuations of alliance. The whole system evolves between two poles, that of fusion by opposition to other groups, that of scission by the 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 are produced in the system which never ceases 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 inefficient for fear to remain the motor of the whole"? And what fear? One would say that social formations sense in advance, with a mortifying and melancholic foreboding, what is going to happen to them, although what happens to them always comes from the outside and rushes into their opening. Perhaps it is even for this reason that it happens to them from the outside; they smother its interior potentiality, at the price of these dysfunctions which thereafter form an integral part of the functioning of their system.

139The segmentary territorial machine conjures fusion through scission, and prevents the concentration of power by maintaining the organs of chieftainship in a relation of impotence with the group: as if the savages themselves had a presentiment of the rise of the imperial Barbarian, who will nonetheless come from without and who will overcode all their codes. But the greatest danger would still be a dispersion, a scission such that all possibilities of code would be suppressed there: decoded fluxes, flowing over a *socius* that is blind and mute, deterritorialized — such is the nightmare that the primitive machine conjures with all its forces, and with all its segmentary articulations. The primitive machine is not unaware of exchange, commerce and industry; it conjures them, localizes them, parcels them out, encases them, maintains the merchant and the smith in a subordinate position, so that fluxes of exchange and of production do not come to shatter the codes for the benefit of their abstract or fictive quantities. And is this not also Oedipus, the fear of incest: dread 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 fluxes that makes us understand a contrario the secret of all these formations, which is to code the fluxes, and even to overcode them rather than letting something escape coding. It is not primitive societies that are outside history, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings this end about. One cannot say that the prior formations did not foresee it, this Thing that came from without only by dint of rising from within, and that one prevents from rising. Hence the possibility of a retrospective reading of all of history in terms of capitalism. One can already look for the sign of classes in precapitalist societies. But ethnologists note how difficult it is to make the partition between these proto-classes, and the castes organized by the imperial machine, and the ranks distributed by the primitive segmentary 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 each time prove disappointing, eminently deceptive. But ranks are inseparable from primitive territorial coding, as castes from imperial state overcoding; whereas classes are relative to the process of an industrial and mercantile production decoded under the conditions of capitalism. One can therefore read all of history under the sign of classes, but by observing the rules indicated by Marx, and to the extent that classes are the "negative" of castes and ranks. For assuredly the *régime* of decoding does not signify an absence of organization, but the most somber organization, the harshest accounting, the axiomatic replacing the codes, and comprehending them, always a contrario.

SECTION 3

140The filled body of the earth is not without distinction. Suffering and dangerous, unique, universal, it falls back on production, on the agents and connections of production. But on it too, everything attaches itself and inscribes itself, everything is attracted, miraculated. It is the element of the disjunctive synthesis and of its reproduction: pure force of filiation or genealogy, Numen. The filled body is the unengendered, but filiation is the first character of inscription marked on this body. And we know what this intensive filiation is, this inclusive disjunction where everything divides, but in itself, and where the same being is everywhere, on all sides, at every level, give or take a difference of intensity. The same included being traverses on the filled body indivisible distances, and passes through all the singularities, all the intensities of a synthesis that slides and reproduces itself. It is useless to recall that genealogical filiation is social and not biological, it is necessarily bio-social, insofar as it inscribes itself on the cosmic egg of the filled body of the earth. It has a mythic origin which is the One, or rather the primitive one-two. Should one say the twins, or the twin, who divides and unites itself in itself, the Nommo or the Nommos? The disjunctive synthesis distributes the primordial ancestors, but each one is itself a complete filled body, male and female, agglutinating on itself all the partial objects, with only intensive variations corresponding to the internal zigzag of the Dogon egg. Each one intensively repeats on its own account the whole genealogy. And it is everywhere the same at the two ends of the indivisible distance and on all sides, litany of twins, intense filiation. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, at the beginning of *Le Renard pâle*, sketch out a splendid theory of the sign: signs of filiation, guide-signs and master-signs, signs of desire first of all intensive, which fall in a spiral and pass through a series of explosions before taking on an extension in images, figures, and drawings.

141If the filled body folds back upon the productive connections, and inscribes them in a network of intensive and inclusive disjunctions, it still must rediscover or reanimate lateral connections within this network itself, must attribute them to itself as if it were their cause. Such are the two aspects of the filled 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 if it produced them. The connections must reappear under a form compatible with the inscribed disjunctions, even if they react in turn upon the form of these disjunctions. Such is alliance as second character of inscription: alliance imposes upon the productive connections the extensive form of a conjugation of persons, compatible with the disjunctions of inscription, but inversely reacts upon inscription by determining an exclusive and limitative usage of these same disjunctions. It is therefore unavoidable that alliance be represented mythically as supervening at a certain moment in the filiative lines (although, in another sense, it has been there all along). Griaule recounts how, among the Dogon, something happens at a given moment, at the level and on the side of the eighth ancestor: a derailment of the disjunctions, which cease to be inclusive, which become exclusive; from then on a dismemberment of the filled body, an annulment 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 among themselves, a lateral inscription with articulatory alliance-stones, in short a whole ark of alliance.{115} Alliances never derive from filiations, nor are they deduced from them. But, this principle being posed, we must distinguish two points of view: one economic and political, in which alliance is there all along, combining and declining itself with extended filiative lineages which do not pre-exist them in a system supposed to be given in extension. The other, mythic, which shows how the extension of the system forms and delimits itself out of intense and primordial filiative lineages, which necessarily lose their inclusive or unlimitative usage. It is from this point of view that the extended system is like a memory of alliances and of words, implying an active repression of the intense memory of filiation. For if genealogy and filiations are the object of an ever-vigilant memory, it is to the extent that they are already taken in an extensive sense which they certainly did not possess before the determination of the alliances that confer it upon them; as intensive filiations, on the contrary, they form the object of a particular memory, nocturnal and bio-cosmic, which must precisely undergo repression so that the new extended memory may be instituted.

142We can better understand why the problem does not at all consist in going from filiations to alliances, or in deriving the latter from the former. The problem is to pass from an intensive energetic order to an extensive system, which comprises at once qualitative alliances and 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, comports as yet no distinction of persons or even of sex, but only pre-personal variations in intensity, affecting one same twinness or bisexuality taken at various degrees. The signs of this order are therefore fundamentally neutral or ambiguous (following an expression that Leibniz used to designate a sign which can be either + or —). It is a matter of knowing how, from this primary intensity, one will pass to a system in extension where 1°) filiations will be extended filiations in the form of lineages, comporting distinctions of persons and parental appellations; 2°) alliances will at the same time be qualitative relations, which extended filiations presuppose as much as the inverse; 3°) in short, the ambiguous intense signs will cease to be such 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 from an acquisition or from a loss. It matters little in this regard whether the régime of filiation is patrilineal or matrilineal. In a patrilineal and patrilocal régime for example, "kinswomen are women lost, allied women are women gained. Each family issuing from these marriages is 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 whereas the sister is lost for her own family." But, Lévi-Strauss remarks, one no less changes sign in changing generation: "According to whether, from the point of view of the initial group, the father has received a wife or the mother has been transferred outside, the sons have a right to a woman or owe a sister. No doubt this difference does not translate, in reality, into a condemnation to celibacy for half 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 upper generation, a sister or a daughter was lost; whereas a brother owes the outside world a sister (or a father, a daughter), because, at the upper generation, a woman was gained… As concerns the pivot couple, formed by a man a married to a woman b, it evidently possesses the two signs according to whether one envisages it from the point of view of A or of B, and the same is true of its children. It now suffices to envisage the generation of the cousins to verify that all those who are in the relation (+ +) or (— —) are parallel, whereas all those who are in the relation (+ —) or (— +) are cross."{116} But, the problem thus posed, it is a question less of the exercise of a logical combinatory governing a play of exchanges, as Lévi-Strauss would have it, than of the institution of a physical system which will naturally express itself 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 first 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 alliance.

143The essential thing is not that the 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. This is where recourse to myth is indispensable, not because it would be a transposed or even inverted representation of real relations in extension, but because it alone determines, in conformity 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 seems decisive to us, and escapes the reproach of idealism usually made against this kind of attempt; likewise the recent article in which Adler and Cartry take up the question.{117} These authors are right to note that Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship (with its four relations brother-sister, husband-wife, father-son, maternal uncle-sister's son) gives itself a ready-made set, from which the mother as such is strangely excluded, although she may, as the case may be, be more or less "kin" or more or less "ally" in relation to her children. Now it is indeed there that the myth takes root, which is not expressive but conditioning. As Griaule reports, the Yurugu, penetrating into the piece of placenta he has stolen, is like the brother of his mother with whom he unites himself in this capacity: "This personage in fact went out into space carrying away a part of the nourishing placenta, that is to say, a part of his own mother. He also considered that this organ belonged to him properly and formed part of his own person, in such a way that he identified himself with his genetrix, in the present case the matrix of the world, and that he held himself to be placed on the same plane as her, from the point of view of generations… He unconsciously feels 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 genetrix, and the mythical rule of the union of the two paired members proposes him as ideal spouse. He ought therefore, in the capacity of pseudo-brother of his genetrix, to be in the situation of her uterine uncle, the designated spouse of this woman." No doubt one finds at this level all the personages at play, mother, father, son, mother's brother, son's sister. But it is evident and striking that these are not persons: their names do not designate persons, but the intensive variations of a "vibratory spiral movement," inclusive disjunctions, necessarily twinned and bisexed states through which a subject passes on the cosmic egg. Everything must be interpreted in intensity. The egg and the placenta itself, traversed by an unconscious vital energy "susceptible of increase and decrease." The father is by no means absent. But Amma, father and progenitor, is himself a high intensive part, immanent to the placenta, inseparable from the twinship that relates him to his feminine part. And if the Yurugu son in turn carries away 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 he carries away makes him the brother of his mother, who eminently replaces the sister, and to whom he unites himself by himself replacing Amma. In short, a whole world of ambiguous signs, included divisions and bisexed states. I am the son, and also the brother of my mother, and the spouse of my sister, and my own father. Everything rests on the placenta become earth, the unengendered, filled body of anti-production where the organs-partial-objects of a sacrificed Nommo will hook themselves on. The fact is that the placenta, as substance common to mother and child, common part of their bodies, makes it so that these bodies are not like a cause and an effect, but both derived products of this same substance in relation to which the son is twin of his mother: such indeed is the axis of the Dogon myth reported by Griaule. Yes, I have been my mother and I have been my son. Rarely will myth and science have been seen to say the same thing across so great a distance: the Dogon narrative develops a mythical Weismannism, in which the germinal plasma forms an immortal and continuous lineage, which does not depend on bodies, but on which on the contrary the bodies of the parents as well as those of the children depend. Hence the distinction between two lineages, one continuous and germinal, the other somatic and discontinuous, alone subjected to the succession of generations. (Lysenko found a naturally Dogon tone for turning it against Weismann, and reproaching the latter with making the son the genetic or germinal brother of the mother: "the Morganist-Mendelians, following Weismann, start from the idea that parents are not genetically the parents of their children; if their doctrine is to be believed, parents and children are brothers and sisters…".){118}

144But the son is not somatically the brother and twin of his mother. That is why he cannot marry her (provided that we explain in a moment the sense of this "that is why"). The one who should have married the mother is therefore the uterine uncle. First consequence from this: 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 to the second degree: on the contrary a negative or inverted Hamlet is primary in relation 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 had to do it only in the name of that germinal filiation, marked with the ambiguous signs of twinness and bisexuality, according to which the son could have done it just as well, and could himself have been that uncle in intense relation with the twin-mother. The vicious circle of the germinal lineage closes (the primitive double bind): the uncle cannot marry his sister-the-mother either; nor therefore the subject marry his own sister — the female twin of Yourougou will be given over to the Nommo as a potential ally. The order of the soma sends the whole intensive scale tumbling back 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 has clearly shown that the mixing of generations was in no way feared as such, and that the prohibition of incest was not explained in that way.{119} It is because the mixing of generations in the son-mother case has the same effect as their correspondence in the uncle-sister case, that is, attests to one and the same intensive germinal filiation that has to be repressed in both cases. In short, a somatic system in extension can constitute itself only to the extent that filiations become extended, correlatively with lateral alliances that institute themselves. It is through the prohibition of incest with the sister that the lateral alliance is knotted, it is through the prohibition of incest with the mother that filiation becomes extended. There is here no repression of the father, no foreclosure of the name of the father; the respective position of the mother or the 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 finds itself repressed by a memory of alliance. It is the great nocturnal memory of intensive germinal filiation that is repressed for the benefit of an extensive somatic memory, made of filiations that have become extended (patrilineal or matrilineal) and of the alliances that they imply. The whole Dogon myth is a patrilineal version of the opposition between the two genealogies, the two filiations: in intensity and in extension, the intense germinal order and the extensive régime of somatic generations.

145The system in extension is born from the intensive conditions that make it possible, but reacts back upon them, annuls them, represses them, and leaves them only mythic expression. At once signs cease to be ambiguous and are determined in relation to extended filiations and lateral alliances; disjunctions become exclusive, limitative (the *either/or* replaces the intense "either… or"); names, appellations no longer designate intensive states, but discernible persons. Discernibility settles upon the sister, the mother as forbidden wives. It is that persons, with the names that now designate them, do not preexist the prohibitions that constitute them as such. Mother and sister do not preexist their prohibition as wives. Robert Jaulin says it very well: "Mythic discourse has as its theme the passage from indifference toward incest to its prohibition; implicit or explicit, this theme is underlying in all myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language."{120} Concerning incest, one must conclude literally that it does not exist, that it does not exist. Incest, one is always on this side of it, in a series of intensities that knows nothing of discernible persons; or else beyond it, in an extension that recognizes them, that constitutes them, but that does not constitute them without rendering them impossible as sexual partners. Incest, one can only do it following a series of substitutions that always distances us from it, that is to say with a person who counts for the mother or the sister only by dint of not being her: the one who is discernible as possible wife. Such is the meaning of preferential marriage: the first permitted incest; but it is no accident that it is rarely effectuated, as though it were still too close to the inexistent impossible (for example, the Dogon preferential marriage with the daughter of the uncle, she counting for the aunt, who herself counts for the mother). Griaule's article is without doubt, in all of ethnology, the text most profoundly inspired by psychoanalysis. And yet it leads to conclusions that make the whole of Oedipus burst apart, because it is not content to pose the problem in extension, and thereby to suppose it resolved. These are the conclusions Adler and Cartry knew how to draw: "It is customary to consider the incestuous relations in myth either as the expression of the desire or nostalgia for a world in which such relations would be possible or indifferent, or as the expression of a structural function of inversion of the social rule, a function destined to found the prohibition and its transgression… In one case as in the other, one already gives oneself as constituted what is precisely the emergence of an order that the myth recounts and explains. In other words, one reasons as if the myth staged persons defined as father, mother, son, and sister, whereas these parental roles belong to the order constituted by the prohibition…: incest does not exist."{121} Incest is a pure limit. On condition of avoiding two false beliefs concerning the limit: one that makes the limit a matrix or origin, as if the interdict proved that the thing had "first" been desired as such; the other that makes the limit a structural function, as if a supposedly "fundamental" relation between desire and law were exercised in transgression. Once again 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 with respect to what the law really forbids (which is why revolutions have nothing to do with transgressions). In short, the limit is neither a beyond nor a this-side: it is the limit between the two, Shallow slandered brook the incest, always already crossed or not yet crossed. For incest is like movement, it is impossible. And it is not impossible in the sense in which the real would be, but quite on the contrary in the sense in which the symbolic is.

146But what does it mean, incest is impossible? Is it not possible to sleep with one's sister or one's mother? And how can one renounce 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 may have the persons at our disposal, but they lose their names insofar as these names are inseparable from the prohibition that forbids them as partners; or else the names subsist, and no longer designate anything but pre-personal intensive states that could just as well "extend" to other persons, as when one calls one's lawful wife mama, or one's spouse sister. It is in this sense that we said: one is always on this side or beyond. Our mothers, our sisters melt in our arms; their name slips off their person like a stamp too damp. The fact is that one can never enjoy person and name at once — which would nonetheless be the condition of incest. So be it, incest is a lure, it is impossible. But the problem is merely postponed. Is it not the property of desire that one desires the impossible? At least in this case, that platitude is not even true. One recalls how illegitimate it is to conclude from the prohibition to the nature of what is prohibited; for 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 even in this manner that repression has itself prolonged by a refoulement without which it would not bite into desire. What is desired is the intense germinal or germinative flux, in which one would search in vain for persons and even for functions discernible as father, mother, son, sister, etc., since these names there designate only intensive variations on the filled body of the earth determined as *germen*. One may 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 conflate incest such as it would be in this non-personal intensive régime that would institute it, with incest such as it is represented in extension in the state that prohibits it, and that defines it as transgression upon persons. Jung is therefore entirely right to say that the Oedipus complex signifies something altogether other than itself, and that the mother in it is just as well the earth, incest, an infinite rebirth (his fault lies only in believing that he thereby "goes beyond" sexuality). The somatic complex refers back to a germinal implex. Incest refers back to an on-this-side that cannot be represented as such in the complex, since the complex is an element derived from the repression of this on-this-side. Incest such as it is prohibited (form of discernibilized persons) serves to repress incest such as it is desired (the depth of the intense earth). The intensive germinal flux is the representative of desire, it is on it that repression bears; the extensive Oedipal figure is its displaced represented, the lure or rigged image that comes to cover over desire, elicited by repression. It is important that this image be "impossible": it performs its office the moment 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 prohibition to the prohibited, that already implies the entire paralogism of repression.

147But why is the implex or germinal influx repressed, given that it is the territorial representative of desire? It is because… what it refers to, as 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 detax itself, nothing could be extracted; nothing would pass from filiation to descent, but descent would be perpetually folded back onto filiation in the act of re-engendering itself; the signifying chain would form no code, it would emit only ambiguous signs and would be perpetually gnawed by its energetic support; what would flow on the filled body of the earth would be as unchained as the uncoded fluxes that glide over the desert of a body without organs. For the question is less that of abundance or scarcity, of source or drying-up (even drying-up is a flux), than that of the codable and the non-codable. The germinal flux is such that it amounts to the same to say that everything would pass or flow with it, or on the contrary that everything would be blocked. For fluxes 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 possible only in the system in extension that discernibilizes persons, and that makes of signs a determinate use, of disjunctive syntheses an exclusive use, of connective syntheses a conjugal use. Such indeed is the sense of the prohibition of incest conceived as the institution of a physical system in extension: in each case one must seek what passes of the flux of intensity, what does not pass, what makes pass or prevents passing, according to the patrilateral or matrilateral 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 Dogon preferential marriage as analyzed by Griaule: what is blocked is the relation with the aunt as substitute for the mother, in the form of joking kinship; what passes is the relation with the aunt's daughter, as substitute for the aunt, as first possible or permitted incest; what blocks or makes pass is the uterine uncle. What passes entails, in compensation for what is blocked, a veritable surplus-value of code, which returns 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 uncle's house, but also, as Griaule says, "the augmentation 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 return in such or such system? cannot be resolved independently of the complexity of the lines of passage and the lines of blockage — as though 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 ends with the daughter's marriage. A married daughter transmits to her own daughter a new relation, namely the one that unites her to her own brother. At the same time, a daughter who marries detaches herself not from her brother's lineage, but solely from that of her mother's brother. The meaning of the payments to the mother's brother at the marriage of his niece is understood only thus: the young girl leaves the old family group of her mother. The niece becomes herself mother and point of departure of 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, give an understanding of the mechanism of formation of the surplus-value of code as an indispensable piece in any coding of fluxes.

148We can therefore sketch the various instances of territorial representation within the primitive *socius*. In the first place, the germinal influx of intensity conditions the whole of representation: it is the representative of desire. But if it is called representative, it is because it stands for the non-codable, 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 possible only insofar as the representative itself undergoes a repression. This repression determines what will pass and what will not pass of the influx into the system in extension, what will remain blocked or stocked in the extended filiations, what on the contrary will move and flow according to the relations of alliance, in such a manner that the systematic coding of flux is effected. We call this second instance alliance, the repressing representation itself, since the filiations only become extended as a function of the lateral alliances that measure their variable segments. Hence the importance of those "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 repression, the great coders. Wherever men meet and assemble to take women from one another, 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. Stressing 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 group homosexual motivation.{124} Through women, men establish their own connections; through the man-woman disjunction, which at every instant is the outcome of filiation, alliance connects men of different filiation. The question: why has a female homosexuality not 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 at the heart of extended filiations (hysteria of filiation, as opposed to the paranoia of alliance). Male homosexuality is therefore the representation of alliance that represses the ambiguous signs of bisexual intense filiation. However, Devereux seems to us mistaken twice over: when he declares that he long recoiled before this overly grave discovery, as he says, of a homosexual representation (there is here only a primitive version of the formula "All men are queers," and indeed they never are more so than when they machine marriages). On the other hand and above all, when he wants to make this homosexuality of alliance a product of the Oedipus complex insofar as repressed. Alliance is never deduced from the lines of filiation by way of Oedipus; on the contrary, it articulates them, under the action of the 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, which is initially non-Oedipal. As for Oedipus in general, it is not the repressed, that is to say the representative of desire, which lies on the near side and is wholly ignorant of papa-mama. Nor is it the repressing representation, which lies beyond, and which only renders persons discernible by subjecting them to the homosexual rules of alliance. Incest is merely the retroactive effect of the repressing representation upon the repressed representative: it disfigures or displaces this representative which it bears upon, it projects onto it discernibilized categories that it has itself instituted, it applies to it terms that did not exist before alliance had, precisely, organized the positive and the negative in the system in extension — it folds it back onto what is blocked in this system. Oedipus is therefore indeed the limit, but the displaced limit which now passes inside the *socius*. Oedipus is the lure-image by which desire lets itself be caught (That is what you wanted! the decoded flux, that was incest!). Then begins a long history, that of Oedipianization. But precisely, everything begins in the head of Laius, the old group homosexual, the pervert, who lays 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.

SECTION 4

149We are going too fast, we are acting as if Oedipus were already installed in the savage territorial machine. Yet, as Nietzsche says concerning bad conscience, it is not on that terrain that such a plant grows. The fact is that the conditions of Oedipus as a "family complex," understood within the framework of the familialism proper to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, are obviously not given. Savage 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 there function always as something other than father, mother, or sister as well. And more than the father, the mother, etc., there is the ally, who constitutes the active concrete reality and makes the relations between families coextensive with the social field. It would not even be exact to say that familial determinations burst forth at every corner of this field, and remain attached to determinations properly social, since the ones and the others are one and the same piece in the territorial machine. Familial reproduction not being yet a simple means, or a matter in the service of a social reproduction of another nature, there is no possibility of folding the latter back onto the former, of establishing between the two bi-univocal relations that would give to some family complex an expressive value and an apparent autonomous form. It is on the contrary evident that the individual in the family, even very small, directly invests 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 appears to us altogether insufficient to compare them to the psychoanalytic process by referring them to criteria that remain borrowed from the latter: for example a family complex, even one different from ours, or cultural contents, even referred to an ethnic unconscious — as one sees in the parallelisms attempted between the psychoanalytic cure and the 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.

150Victor 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, insufferable, vain, failing in all his undertakings, the patient K is prey to the shade of his maternal grandfather, who makes harsh reproaches against him. Although the Ndembu are matrilineal and are supposed to live among their maternal kin, 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 driven out, and returns to the maternal village. There his house aptly expresses his situation, wedged between two sectors, the houses of members of the paternal group and those of his own matrilineage. Now how do the divination, charged with indicating the cause of the ill, and the medical cure, charged with treating it, proceed? The cause is the tooth, the two upper incisors of the hunter ancestor, contained in a sacred bag, but which can escape from it to penetrate the patient's body. But, in order to diagnose, in order to conjure away the effects of the incisor, the diviner and the doctor engage in a social analysis bearing on the territory and its neighborhood, the chieftaincy and the sub-chieftaincies, the lineages and their segments, the alliances and the filiations: they never cease to bring to light desire in its relations with political and economic units — and it is moreover on this point 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 may be treated by traditional ritual procedures…, the vagueness 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 this one was a great chief; his successor, the "real chief," had had to renounce, for fear of being bewitched; and his presumed heir, intelligent and enterprising, does not have the power; the current chief is not the right one; as for the patient K, he was unable to take on the mediating role that could have made him a candidate-chief. Everything is complicated by reason of the colonizer-colonized relations, the [English] not having recognized the chieftaincy, 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 lament the present decadence). The doctor does not organize a sociodrama, but a veritable 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 with a ceremony broken up by stops and re-starts, flux of all kinds, flux of words and cuts: the members of the village come to speak, the patient speaks, the shade is invoked, they stop, the doctor explains, they begin again, drums, chants, trances. It is not only a matter of discovering the preconscious investments of the social field by interests, but more deeply its unconscious investments by desire, as they pass through the patient's marriages, his position in the village, and all the chiefly positions lived in intensity in the group.

151We were saying that the point of departure seemed Oedipal. It was only the point of departure for us, trained to say Oedipus every 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 the women and the 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 folded back onto the name of the father, or of the maternal grandfather, the latter opened onto all the names of history. Instead of everything being projected onto a grotesque cut of castration, everything swarmed into the thousand cuts-flux of chieftaincies, of lineages, of relations of colonization. The whole play of races, of clans, of 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 stuffs it by force into "the symbolic void of the father." Or rather, if it is true that the analysis does not even begin Oedipal, except for us, does it not become so nevertheless, to a certain extent, and to what extent? Yes, it becomes so in part, under the effect of colonization. The colonizer for example abolishes the chieftaincy, or uses it for his ends (and many other things: the chieftaincy, that is still nothing). The colonizer says: your father, he is your father and nothing else, or the maternal grandfather, don't go taking them for chiefs, … you can get yourself triangulated in your corner, and place your house between those of the paternals and the maternals, … your family, it is your family and nothing else, social reproduction no longer passes through it, although your family is precisely needed to furnish a material that will be submitted to the new régime of reproduction… So yes, an Oedipal frame is sketched out for the dispossessed savages: shantytown Oedipus. We have seen, however, that the colonized remained a typical example of resistance to Oedipus: in fact, it is there that the Oedipal structure does not manage to close itself, and that its 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 the administration, the elders who curse the White, the young who enter into a political struggle, etc.). But both are true: the colonized resists Oedipalization, and Oedipalization tends to close back upon him. Insofar as there is Oedipalization, it is the doing of colonization, and it must be joined to all the procedures that Jaulin was able to describe in *La Paix blanche*. "The state of being colonized can lead to a reduction of the humanization of the universe, such that every solution sought will be to the measure of the individual or of the restricted family, with, as a consequence, an extreme anarchy or disorder at the level of the collective: an anarchy of which the individual will always be 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 will reduce the universe, will tend to extend it."{126} Oedipus is something like euthanasia within ethnocide. The more social reproduction escapes the members of the group, in nature and in extension, the more it folds back upon them, or folds them themselves back onto a restricted and neuroticized familial reproduction whose agent is Oedipus.

152For, in the end, how are we to understand those who say they have found an Indian, or an African Oedipus? They are the first to recognize that they find nothing of the mechanisms and attitudes that constitute our Oedipus as ours (our supposed Oedipus as ours). No matter, they say that the structure is there, even though it has no existence "accessible to the clinic"; or that the problem, the point of departure, is indeed oedipal, although the developments and solutions are wholly different from ours (Parin, Ortigues). They say that it is an Oedipus "that never finishes existing," when it does not even have (outside of colonization) the conditions necessary to begin to exist. If it is true that thought is evaluated by its degree of oedipianization, then yes, Whites think too much. The competence, the honesty, and the talent of these authors, africanist psychoanalysts, are out of question. But with them it is as with certain psychotherapists among us: one would say that they do not know what they are doing. We have psychotherapists who sincerely believe they are doing progressive work by applying new manners of triangulating the child — careful, a structural Oedipus, not an imaginary one! Likewise these psychoanalysts in Africa who wield the yoke of a structural or "problematic" Oedipus in the 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 a sign of an election, of a special attention from supernatural powers, or as a sign of an aggression of a magical character: that idea does not let itself be easily profaned. Analytic psychotherapy can intervene only from the moment when a demand can be formulated by the subject. Our entire research was therefore conditioned by the possibility of instituting a psychoanalytic field. When a subject adhered fully to the traditional norms and had nothing to say in his own name, he let himself be taken in charge by the traditional therapists and the family group or by the medicine of 'medicaments.' Sometimes, the fact that he wished to speak to us of the traditional treatments corresponded to an inception of psychotherapy and became for him a means of situating himself personally in his own society… At other times, the analytic dialogue could deploy itself further, and in that case the oedipal problem tended to take on its diachronic dimension, bringing out the conflict of generations."{127} Why think that supernatural powers and magical aggressions form a worse myth than 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 alongside Oedipus. And by what right 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 contrary? Would Oedipus not also be a traditional norm, ours? How can one say that 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" that is invoked to justify Oedipus? Granted, the subject demands and demands again of papa-mama: but what subject, and in what state? Is that the means "of situating himself personally in his own society"? And what society? The neo-colonized society that is made for him, and that finally succeeds in what colonization had only been able to sketch out, an effective folding-back of the forces of desire onto Oedipus, onto a name of the father, in the grotesque triangle?

153Let us return to the famous, inexhaustible discussion between the culturalists and the orthodox psychoanalysts: is Oedipus universal? is it the great Catholic paternal symbol, the reunion of all the churches? The discussion began between Malinowski and Jones, continued between Kardiner and Fromm on the one hand, Roheim on the other. It still continues among 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: the one, outmoded it seems, that makes Oedipus an originary affective constellation, and at the limit a real event, whose effects would be transmitted by phylogenetic heredity. And the one that makes Oedipus a structure, which must be uncovered 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 patent absence, understood as an effect of repression, or better still since the structural invariant is uncovered only through imaginary variations, testifying if need be to a symbolic "foreclosure" (the father as empty place). The universal of Oedipus resumes the old metaphysical operation that consists in interpreting negation as a privation, as a lack: the symbolic lack of the dead father, or the great Signifier. To interpret is our modern way of believing, and of being pious. It is already Roheim who proposed to organize the savages in a series of variables converging toward the neotenic structural invariant.{128} It is 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: the tribes, daughters of the ethnologist, do not speak the Oedipus that nonetheless makes them speak. Roheim added that it was ridiculous to believe that the Freudian 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 the nature of repression, the meaning and the scope of repression varied.

154This whole business of repression is quite complicated. Things would be simpler if libido or affect were repressed, in the broadest sense of the word (suppressed, inhibited, or transformed) — at the same time as the alleged Oedipal representation. But this is not so: most ethnologists have indeed noted 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 in spite of the displacement of representation. As Leach says regarding the sex-hair relation, "the symbolic displacement of the phallus is customary, but the phallic origin is in no way repressed."{129} Must we say that the savages repress representation, and keep affect intact? And would it be the contrary among us, in the patriarchal organization where representation remains clear, but with affects suppressed, inhibited, or transformed? And yet, no: psychoanalysis tells us that we too repress 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 repression 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, from whose repression and return it would be born. Yet the contrary is evident; and not only does Oedipal representation presuppose the prohibition of incest, but one cannot even say that it is born from it or results from it. Reich, becoming a partisan of Malinowski's theses, added a profound remark to them: desire is the more Oedipal the more the prohibitions bear, not simply on incest, but "on sexual relations of every other type," sulking the other paths.{130} In short, the repression of incest no more arises from a repressed Oedipal representation than it itself provokes this repression. But, which is something altogether different, the general system repression-repression gives rise to an Oedipal image as a disfiguration of the repressed. That this image in turn ends up undergoing a repression, that it comes in place of the repressed or of what is effectively desired, to the very extent that sexual repression bears on something other than incest, this is a long history which is the history of our society. But what is repressed is not first of all the Oedipal representation. What is repressed is desiring production. It is what, of this production, does not pass into social production or reproduction. It is what would introduce there disorder and revolution, the uncoded fluxes of desire. What passes, on the contrary, from desiring production to social production forms a direct sexual investment of this social production, without any repression of the sexual character of the symbolism and of the corresponding affects, and above all without reference to an Oedipal representation that one would suppose originally repressed 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 the father. Likewise the libidinal investment of food, wherever a fear of being hungry, a pleasure in not being hungry are revealed, and which is related only secondarily to an image of the mother.{131} We have seen previously how the prohibition of incest referred, not to Oedipus, but to the uncoded fluxes constitutive of desire, and to their representative, the intense pre-personal flux. As for Oedipus, it is still a way of coding the uncodable, of codifying what escapes the codes, or of displacing desire and its object, of trapping them.

155Culturalists and ethnologists show clearly that institutions are primary with respect to affects and structures. For structures are not mental, they are in things, in the forms of social production and reproduction. Even an author like Marcuse, hardly suspect of complacency, recognizes that culturalism set off on a good footing: introducing desire into production, knotting the link "between the instinctual structure and the economic structure, and at the same time indicating the possibilities there are of progressing beyond a patricentric and exploitative culture."{132} So, what made culturalism turn out badly? and here again there is no contradiction in its setting off well at the beginning and turning badly from the beginning. Perhaps it is the postulate common to Oedipal relativism and Oedipal absolutism, that is, the obstinate maintenance of a familialist perspective, which exerts its ravages everywhere. For if the institution is first understood as familial institution, it matters very little whether one says that the family complex varies with institutions, or that Oedipus on the contrary is a nuclear invariant around which families and institutions turn. The culturalists invoke other triangles, for example uterine uncle–aunt–nephew; but the Oedipianists have no trouble showing that these are imaginary variations for the same structural invariant, different figures for the same symbolic triangulation, which is not confused either with the personages who come to effectuate it, or with the attitudes that come to put these personages in relation. But, inversely, the invocation of such a transcendent symbolism in no way takes the structuralists out of the narrowest familial point of view. So it is with the endless discussions on: is it papa? is it mama? (You neglect the mother! No, it is you who do not see the father, alongside, as empty place!) The conflict of the culturalists and the orthodox psychoanalysts has often been reduced to these evaluations of the respective role of the mother and the father, of the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal, without thereby getting out of the family or even out of Oedipus, oscillating always between the two famous poles, the pre-Oedipal maternal pole of the imaginary, the Oedipal paternal pole of the structural, both on the same axis, both speaking the same language of a familialized social, of which the one designates the customary maternal dialects, and the other, the strong law of the father's tongue. The ambiguity of what Kardiner called "primary institution" has been clearly shown. For it can be a matter, in certain cases, of the way in which desire invests the social field, from childhood on and under familial stimuli coming from the adult: all the conditions would then be given for an adequate (extrafamilial) comprehension of the libido. But, more often, it is only a matter of the familial organization in itself, which is supposed first to be lived by the child as a microcosm, then projected into adult and social becoming.{133} From this point of view, the discussion can only turn in circles between proponents of a cultural interpretation, and proponents of a symbolic or structural interpretation of this same organization.

156Let us add a second postulate common to the culturalists and the symbolists. All admit that, with us at least, in our patriarchal and capitalist society, Oedipus is a sure thing (even if, like Fromm, they underscore the elements of a new matriarchy). All admit our society as the strong point of Oedipus: a point from which one will find an Oedipal structure everywhere, or else, on the contrary, one will have to vary the terms and the relations in complexes that are non-Oedipal, but no less "familial" for all that. This is why our entire preceding critique has borne on Oedipus such as it is supposed to hold good and function with 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 disfiguration it implies and operates upon desiring production, upon the syntheses of the unconscious, upon the libidinal investments in our cultural and social milieu. Not that Oedipus is nothing with us: we have not ceased saying that it was being demanded, demanded again; and even an attempt as profound as Lacan's to shake off the yoke of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for means of weighting it down still further, and of closing it back upon the baby and the schizo. And, certainly, it is not only legitimate but indispensable that the ethnological or historical explanation not be in contradiction with our present organization, or that the latter contain in its fashion the basic elements of the ethnological hypothesis. This is what Marx said, recalling the requirements of a universal history; but, he added, on condition that the present organization be capable of criticizing itself. Now Oedipus's self-criticism is what one scarcely sees in our organization, of which psychoanalysis is a part. It is correct, in certain respects, to interrogate all social formations on the basis of Oedipus. But not because Oedipus would be a truth of the unconscious particularly detectable with us; on the contrary, because it is a mystification of the unconscious that has succeeded with us only by dint of mounting its parts and its workings through the prior 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 resume its point of departure and find again its point of arrival.

157Oedipus is a limit. But limit has many acceptations, since it can be at the beginning as inaugural event, having the role of a matrix, or in the middle, as structural function assuring the mediation of personages and the foundation of their relations, or at the end, as eschatological determination. Now, as we have seen, it is only in this last acception that Oedipus is a limit. Desiring production too. But, precisely, this very acception has many diverse senses. In the first place, desiring production is at the limit of social production; decoded fluxes, at the limit of codes and territorialities; the body without organs, at the limit of the *socius*. We will speak of an absolute limit each time the schizo-fluxes pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the *socius*: the body without organs is the deterritorialized *socius*, desert where the decoded fluxes of desire flow, end of the world, apocalypse. In the second place however, the relative limit is nothing but the capitalist social formation, because it machines and makes flow effectively decoded fluxes, but by substituting for the codes an accountant's axiomatic that is still more oppressive. So that capitalism, in conformity with the movement by which it counters its own tendency, never ceases to approach the wall, and to push 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 sense or foresee the real form under which the limit risks befalling it, and which it conjures with all its forces. Hence the obstinacy with which formations prior to capitalism encyst the merchant and the technician, preventing fluxes of money and fluxes of production from taking on 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: consumer goods, prestige goods, women and children. When money appears, it can only be coded as a prestige good, and yet merchants use it to seize the sectors of consumer goods traditionally held by the women: all the codes waver. Assuredly, to begin with money and to end with money is an operation that cannot be expressed in terms of code; seeing the trucks leave for export, "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 the interior was already projected into a primordial beginning, a mythic matrix as imaginary limit. How to imagine this nightmare, the invasion of the *socius* by uncoded fluxes that slide in the manner of a lava? An irrepressible flood of shit as in the myth of the Trickster, or else the intense germinal influx, the on-this-side of incest as in the myth of the Yurugu, who introduces disorder into the world by acting as representative of desire. Hence, in the fifth place finally, the importance of the task that consists in displacing the limit: making it pass into the interior of the *socius*, in the middle, between a beyond of alliance and the on-this-side 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 from it a thousand little shallow streams. Oedipus is this displaced limit. Yes, Oedipus is universal. But the wrong was to have believed in the following alternative: either it is a product of the repression-repression system, and then it is not universal; or it is universal and it is a 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 dread absolutely as their deepest negative, namely the decoded fluxes of desire.

158But this is not to say that this universal Oedipal limit is "occupied," strategically occupied in all social formations. One must give its full sense to Kardiner's remark: a Hindu or an Eskimo can dream of Oedipus without thereby 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 make itself independent of familial reproduction, that is, of the territorial machine that declines alliances and filiations; thanks to this independence, the detachable fragments of chain must convert themselves into a transcendent detached object that crushes their polyvocity; the detached object (phallus) must operate a sort of folding, application or folding-down, folding-down of the social field defined as starting set onto the familial field, now defined as arrival set, and must institute a network of bi-univocal relations between the two. For Oedipus to be occupied, it is not enough that he be a limit or a displaced represented in the system of representation, he must migrate within that system, and come himself to occupy the place of representative of desire. These conditions, inseparable from the paralogisms of the unconscious, are realized in the capitalist formation — though they still imply certain archaisms borrowed from the barbarian imperial formations, notably the position of the transcendent object. The capitalist style has been well described by Lawrence, "our democratic-industrial order of things, the my-little-darling-I-want-to-see-mama style." Now, on the one hand, it is evident that primitive formations in no way fulfill these conditions. Precisely because the family, open onto alliances, is co-extensive with and adequate to the historical social field, because it animates social reproduction itself, because it mobilizes or passes along the detachable fragments without ever converting them into a detached object — no folding-down, no application is possible that would correspond to the Oedipal formula 3 + 1 (the 4 corners of the field folded into 3, like a tablecloth, plus the transcendent term that operates 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 has no end of existing, he does not manage 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 limit or displaced represented, but precisely in such a way that each member of the group is always on this side of or beyond, without ever occupying the position (this is what Kardiner saw so well in the formula we were citing). It is colonization that makes Oedipus exist, but an Oedipus felt for what it is, pure oppression, insofar as it presupposes that these Savages be deprived of control over their social production, ripe to be folded down onto the only thing that remains to them, and even that, the familial reproduction that is imposed on them as Oedipalized no less than as alcoholic or sickly.

159On the other hand, when the conditions are realized in capitalist society, one will not on that account believe that Oedipus ceases to be what it is, a 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. Never is it cause: Oedipus depends on a prior social investment of a certain type, apt to fold back upon family determinations. It will be objected that such a principle is valid perhaps for the adult, but certainly not for the child. But precisely Oedipus begins in the head of the father. And not from an absolute beginning: it forms itself only on the basis of the investments that the father effects of the historical social field. And, if it passes to the son, this is not by virtue of a familial 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 the familial stimuli is still the social field, and a whole system of cuts and of extra-familial fluxes. That the father is first in relation to the child, this can be understood analytically only as a function of that other primacy, that of social investments and counter-investments in relation to familial 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 an arrival ensemble (the family become microcosm) upon which capitalist production and reproduction fold back, whose organs and agents no longer pass at all through a coding of the fluxes of alliance and filiation, but through an axiomatic of decoded fluxes. The capitalist formation of sovereignty therefore needs an intimate colonial formation that answers to it, upon which it applies itself, and without which it would have no purchase on the productions of the unconscious.

160What is to be said, under these conditions, of the relation ethnology-psychoanalysis? Must one settle for 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 kind of private universal, of universal-individual? (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 has the pretension of explaining to the ethnologist what the symbol means: it means the phallus, castration, Oedipus. But the ethnologist asks something else, and sincerely asks himself what use psychoanalytic interpretations can be to him. The duality therefore shifts, it is no longer between two sectors, but between two kinds of question: "What does it mean?" and "What is it used for?" What it is used for not only to the ethnologist, but what it is used for and how it works in the very formation that makes use of the symbol.{137} What a thing means, it is not certain that this serves any purpose at all. For example, it may be that Oedipus is of no use, neither to psychoanalysts nor to the unconscious. And what would the phallus serve, inseparable from castration which withdraws its use from us? It is said, 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 this same question barred? It is still the domain of representation. The real misunderstandings, the practical misunderstandings between ethnologists (or Hellenists) and psychoanalysts, do not come from a misrecognition or a 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 end to end. Everyone knows this, 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 defines itself not by what it means, but by what it does and by what one does with it. It always means the phallus, or something close, only what it means does not say what it is used for. In short, there is no ethnological interpretation, for the simple reason that there is no ethnographic material: there are only uses and functionings. On this point ethnologists may have many things 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 may be that ethnologists and Hellenists constrain psychoanalysts to make at last on their own account a similar discovery: namely that there is no unconscious material either, nor psychoanalytic interpretation, but only uses, analytic uses of the syntheses of the unconscious, which no more let themselves be defined by the assignation 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 whose use and functioning schizo-analysis discovers in immanence to social machines. The unconscious says nothing, it machines. It is not expressive or representative, but productive. A symbol is solely a social machine that functions as machine of desire, a machine of desire that functions in the social machine, an investment of the social machine by desire.

161It has often been said and shown that an institution, no more than an organ, is explained by its use. A biological formation, a social formation do not form themselves in the same manner as they function. Therefore there is no biological, sociological, linguistic, etc., functionalism at the level of the great specified ensembles. But it is not the same with the machines of desire as molecular elements: there, use, functioning, production, formation make but one. And it is this synthesis of desire that explains, under such or such determined conditions, the molar ensembles with their specified use in a biological, social, or linguistic field. The fact is that the great molar machines presuppose pre-established linkages that their functioning does not explain, since it derives from them. Only the machines of desire produce the linkages 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 attained those regions where desire machines, independently of the macroscopic nature of what it machines: organic, social, linguistic elements, etc., put to cook all together in the same pot. Functionalism must know no other unities-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 assembles plants, pieces of organs, a scrap of clothing, an image of papa, formulas and words: one will not ask what it means, but what machine is thus mounted, what fluxes and what cuts, in relation to other cuts and other fluxes. Analyzing the symbolism of the forked branch among the Ndembu, Victor Turner shows that the names given to it are 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 signifying chains than from material fluxes. The exegetical sense (what is said of the thing) is but one element among others, and less important than the operative use (what is done with it) or the positional functioning (the relation to other things in the same complex), according to which the symbol is never in a bi-univocal relation with what it would mean, but always has a multiplicity of referents, "always multivocal and polyvocal."{138} Analyzing the magical object *buti* among the Kukuya of the Congo, Pierre Bonnafé shows how it is inseparable from the practical syntheses that produce it, register 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 registers the object in the body of the subject, and transforms the latter into an animal-man; the residual conjunction that submits the "remainder" to a long voyage before burying it or immersing it.{139} If ethnologists today rediscover a lively interest in the hypothetical concept of fetish, it is certainly under the influence of psychoanalysis. But one would say that psychoanalysis gives them as many reasons to doubt the notion as to direct their attention to it. For never has psychoanalysis said Phallus-Oedipus-and-Castration more than apropos of 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 use 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 rediscover everywhere the father as the symbolic representative of separation? Is this not to remain at the level of what it means? The ethnologist finds himself 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 partial object or separable part of the body does not represent an aggressor and separated phallus; it is a thing in itself, a material piece in an apparatus for aggressing, in a machine for separating.

162Once again, the question is not whether the basis 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 in this way, so long as one imposes a choice between the libido and the numen, the misunderstanding between ethnologists and psychoanalysts can only sharpen — just as it never ceases to grow between Hellenists and psychoanalysts on the subject of Oedipus. Oedipus, the club-footed despot, is obviously a whole political history that pits the despotic machine against the old primitive territorial machine (whence both the negation and the persistence of autochthony, well marked by Lévi-Strauss). But this is not sufficient to desexualize the drama, on the contrary. In fact, the question is how one conceives sexuality and libidinal investment. Must they be referred to an event or to a "felt experience" that remains in spite of everything familial and intimate, the intimate Oedipal felt experience, even when interpreted structurally, in the name of the pure signifier? Or must they be opened onto the determinations of a historical social field, where the economic, the political, the religious are things invested by the libido for themselves, and not the derivatives of a papa-mama? In the first case, one considers large molar aggregates, large social machines — the economic, the political, etc. — even if it means seeking what they mean by applying them to an abstract familial aggregate supposed to contain the secret of the libido; one thus remains within the frame of representation. In the second case, one goes beyond these large aggregates, including the family, toward the molecular elements that form the parts and gears of machines of desire. One seeks how these machines of desire function, how they invest and subdetermine the social machines that they constitute on a large scale. One then reaches the regions of a productive unconscious, molecular, micrological or micropsychic, which no longer means anything and no longer represents anything. Sexuality is no longer considered as a specific energy that unites persons derived from the large aggregates, but as the molecular energy that places partial-object-molecules into connection (libido), that organizes inclusive disjunctions on the giant molecule of the body without organs (numen), and that distributes states according to domains of presence or zones of intensity (voluptas). For machines of desire are precisely that: the microphysics of the unconscious, the elements of the micro-unconscious. But, as such, they never exist independently of the historical molar aggregates, of the 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 bear witness to the way in which desire is present in a social field, and to the way in which it associates this field with itself as the statistically determined domain that is bound to it. Machines of desire function within social machines, as if they kept their own régime in the molar aggregate 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 within a familial aggregate, but the molecular subdetermination functioning within social, and secondarily familial, aggregates, which trace the field of presence and of production of desire: a whole 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 the social machines, their régime compared to that of machines of desire.

SECTION 5

163If representation is always a repression-repression of desiring production, this is nonetheless in very diverse ways, according to the social formation considered. The system of representation has three elements in depth: the repressed representative, the repressing representation, and the displaced represented. But the instances that come to effectuate them are themselves variable; there are migrations in the system. We have no reason to believe in the universality of a single and same apparatus of socio-cultural repression. One can speak of a more or less great coefficient of affinity between social machines and machines of desire, depending on whether their respective régimes are more or less close, depending on whether the latter have more or less chance of passing their connections and interactions into the statistical régime of the former, depending on whether the former operate to a lesser or greater degree a movement of detachment with respect to the latter, depending on whether the deathly elements remain caught in the mechanism of desire, embedded in the social machine, or on the contrary gather together into a death instinct extended throughout the social machine and crushing desire. The principal factor in all these respects is the type or kind of social inscription, its alphabet, its characters: inscription on the *socius* is in fact the agent of a secondary or "properly speaking" repression, which necessarily stands in relation to the desiring inscription of the body without organs, and to the primary repression that the latter already exercises in the domain of desire; now this relation is essentially variable. There is always social repression, but the apparatus of repression varies, notably according to what plays the role of the representative on which it bears. In this sense it may be that primitive codes, at the very moment when they exert themselves with maximum vigilance and extension on the fluxes of desire, chaining them in a system of cruelty, retain infinitely more affinity with machines of desire than does the capitalist axiomatic, which nevertheless liberates decoded fluxes. This is because desire is not yet trapped, not yet introduced into an ensemble of impasses, the fluxes have lost nothing of their polyvocity, and the simple represented in representation has not yet taken the place of the representative. To evaluate in each case the nature of the apparatus of repression and its effects on desiring production, one must therefore take into account not only the elements of representation as they are organized in depth, but the manner in which representation itself organizes itself at the surface, on the surface of inscription of the *socius*.

164Society is not exchangist, the *socius* is inscriptive: not to exchange, but to mark bodies, which are of the earth. We have seen that the régime of debt followed 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 fluxes of desire and that, through debt, makes for man a memory of words. It is alliance that represses the great filiative memory, intense and mute, the germinal influx as representative of the non-coded fluxes that would submerge everything. It is debt that composes alliances with filiations that have become extended, in order to form and forge a system in extension (representation) upon the repression of nocturnal intensities. Alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as the prehistoric labor of humanity: making use of 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. This is why it is so important to see in debt a direct consequence of primitive inscription, instead of making it (and making inscriptions themselves) an indirect means of universal exchange. The question that Mauss had at least left open: is debt primary with respect to exchange, or is it only a mode of exchange, a means in the 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 monetized.{140} It is not a theoretical discussion of foundations; the whole 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 basis of things, why must it not have the appearance of an exchange, above all not? Why must it be a gift, or a counter-gift, and not an exchange? And why must the giver, in order to show clearly that he does not expect an exchange even deferred, also be in the position of one who is robbed? It is theft that prevents 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 Gourmantché ideology, a woman could only be given (and we have the *lityuatieli*), or carried off, abducted, hence in a certain way stolen (and we have the *lipwotali*); any union that might too manifestly appear as the result of a direct exchange between two lineages or lineage segments is, in this society, if not prohibited, at least widely disapproved."{141} Will it be said 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 with respect to a "more real" totality? Yet exchange is known, well known — but as that which must be exorcised, encysted, severely partitioned, so that no corresponding value develops as exchange value that would introduce the nightmare of a market economy. The primitive market proceeds by haggling rather than by the fixing of an equivalent, which would entail a decoding of the fluxes and the collapse of the mode of inscription on the *socius*. We are brought back to the starting point: that exchange is inhibited and exorcised in no way testifies to its primary reality, but on the contrary demonstrates that the essential thing is not to exchange, but to inscribe, to mark. And when exchange is made into an unconscious reality, one may well invoke the rights of structure, and the necessary inadequacy of attitudes and ideologies with respect to this structure, one only hypostatizes the principles of an exchangist psychology in order to account for institutions that one recognizes elsewhere as not being institutions of exchange. And above all, what is being done with the unconscious itself, if not explicitly reducing it to an empty form, from which desire itself is absent and expelled? Such a form may define a preconscious, certainly not the unconscious. For if it is true that the unconscious has no material or content, this is certainly not for the benefit of an empty form, but because it is always and already a functioning machine, a machine of desire and not an anorexic structure.

165The difference between machine and structure appears in the postulates that implicitly animate the exchangist structural conception of the *socius*, together with the corrections that must be introduced into it for the structure to be capable of functioning. In the first place, in kinship structures one hardly avoids acting as if alliances flowed from lines of filiation and their relations, although it is the lateral alliances and the blocks of debt that condition the extended filiations in the system in extension, and not the inverse. In the second place, one tends to make of the latter a logical combinatory, instead of taking it for what it is, a physical system in which intensities distribute themselves, of which some cancel out and block a current, of which others let the current pass, etc.: the objection according to which the qualities developed in the system are not only 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 exchangist structural conception tends to postulate a kind of equilibrium of prices, of equivalence or primary equality in the principles, even if it must then explain that inequalities are necessarily introduced into 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 altogether different: it is a matter of knowing whether the disequilibrium is pathological and a matter of consequence, as Lévi-Strauss believes, or whether it is functional and a matter of principle, as Leach thinks.{142} Is instability derivative 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 attends 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 ensemble of prestations is evaluated in a particular society, the better there 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 back upon itself"). Not only the essential openness of the blocks of debts following lateral alliances and successive generations, but above all the relation of statistical formations to their molecular elements are then referred back to mere empirical reality insofar as inadequate to the structural model.{143} Now all this, in the last place, depends on 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 such as it is described upon the *socius*, without taking account of the real agency that inscribes it and of 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 connections of labor in the disjunctive régime of its inscriptions. "From the point of view of relations of production, in fact, 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, however, are simply the form that this distribution takes in the sphere of circulation: by 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 the essential has appeared to us to be, 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 blocks of debts. Never would the soft structure function, and make circulate, without the hard machinic element that presides over the inscriptions.

166The 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 itself with it and does not subordinate itself to it, but is connected to it, coordinated "in a kind of radiating organization" and pluridimensional. (And one must say the contrary of linear writing: civilizations cease to be oral only by dint of losing the independence and the 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 has admirably described these two heterogeneous poles of savage inscription or territorial representation: the voice-audition couple, and hand-graphism.{145} How does such a machine function? — for it does function: the voice is like a voice of alliance, to which without resemblance a graphism is coordinated, on the side of extended filiation. On the body of the young girl is placed the calabash of excision. Furnished by the lineage of the husband, it is the calabash that serves as conductor for the voice of alliance; but the graphism must be traced by a member of the young girl's clan. The articulation of the two elements takes place on the body itself, and constitutes the sign, which is not resemblance or imitation, nor effect of a signifier, but position and production of desire: "For the transformation of the young girl to be fully effective, a direct contact must operate between her belly on the one hand, the calabash and the signs inscribed upon it on the other. The young girl must physically impregnate herself with the signs of procreation and incorporate them into herself. The signification of the ideograms is never taught to the young girls during their initiation. The sign acts through its inscription in the body… The inscription of a mark in the body does not here have only the value of a message, 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 divine work."{146} But how to explain the role of sight, indicated by Leroi-Gourhan, both in the contemplation of the face that speaks and 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 obliges, and the body afflicted by the sign that a hand engraves in it? Must one not add a third side to the other two, a third element of the sign: eye-pain, besides voice-audition and hand-graphism? The patient in the rituals of affliction does not speak, but receives speech. He does not act, but is passive under the graphic action, he receives the stamp of the sign. And his pain, what is it if not a pleasure for the eye that watches it, the collective or divine eye that 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 issued 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 extracts, grasping the effect of active speech on the body, but also the reaction of the body insofar as it is acted upon. This is indeed what must be called the 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 that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciating eye. Such is how territorial representation organizes itself on the surface, still very close to an eye-hand-voice machine of desire. Magic triangle. Everything is active, acted or reacting in this system, the action of the voice of alliance, the passion of the body of filiation, the reaction of the eye appreciating the declension of the two. To choose the stone that will make of the young Guayaki a man, with enough harm and pain, by splitting the length of his back: "It must have a very sharp side" (says Clastres in an admirable text) "but not like the bamboo splinter that cuts too easily. To choose the adequate stone therefore requires an eye. The whole apparatus of this new ceremony reduces to this: a pebble… Furrowed skin, scarified earth, one and the same mark."{147}

167The great book of modern ethnology is less Mauss's *Essai sur le don* than Nietzsche's *Genealogy of Morals*. At least it ought to be. For the *Genealogy*, the second dissertation, is an attempt and an unequalled success at interpreting primitive economy in terms of debt, in the creditor-debtor relation, by eliminating every consideration of exchange or interest "in the English manner." And if they are eliminated from psychology, it is not to install them in structure. Nietzsche has only poor material at his disposal, ancient Germanic law, a little Hindu law. But he does not hesitate as Mauss does between exchange and debt (Bataille will not hesitate either, under the Nietzschean inspiration that guides him). Never has the fundamental problem of the primitive *socius* been posed so acutely, the problem of inscription, of the code, of the mark. Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great bio-cosmic memory that would unleash the deluge upon every attempt at collectivity. But, at the same time, how is he to be given a new memory, a collective memory that is that of words and alliances, one that declines the alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of extraction and detachment, and that thus operates the coding of the fluxes of desire as the condition of the *socius*? The answer is simple, it is debt, it is the open, mobile and finite blocks of debt, this extraordinary composite of the speaking voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye. All the stupidity and arbitrariness of laws, all the pain of initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons and atrocious procedures, have only this sense: to train man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him in the creditor-debtor relation which, on both sides, turns out to be a matter of memory (a memory strained 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 follows directly from inscription. Once again no vengeance is to be invoked here, no ressentiment (it is not on this soil that they grow, any more than Oedipus does). That the innocent suffer all the marks in their bodies, this comes from the respective autonomy of the voice and the graphism, and also from the autonomous eye that draws pleasure from it. It is not because each one is suspected, in advance, of being a bad debtor to come; it would rather be the contrary. It is the bad debtor who must be understood as one on whom the marks did not sufficiently "take," as though he were or had been unmarked. He has merely widened beyond the permitted limits the gap that separated the voice of alliance and the body of filiation, to the point where the balance must be re-established by a surplus of pain. Nietzsche does not say so, but what does it matter? For it is indeed there that he encounters the terrible equation of debt, damage caused = pain to be undergone. How to explain, he asks, that the pain of the criminal can serve as an "equivalent" for 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 the gods fond of cruel spectacles, "so much does punishment have the bearing of a festival!" So much does pain belong to an active life and a complacent gaze. The equation damage = pain has nothing exchangist about it, and shows in this limit-case that debt itself had nothing to do with exchange. Quite simply, the eye draws from the pain it contemplates a surplus-value of code, which compensates for the ruptured relation between the voice of alliance to which the criminal has failed, and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated his body. The crime, rupture of phono-graphic connection, re-established by the spectacle of punishment: primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything.

168It has foreseen everything, coding pain and death — except the way its own death was to come to it from without. "They arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without consideration, without pretext, they are there with the rapidity of lightning, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too *other* even to be an object of hatred. Their work consists in instinctively creating forms, in striking imprints, they are the most involuntary and unconscious artists there are: wherever they appear, in a short time there is something new, a sovereign mechanism that is living, in which each part, each function is delimited and determined, in which nothing finds a place that does not first have its signification in relation to the whole. They do not know, these organizers of birth, what fault, responsibility, deference are; in them reigns that terrifying egoism of the artist with the brazen gaze, who knows himself justified in advance in his work, for all eternity, as the mother in her child. It is not with them, as one suspects, that bad conscience germinated, — but without them this horrible plant would not have sprung up, it would not exist, if, under the shock of their hammer-blows, of their artists' tyranny, a prodigious quantity of liberty had not disappeared from the world, or at least disappeared from all eyes, constrained to pass into the latent state."{148} It is here that Nietzsche speaks of cut, 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 which, with its warlike organization doubled by the force to organize, lets its formidable claws fall without scruple 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 the State. Nietzsche will come to establish other cuts: those of the Greek city, of Christianity, of democratic and bourgeois humanism, of industrial society, of capitalism and of socialism. But it may be that all of them, in diverse respects, presuppose this first great cut, although they also claim to push it back and fill it in. It may be that, spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, there has never been but one single State, the dog-State which "speaks in smoke and howls." And Nietzsche suggests how this new *socius* proceeds: an unprecedented terror, in relation to which the old system of cruelty, the forms of primitive training and chastisement, are nothing. A concerted destruction of all the primitive codings, or, worse still, their derisory conservation, 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 machine of inscription, the blocks of mobile, open, and finite debt, "the parcels of destiny," all of this finds itself taken into an immense gearing that renders the debt infinite and forms now but one and the same crushing fatality: "From now on the perspective of a liberation must disappear once and for all into pessimistic mist, from now on the despairing gaze must lose heart before an iron impossibility…" The earth becomes an asylum of the insane.

SECTION 6

169The institution of the despotic machine or of the barbarian *socius* can be summed up thus: new alliance and direct filiation. The despot refuses 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 whose locus is the desert, imposing the harshest trials, the driest, and testifying as much to the resistance of an old order as to the authentication of the new order. The machine of the strange is at once great paranoiac machine, since it expresses the struggle with the old system, and already glorious bachelor machine, insofar as it stages the triumph of the new alliance. The despot is the paranoiac (there is no longer any drawback to maintaining such a proposition, once one has rid oneself of the familialism proper to the conception of paranoia in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and once one sees in paranoia a type of investment of social formation). And new perverse groups propagate the despot's invention (perhaps they even fabricated it for him), spread his glory and impose his power in the cities they found or that they conquer. Everywhere a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes, functionaries are part of the cortege. One would say that the old complementarity has shifted to form a new *socius*: no longer the bush paranoiac and the village or encampment perverts, but the desert paranoiac and the city perverts.

170In principle, the despotic barbarian 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 equally grasp the movement of this formation when an empire detaches itself from a preceding empire; or even when the dream of a spiritual empire arises there where temporal empires fall into decadence. The undertaking may be above all military and one of conquest, it may be religious above all, military discipline being converted into internal asceticism and cohesion. The paranoiac may himself be 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 into the desert, installs his new machine there, holy ark and portable temple, and gives his people a religious-military organization. To sum up the undertaking of Saint John the Baptist, one says: "John attacks at its base the central doctrine of Judaism, that of the alliance with God through a filiation going back to Abraham."{149} That is the essential: we speak of imperial barbarian formation or of despotic machine each time the categories of new alliance and direct filiation are mobilized. And whatever the context of this mobilization, in relation to preceding empires or not, since across these vicissitudes the imperial formation always defines itself by a certain type of code and inscription which is opposed by right to the primitive territorial codings. The number of the alliance matters little: new alliance and direct filiation are specific categories that bear witness 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 again from zero, of objectifying a complete transformation: the subject leaps outside the alliance-filiation crossings, installs itself at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that links it directly to God and connects it to the people. For the first time something has been withdrawn from life and the earth which will permit life to be judged and the earth to be surveyed from above, 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.

171It remains that, in order to understand the barbarian formation, we must relate it not to other formations of the same kind that it competes with, temporally or spiritually, according to relations that obscure the essential, but to the primitive savage formation that it supplants by right, and that continues to haunt it. It is indeed thus that Marx defines Asiatic production: a superior unity of the State is instituted on the basis of the primitive rural communities, which retain ownership of the soil, while the State is the true owner of it in conformity with the apparent objective movement that attributes to it the surplus product, brings back to it the productive forces in the great works, and makes the State itself appear as the cause of the collective conditions of appropriation.{150} The filled 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 prohibitions that often render it nearly incapable of acting make of it a body without organs. It is he who is the unique quasi-cause, the source and the estuary of the apparent movement. Instead of mobile detachments of signifying chain, a detached object has leapt outside the chain; instead of extractions of flux, all the fluxes converge into a great river that constitutes the consumption of the sovereign: radical change of régime in the fetish or the symbol. What counts is not the person of the sovereign, nor even his function, which may be limited. It is the social machine that has profoundly changed: instead of the territorial machine, the State "megamachine," functional pyramid having 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, blocks of debt become an infinite relation in the form of tribute. The whole 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 maintenance of the despot, his court and the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the principle of a territorialization that inscribes people according to their residence, we must see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement of deterritorialization that divides the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new filled body, to the new *socius*.

172"They come like destiny, … they are there with the rapidity of lightning, too terrible, too sudden…" The death of the primitive system always comes from outside, history is the history 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 deserted plateaus, so many vast fertile plains… Yet there they are, and each morning seems to swell their number… To converse with them, impossible! They do not know our language."{151} But this death that comes from outside is also the one that rose up from within: the general irreducibility of alliance to filiation, the independence of alliance groups, the way in which they served as conducting element for economic and political relations, the system of primitive ranks, the mechanism of surplus-value, all this already sketched out despotic formations and orders of castes. And how to distinguish the way in which the primitive community distrusts its own chieftain institutions, conjures away or garrots the image of the possible despot it would secrete in its bosom, from that in which it binds up the symbol—now derisory—of an ancient despot who imposed himself from outside, long ago? It is not always easy to know whether it is a primitive community repressing an endogenous tendency, or finding itself again as best it can after a terrible exogenous adventure. The play of alliances is ambiguous: are we still on this side of the new alliance, or already beyond it, and as if fallen back into a residual and transformed this-side? (Auxiliary question: what is feudalism?). We can only assign the precise moment of the imperial formation as that of the new exogenous alliance, not only in the place of the ancient alliances, but in relation to them. And this new alliance is altogether 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. This is indeed what makes for the specific character of Asiatic production: the autochthonous rural communities subsist, and continue to produce, to inscribe, to consume; the State has dealings only with them. The cogs of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are now only the working parts of the State machine. Objects, organs, persons and groups retain 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 surplus-value. The ancient inscription remains, but bricked up by and in the State inscription. The blocks subsist, but have become bricks set in and framed, having now only a commanded mobility. Territorial alliances are not replaced, but only allied to the new alliance; territorial filiations are not replaced, but only affiliated to the direct filiation. It is like an immense right of the first-born over every filiation, an immense right of the first night over every alliance. The filiative stock becomes the object of an accumulation in the other filiation, the alliance debt 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 ends; so true is it, as Nietzsche said, that what one calls the evolution of a thing is "a constant succession of phenomena of subjection more or less violent, more or less independent, not to forget the resistances that ceaselessly arise, the attempts at metamorphosis that operate to concur with defense and reaction, finally the felicitous results of actions in the contrary direction."

173It has often been remarked that the State begins (or begins again) with two fundamental acts, one called of territoriality by fixation of residence, the other called of liberation by abolition of small debts. But the State proceeds by euphemism. Pseudo-territoriality is the product of an effective deterritorialization which substitutes abstract signs for the signs of the earth, and which makes the earth itself the object of a property of the State, or of its richest servants and functionaries (and there is not much change, from this point of view, when the State does no more than guarantee the private property of a dominant class that 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 on the scene of a new territorial machine, possibly revolutionary and capable of posing or treating in its full amplitude the agrarian problem. In other cases where a redistribution takes place, the cycle of credits 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 merchant model. The despotic machine has this in common with the primitive machine, it resembles it in this respect: horror of decoded fluxes, fluxes of production, but also merchant fluxes of exchange and commerce that would escape the monopoly of the State, its gridding, its stamp. When Etienne Balazs asks: why was capitalism not born in China in the 13th century, where all the scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed given?, the answer is in the State which closed the mines as soon as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient, and which kept the monopoly or strict control of commerce (the merchant as functionary).{152} The role of money in commerce depends less on commerce itself than on its control by the State. The relation of commerce with money is synthetic, not analytic. And fundamentally money is inseparable, not from commerce, but from the tax as upkeep of the State apparatus. There even where dominant classes distinguish themselves from this apparatus and make use of it for the profit of private property, the despotic link of money with the tax remains visible. Drawing on the researches of Will, Michel Foucault shows how, in certain Greek tyrannies, the tax on the 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 stronger, by preventing and repressing any re-territorialization that might take place through the economic data of the agrarian problem.{153} (As if the Greeks had discovered in their own way what the Americans will 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 this is what the two acts of the State conceal: residence or State territoriality inaugurates the great movement of deterritorialization which subordinates all the primitive filiations to the despotic machine (agrarian problem); the abolition of debts or their accountable transformation opens the task of an interminable State service which subordinates to itself all the primitive alliances (problem of debt). The infinite creditor, the infinite credit has replaced the mobile and finite blocks of debt. There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt becomes debt of existence, debt of the existence of subjects themselves. The time comes when the creditor has not yet lent while the debtor never stops giving back, for giving back is a duty, but lending is a faculty — as in Lewis Carroll's song, the long song of the infinite debt:

174The despotic State, as it appears in the purest conditions of so-called Asiatic production, has two correlative aspects: on the one hand it replaces the territorial machine, it forms a new deterritorialized filled body; on the other hand it maintains the old territorialities, integrating them as pieces or organs of production within the new machine. It has its perfection at one stroke because it functions on the basis of dispersed rural communities, as preexisting machines autonomous or semi-autonomous from the standpoint of production; but, from this same standpoint, it reacts upon them by producing the conditions of large-scale works that exceed the power of the distinct communities. What is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new, a disjunctive synthesis that makes the old filiations effuse onto direct filiation, reuniting all the subjects in the new machine. The essential thing about the State is therefore the creation of a second inscription by which the new filled body — immobile, monumental, immutable — appropriates all the forces and agents of production; but this State inscription lets the old territorial inscriptions subsist, as "bricks" on the new surface. From this finally follows the manner in which the conjunction of the two parts is operated, the respective shares that fall to the superior proprietor unity and to the possessing communities, to overcoding and to intrinsic codes, to appropriated surplus-value and to utilized usufruct, to the State machine and to the territorial machines. As in the Great Wall of China, the State is the transcendent superior unity integrating relatively isolated sub-assemblies that function separately, to which it assigns a development in bricks and a construction work by fragments. Scattered partial objects hooked onto the body without organs. No one better than Kafka was able to show that the law had nothing to do with a harmonious, immanent natural totality, but acted as an eminent formal unity, and on this account reigned over fragments and pieces (the wall and the tower). Thus the State is not primitive, it is origin or abstraction, it is the originary abstract essence that is not to be confused with the beginning. "The Emperor is the sole object of all our thoughts. Not the reigning Emperor… He would be its object, I mean, if we knew him, if we had the slightest precision concerning him!… The people does not know which emperor reigns, and the very name of the dynasty remains uncertain to it… In our villages, Emperors long since deceased ascend the throne, and one who lives now only in legend has just promulgated a decree which the priest reads aloud at the foot of the altar." As for the sub-assemblies themselves, primitive territorial machines, they are indeed the concrete, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments here enter into relations corresponding to the essence, they take on precisely this brick form which assures their integration into the superior unity, and their distributive functioning, in conformity with the collective designs of this same unity (large-scale works, extortion of surplus-value, tribute, generalized slavery). Two inscriptions coexist in the imperial formation, and reconcile themselves insofar as the one is bricked into the other, the other on the contrary cementing the ensemble and relating to itself producers and products (they have no need to speak the same language). The imperial inscription recuts all alliances and filiations, prolongs them, makes them converge upon 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 pushed toward a mouth, 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, even if it be death drive. Castes are inseparable from overcoding, and imply dominant "classes" that do not yet manifest themselves as classes, but are merged with a State apparatus. Who can touch the filled body of the sovereign? — there is a problem of caste. It is overcoding that dispossesses the earth in favor of the deterritorialized filled body, and that, on this filled body, renders the movement of debt infinite. Nietzsche's power, to have marked the importance of such a moment that begins with the founders of States, those "artists with a gaze of bronze, forging a murderous and pitiless mechanism," erecting before every prospect of liberation an iron impossibility. Not exactly that this infinitivation can be understood, as Nietzsche says, as a consequence of the play of ancestors, of profound genealogies and extended filiations — but rather when these find themselves short-circuited, abducted by the new alliance and direct filiation: it is there that the ancestor, the master of mobile and finite blocks, finds himself deposed by the god, the immobile organizer of bricks and of their infinite circuit.

SECTION 7

175Incest with the sister, incest with the mother are very different things. The sister is not a substitute for the mother: the one belongs to the connective category of alliance, the other to the disjunctive category of filiation. If the one is prohibited, it is to the degree that the conditions of territorial coding require that alliance not be confused with filiation; and the other, that descent within filiation not fold back upon ascent. That is why the despot's incest is double, by virtue of the new alliance and of direct filiation. He begins by marrying the sister. But this prohibited endogamic marriage, he performs it outside the tribe, insofar as he himself is outside his tribe, outside or at the limits of the territory. That is what Pierre Gordon showed in a strange book: the same rule that proscribes incest must prescribe it to certain ones. Exogamy must lead to the position of men outside the tribe who are qualified on their own account to make an endogamic marriage and, by the redoubtable virtue of this marriage, to serve as initiators for the exogamic subjects of both sexes (the "sacred deflowerer," the "ritual initiator" on the mountain or on the other side of the water).{155} Desert, land of betrothal. All the flux converge toward such a man, all the alliances find themselves recut by this new alliance that overcodes them. The endogamic marriage outside the tribe puts the hero in a position to overcode all the exogamic marriages within the tribe. It is clear that incest with the mother has an entirely different meaning: this time it is a matter of the mother of the tribe, such as she exists in the tribe, such as the hero finds her on penetrating into the tribe or finds her again on returning to it, after his first marriage. He recuts the extended filiations with a direct filiation. The hero, initiated or initiator, becomes king. The second marriage develops the consequences of the first, draws out its effects. The hero begins by marrying the sister, then he marries the mother. That the two acts may to varying degrees be agglutinated, assimilated, does not prevent there being two sequences here: the union with the sister-princess, the union with the mother-queen. Incest goes by twos. The hero is always astride two groups, the one into which he goes off to find his sister, the other to which he returns to find his mother again. This double incest does not have as its aim the production of a flux, even a magical one, but the overcoding of all existing flux, and the ensuring 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 gap with the primitive machine; it gives an endpoint to the ancient alliances; it founds the new alliance by operating a generalized appropriation of all the alliance debts. The marriage with the mother is the return to the tribe; it expresses the temporal gap with the primitive machine (difference of generations); it constitutes the direct filiation that flows from the new alliance, by operating a generalized accumulation of filiative stock. Both are necessary for overcoding, like the two ends of a tie for the despotic knot.

176Let us stop here: how is such a thing possible? How has 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 the despot has of committing incest, and of rendering it possible, in no way consists in lifting the repression-repressing apparatus; on the contrary, it is part of it, it only changes the parts, and again it is always under the heading of displaced represented that incest now comes to occupy the position of the repressing representation. One more gain in sum, a new economy in the repressive repressing apparatus, a new mark, a new hardness. Easy, too easy if it sufficed to render incest possible, and to carry it out sovereignly, for the exercise of repressing and the service of repression to cease. The barbarian royal incest is only the means of overcoding the fluxes 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 such as it results from repressing, repression can only gain when it comes to the place of representation itself and takes on under this heading the repressing function (this is what one already saw in psychosis, where the intrusion of the complex into consciousness, according to the traditional criterion, certainly did not lighten the repressing of desire). With the new place of incest in the imperial formation, we therefore speak only of a migration within the elements in depth of representation, which will make the latter more foreign, more pitiless, more definitive or more "infinite" in relation to desiring production. But this migration would never be possible if there did not correlatively occur a considerable change in the other elements of representation, those which play at the surface of the inscribing *socius*.

177What changes singularly in the surface organization of representation is the relation of voice and graphism: the oldest authors saw this clearly, it is the despot who makes writing, it is the imperial formation that makes of graphism a writing properly speaking. Legislation, bureaucracy, accounting, tax collection, State monopoly, imperial justice, the activity of functionaries, historiography, everything is written in the despot's cortège. 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 the voice, and marks on bodies signs that respond to the voice, that react to the voice, but that are autonomous and do not align themselves with it; conversely, barbarian civilizations are written, not because they have lost the voice, but because the graphic system has lost its independence and its proper dimensions, has aligned itself with the voice, has subordinated itself to the voice, even at the cost of extracting from it an abstract deterritorialized flux which it retains and makes resonate in the linear code of writing. In short, it is in one and the same movement that graphism begins to depend on the voice, and induces a mute voice from the heights or from the beyond which begins to depend on graphism. It is by dint of subordinating itself to the voice that writing supplants it. Jacques Derrida is right to say that every language presupposes an originary writing, if by this he means the existence and connection of some graphism whatever (writing in the broad sense). He is right also to say that one can scarcely establish cuts, within writing in the narrow sense, between pictographic, ideogrammatic, and phonetic procedures: there is always and already alignment with the voice, at the same time as substitution for the voice (supplementarity), and "phonetism is never all-powerful, but also has always already begun to work upon the mute signifier." He is right too to link writing mysteriously to incest. But we see in this no motive for concluding to the constancy of an apparatus of repression 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 that are altogether different: a graphism that leaves the voice dominant by dint of being independent of it while connecting to it, a graphism that dominates or supplants the voice by dint of depending on it through various procedures and subordinating itself to it. The primitive territorial sign is valid only for itself, it is a position of desire in multiple connection, it is not the sign of a sign or the desire of a desire, it is ignorant of linear subordination and its reciprocity: neither pictogram nor ideogram, it is rhythm and not form, zigzag and not line, artefact 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.

178Territorial representation is first of all made of two heterogeneous elements, voice and graphism: the one is like the word-representation constituted in the lateral alliance, the other like the thing-representation (body-representation) instituted in extended filiation. The one acts on the other, the other reacts to the one, each with its own power which connotes itself with that of the other in order to operate the great task of intense germinal repression. What is repressed, in fact, is the filled body as ground of the intense earth, which must give way to the *socius* in extension in which the intensities at issue pass or do not pass. The filled body of the earth must take on an extension in the *socius* and as *socius*. The primitive *socius* thus covers itself with a network in which one does not cease to leap from words to things, from bodies to appellations, following the extensive demands of the system in length and breadth. What we call régime of connotation is a régime in which the word as vocal sign designates something, but in which the designated thing is no less a sign, because it hollows itself out with a graphism connoted to the voice. The heterogeneity, the discontinuity, the disequilibrium of the two elements, vocal and graphic, is caught up by a third, the visual element — eye of which one would say that it sees the word (it sees it, it does not read it) inasmuch as it evaluates the pain of the graphism. J. F. Lyotard has attempted to describe in another context such a system, in which the word has only a designating function, but does not on its own constitute the sign; what becomes sign is rather the thing or the body designated as such, insofar as it reveals an unknown face defined upon it, traced by the graphism that responds to the word; the gap between the two is filled by the eye, which "sees" the word without reading it, inasmuch as it appreciates the pain emanating from the graphism in the full body: the eye leaps.{158} 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 designator, but where the graphism itself makes a sign with the designated thing, and where the eye goes from the one to the other, extracting and measuring the visibility of the one by the pain of the other. Everything is active, acted upon, reacting in the system, everything is in use and in function. So much so that when one considers the ensemble of territorial representation, one is struck to note the complexity of the networks with which it covers the *socius*: the chain of territorial signs does not cease to leap from one element to another, radiating in all directions, emitting detachments wherever there are fluxes to extract from, including disjunctions, consuming remainders, extracting surplus-values, connecting words, bodies and pains, formulas, things and affects — connoting voices, graphies, eyes, always in a polyvocal usage: a manner of leaping that does not gather itself in a meaning-to-say, still less in a signifier. And if incest from this point of view has seemed to us impossible, it is because it is nothing other than a necessarily missed leap, this leap that goes from appellations to persons, from names to bodies: on the one hand, the repressed this-side of appellations that do not yet designate persons, but only intensive germinal states; on the other hand, the repressing beyond that applies the appellations to persons only by prohibiting 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 hold on persons, where persons subtract themselves from the graphy, and where the eye has nothing more to see, nothing more to evaluate: incest, mere displaced limit, neither repressed nor repressing, but only displaced represented of desire. It appears in fact from this moment on that the two dimensions of representation — its surface organization with the voice-graphy-eye elements, and its in-depth organization with the instances representative of desire-repressing representation-displaced represented — have a common fate, like a complex system of correspondences within a given social machine.

179Now all of this finds itself overturned in a new destiny, with the despotic machine and imperial representation. In the first place, graphism aligns itself, folds itself 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 the movement of graphism which, all at once, subordinates itself to the voice in order to subordinate the voice to itself, to supplant the voice. From then on a crushing of the magical triangle is produced: the voice no longer sings, but dictates, decrees; the graphy no longer dances and ceases to animate bodies, but writes itself frozen on tables, stones and books; the eye sets itself to read (writing does not entail, but implies a kind of blinding, a loss of vision and of appreciation, and it is now the eye that hurts, although it also acquires other functions). Or rather we cannot say that the magical triangle is completely crushed: it subsists as base, and as brick, in the sense that the territorial system continues to function within the framework of the new machine. The triangle has become the base for a pyramid all of whose faces make the vocal, the graphic, the visual converge toward the eminent unity of the despot. If one calls the *régime* of representation in a social machine plane of consistency, it is evident that this plane of consistency has changed, that it has become one of subordination, no longer of connotation. And here indeed is the essential point in the second place: the folding-back of graphy onto the voice has made a transcendent object leap out of the chain, 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, inversely, no longer expresses itself except through the signs of writing it emits (revelation). Perhaps it is here that we have the first assembly of formal operations that will culminate in Oedipus (paralogism of extrapolation): a folding-back or a set of bi-univocal relations, which culminates in the exhaustion of a detached object, and the linearization of the chain that flows from this object. Perhaps it is here that the question "what does it mean?" begins, and that problems of exegesis prevail over those of usage and efficacy. What did he mean, the emperor, the god? Instead of always-detachable chain segments, a detached object on which the entire chain depends; instead of a polyvocal graphism level with the real, a bi-univocization that forms the transcendent from which a linearity issues; instead of non-signifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial chain, a despotic signifier from which all signs flow uniformly, in a deterritorialized flux of writing. Men have even been seen drinking this flux. Zempléni shows how, in certain regions of Senegal, Islam superimposes a plane of subordination on the old plane of connotation of animist values: "Divine or prophetic speech, written or recited, is the foundation of this universe; the transparency of animist prayer gives way to the opacity of the rigid Arabic verse, the word congeals into formulas whose power is ensured by the truth of the Revelation and not by a symbolic and incantatory efficacy… The science of the marabout in fact refers to a hierarchy of names, verses, numbers and corresponding beings" — and if need be, one will put the verse into a bottle filled with pure water, one will drink the water of the verse, one will rub one's body with it, one will wash one's hands with it.{159} Writing, the first deterritorialized flux, drinkable on that account: it flows from the despotic signifier. For what is the signifier in the first instance? what is it in relation to the non-signifying territorial signs, when it leaps out of their chains and imposes, superimposes a plane of subordination on 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 despot's desire. The mouth no longer speaks, it drinks the letter. The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer lets itself be engraved like the earth, but prostrates itself before the engravings of the despot, the beyond-earth, the new filled body.

180No water will ever wash the signifier of its imperial origin: the master-signifier or "the signifier-master." One may drown the signifier in the immanent system of language, use it to evacuate the problems of sense and signification, resolve it into 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 push the comparison of language with exchange and money as far as possible, and submit it to the paradigms of an active capitalism — never will one prevent the signifier from reintroducing its transcendence, and from bearing witness for a vanished despot who still functions in modern imperialism. Even when it speaks Swiss or American, linguistics stirs the shadow of oriental despotism. Not only does Saussure insist on this: that the arbitrariness of language founds its sovereignty, like a generalized servitude or slavery undergone by the "mass." But it has been possible to show how two dimensions subsist in Saussure, the one horizontal where the signified is reduced to the value of the minimal coexistent terms into 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 which recomposes the signifier (the "value" as counterpart of the coexistent terms, but also the "concept" as 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 entirety of the chain depends and which spreads over it the effects of signification. There is no phonological or 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 the linearity of deterritorialized signs; but this field remains defined by a transcendence, even when one considers it as absence or empty place, operating the necessary foldings, foldovers and subordinations, and from which there flows through the whole 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 mass in relation to the minimal elements of the sign in the immanence of language, without showing how domination is exercised through and in the transcendence of the signifier.{160} There as elsewhere there nonetheless asserts itself an irreducible exteriority of conquest. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the operations of foldover 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 that of the slaves. Nougayrol describes such a situation: "For the Sumerians, (such a sign) is water; the Sumerians read this sign a, which means water in Sumerian. An Akkadian arrives and he asks his Sumerian master: what is it, this sign? The Sumerian answers him: it is a. The Akkadian takes this sign for a, there is no longer on this point any relation between the sign and water which, in Akkadian, is said mû… I believe that the presence of the Akkadians determined the phoneticization of writing… and that the contact of two peoples is almost necessary for the spark of a new writing to flash forth."{161} One could not better show how an operation of bi-univocization is organized around a despotic signifier, in such a way that an alphabetic phonetic chain flows from it. Alphabetic writing is not for illiterates, but by illiterates. It passes through illiterates, those 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 give us access to a modern and functional comprehension of language. The imperialism of the signifier does not get us out of the question "what does it mean?", it is content to bar the question in advance, and to render all answers insufficient by relegating them to the rank of a simple signified. It rejects exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, superior scientificity. Like the young dogs of the palace too prompt to drink the verse-water, and who never cease to cry: the signifier, you have not reached the signifier, you are stuck at the signifieds! The signifier, that's the only thing that makes them enjoy. But this master-signifier remains what it is in the distance of ages, transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the elements of the chain, something common for a common absence, instaurator of all the cuts-flux in a single and same place of a single and same cut: detached object, phallus-and-castration, bar that submits depressive subjects to the great paranoid 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 today animates the anger of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of his adepts: the force and the serenity with which Lacan leads the signifier back to its source, to its true origin, the despotic age, and assembles an infernal machine that welds desire to the law, because, all reflection made, he thinks, it is indeed in this form that the signifier accords with the unconscious and produces effects of signified there.{162} The signifier as repressing representation, and the new displaced represented that it induces, the famous metaphors and metonymy, all this constitutes the overcoding and deterritorialized despotic machine.

181The despotic 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 of direct filiation. Incest is the very operation of overcoding at both ends of the chain, throughout the territory where the despot reigns, from the confines to the center: all the debts of alliance converted into the infinite debt of the new alliance, all the extended filiations subsumed by direct filiation. Incest, or the royal trinity, is therefore the whole of repressing representation insofar as it proceeds to overcoding. The system of subordination or of signification has replaced the system of connotation. To the extent that graphism is folded back onto the voice (this graphism that was once inscribed on bodies themselves), the representation of body subordinates itself to the representation of word: sister and mother are the signifieds of the voice. But, to the extent that this folding-back induces a fictive voice from on high that no longer expresses itself except in the 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 at times we had the appellations (mother, sister), but not the persons or the bodies, at times we had the bodies, but the appellations slipped away as soon as we transgressed the prohibitions they carried — has ceased to exist. Incest has become possible in the espousals of the bodies of kinship and the parental appellations, in the union of the signifier with its signifieds. The question is therefore in no way whether the despot unites with his "real" sister and his real mother. For his real sister is in any case the sister of the desert, just as his real mother is in any case the mother of the tribe. Once 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 that we encountered previously, of simulation with identification, if identification is that of the object on high, simulation is precisely the writing that corresponds to it, the flux that flows from this object, the graphic flux that flows from the 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 filled body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and the 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 of subordination. And what is simulated, therefore produced, through incest itself simulated, therefore produced — all the more real for being simulated and inversely —, are something like the extreme states of a reconstituted, recreated intensity. With his sister, the despot simulates "a zero state from which the phallic power would surge forth," like a promise "whose hidden presence must be situated at the extreme within the body itself"; with his mother, an over-power in which the two sexes would be at the maximum of their proper characters" exteriorized: the ABCs of the phallus as voice.{163} It is therefore always a matter of something else in royal incest: bisexuality, homosexuality, castration, transvestism, as so many gradients and passages in the cycle of intensities. For the despotic signifier proposes to reconstitute what the primitive machine had repressed, the filled body of the intense earth, but on new foundations or new conditions given in the deterritorialized filled body of the despot himself. This is why incest changes meaning or place, and becomes the repressing representation. For this is what is at stake in overcoding through incest: that all the organs of all the subjects, all the eyes, all the mouths, all the penises, all the vaginas, all the ears, all the anuses, hook themselves onto the filled body of the despot as onto the peacock tail of a royal train, and have their intensive representatives there. Royal incest is not separable from the intense multiplication of organs and from their inscription on the new filled body (Sade saw clearly this always royal role of incest). The apparatus of repression-repression, the repressing representation, finds itself now determined as a function of a supreme danger that expresses the representative on which it bears: that a single organ should flow outside the despotic body, detach itself from it or slip away from it, and the despot sees rising up before him, against him, the enemy through whom death will come to him — an eye whose gaze is too fixed, a mouth whose smile is too rare, each organ is a possible protest. 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 hungry," and the smile of Cassius "who seems to smile at his own smile." A long history that will lead the body of the assassinated, disorganized, dismembered, filed-down despot into the latrines of the city. Was it not already the anus that detached the object on high and produced the eminent voice? Did not the transcendence of the phallus depend on the anus? But the latter only reveals itself at the end, as the last survival of the vanished despot, the underside of his voice: the despot is no longer anything but this "ass of a dead rat hung from the ceiling of the sky." The organs began by detaching themselves from the despotic body, organs of the citizen raised against the tyrant. Then they will become those of the private man, they will privatize themselves on the model and the memory of the deposed anus, set outside the social field, haunted by the fear of smelling bad. The whole history of primitive coding, of despotic overcoding, of the decoding of the private man holds in these movements of flux: the intense germinal influx, the over-flux of royal incest, the reflux 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*. The whole history of the graphic flux goes from the flow of sperm in the cradle of the tyrant, to the flow of shit in his tomb-sewer, — "all writing is pig-shit," all writing is this simulation, sperm and excrement.

182One could believe that the system of imperial representation is, despite everything, gentler than that of territorial representation. Signs no longer inscribe themselves in living flesh, but on stones, parchments, coins, lists. Following Wittfogel's law of "diminishing administrative returns," large sectors are left semi-autonomous, insofar as they do not compromise State power. The eye no longer extracts a surplus-value from the spectacle of pain, it has ceased to appreciate; it has rather set itself to "preventing" and surveilling, to preventing any surplus-value from escaping the overcoding of the despotic machine. For all organs and their functions undergo an exhaustion that relates them and makes them converge on the filled body of the despot. In truth, the régime is not gentler, the system of terror has replaced that of cruelty. The ancient cruelty subsists, notably in autonomous or quasi-autonomous sectors; but it is now bricked into the State apparatus, which now organizes it, now tolerates or limits it, in order to make it serve its ends and subsume it under the superior and superimposed unity of a more terrible law. It is in fact belatedly that the law opposes itself or appears to oppose itself to despotism (when the State presents itself as an apparent conciliator between classes which distinguish themselves from it, and must consequently rework the form of its sovereignty).{164} The law does not begin by being what it will become or will claim to become later: a guarantee against despotism, an immanent principle which unites the parts into a whole, which makes of this whole the object of a general knowledge and a general will, whose sanctions only follow by judgment and application onto the rebellious parts. The barbarian imperial law has rather two characters which oppose themselves to those — the two characters that Kafka so forcefully developed: the paranoid-schizoid trait of the 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, thereby acting in the name of a formidable Unity, but a formal and empty Unity, eminent, distributive and not collective; the manic-depressive trait (metaphor) according to which the law makes nothing known and has no knowable object, the verdict not preexisting the sanction, and the statement of the law not preexisting the verdict. The ordeal presents these two traits in the living state. As in the machine of the Penal Colony, it is the sanction that writes both the verdict and the rule. The body may well have freed itself from the graphism that was proper to it in the system of connotation, it now becomes the stone and the paper, the tablet and the coin on which the new writing can mark its figures, its phoneticism and its alphabet. To overcode, such is the essence of the law, and the origin of the new pains of the body. Punishment has ceased to be a festival, from which the eye extracts a surplus-value in the magical triangle of alliance and filiations. Punishment becomes a 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, the law, before being a feigned guarantee against despotism, is the invention of the despot himself: it is the juridical form taken by the infinite debt. Even among the late Roman emperors, one will see the jurist in the despot's cortege, and the juridical form accompany the imperial formation, the legislator with the monster, Gaius and Commodus, Papinian and Caracalla, Ulpian and Heliogabalus, "the delirium of the twelve Caesars and the golden age of Roman law" (taking if necessary the side of the debtor against the creditor in order to entrench the infinite debt).

183Vengeance, and like a vengeance exercised in advance, the imperial barbarian law crushes the entire primitive play of action, of the acted and the reaction. Now passivity must become the virtue of subjects hooked onto the despotic body. As Nietzsche says, when he shows precisely how punishment becomes vengeance in imperial formations, "a prodigious quantity of freedom must have vanished from the world, or at least vanished from all eyes, forced to pass into a latent state, under the shock of their hammer-blows, of their tyranny of artists…". An exhaustion of the death drive is produced, which ceases to be coded in the play of savage actions and reactions where fatalism was still something acted, in order to become the somber agent of overcoding, the detached object hovering over each one, as if the social machine had taken off from the machines of desire: death, desire of desire, desire of the despot's desire, latency inscribed in the deepest part of the State apparatus. Not a single survivor any more than a single organ flows from this apparatus, or slips outside the despotic body. For there is no longer any 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 will only be known later, when it has evolved and taken on 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 in that they withdraw themselves from knowledge and owe everything to their eminent cause. It still happens that the young dogs demand the return to the despotic signifier, without exegesis or interpretation, when the law nonetheless wants to explain what it signifies, to assert an independence of its signified (against the despot, it says). For dogs, following Kafka's observations, like desire to closely wed itself to the law in the pure exhaustion of the death drive, rather than hearing, it is true, hypocritical doctors explain what all this means. But all this, the development of the democratic signified or the coiling of the despotic signifier, is nonetheless part of the same question, sometimes open and sometimes barred, the same continued abstraction, machinery of repression which always distances us from the machines of desire. For there was never but a single State. What's it for? grows fainter and fainter, and disappears in the mist of pessimism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada! And, in fact, there is something common in the régime of the law as it appears under the imperial formation, and as it will later evolve: indifference to designation. It is proper to the law to signify without designating anything. The law designates nothing and no one (the democratic conception of the law will make this into a criterion). The complex relation of designation, such as we saw it elaborated in the system of primitive connotation putting into play the voice, the graphism and the eye, disappears here in the new relation of barbarian subordination. How would designation subsist when the sign has ceased to be position of desire, in order to become this imperial sign, universal castration which 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 else let them subsist in the maintained bricks of the old system). Why do linguists never cease to rediscover the truths of the despotic age? And is it possible, finally, that this arbitrariness of designations, as the underside of a necessity of signification, bears not only on the subjects of the despot or even on his servants, but on the despot himself, his dynasty and his name ("The people does not know which emperor reigns, and the name of the dynasty remains uncertain to it")? Which would signify that the death drive is still more profound in the State than was believed, and that latency works not only on the subjects but in the highest cogs. Vengeance becomes that of the subjects against the despot. In the system of latency of terror, what is no longer active, acted or reacted, "what is rendered latent by force, tightened, repressed, drawn back inside," that itself is now felt: the eternal ressentiment of the subjects responds to the eternal vengeance of the despots. Inscription is "felt" when it is no longer acted nor reacted. When the deterritorialized sign becomes signifier, a formidable quantity of reaction passes into the latent state, it is the whole resonance, the whole retention that change in volume and in time ("the *après-coup*"). Vengeance and ressentiment, this is certainly not the beginning of justice, but its becoming and its destiny in the imperial formation such as Nietzsche analyzes it. And, following his prophecy, would the State itself be this dog who would want to die? But also who is reborn from its ashes. For it is this whole ensemble of the new alliance or of the infinite debt — the imperialism of the signifier, the metaphorical or metonymic necessity of the signifieds, with the arbitrariness of designations — that ensures the maintenance of the system, and that makes a name succeed a name, a dynasty another, without the signifieds changing, nor the wall of the signifier being pierced. Which is why the régime of latency, in the African, Chinese, Egyptian, etc. empires, was that of constant rebellions and secessions, and not of revolution. There again death will have to be felt from within, but come from without.

184They made everything pass into the latent state, the founders of empire; they invented vengeance and provoked ressentiment, that counter-vengeance. And yet Nietzsche still says of them what he was already saying of the primitive system: it is not in them that "bad conscience" — let us 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 rendered it possible…{165} What does Nietzsche mean, he who dragged Caesar along with him as despotic signifier, and his two signifieds, his sister and his mother, and felt them growing heavier and heavier as he approached madness? It is true that Oedipus began its cellular, ovular migration in imperial representation: from a displaced represented of desire, it became the repressing representation itself. The impossible became possible; the unoccupied limit is now found to be occupied by the despot. Oedipus received its name, the club-footed despot, operating the double incest by overcoding, with his sister and his mother as the representations of bodies subjected to verbal representation. What is more, Oedipus is in the process of mounting each of the formal operations that will render it possible: the extrapolation of a detached object; the double bind of overcoding or of 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 afterwards or its deferred action. 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 clearly the story that psychoanalysis insists on whispering in their ear. It is indeed the story of desire, and its sexual history (there is no other). But all the pieces here play as cogs of the State. Desire certainly does not play between a son, a mother and a father. Desire proceeds to a libidinal investment of a State machine, which overcodes the territorial machines, and, with a supplementary turn of the screw, represses the machines of desire. Incest follows from this investment and not the inverse, and at first puts in play only the despot, the sister and the mother: he is 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. The whole of sexuality takes place between machines, struggle among them, superposition, brickwork. Let us be astonished once again at the story reported by Freud. In *Moses and Monotheism*, he senses well that latency is an affair 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 in no way yet a complex as repressed desire, since on the contrary it exercises its action of repression upon 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 the complex, whereas the first only expresses its pieces and cogs functioning from a wholly other point of view, in a wholly other organization. Such is the mania of psychoanalysis with all its paralogisms: to present as resolution or attempted resolution of the complex what is its definitive instauration or interior installation, and to present as complex what is still its contrary. For what will be needed for Oedipus to become *the* Oedipus, the Oedipus complex? Many things in truth — those very things that Nietzsche partially intuited in the evolution of infinite debt.

185The Oedipal cell will have to complete its migration, it will have to do more than pass from the state of displaced represented to the state of repressing representation, but, from repressing representation, it must finally become the representative of desire itself. And become it under the heading of displaced represented. The debt will have to become not only infinite debt, but be interiorized and spiritualized as infinite debt (Christianity and what follows from it). Father and son will have to form themselves, that is, the royal triad must "masculinize itself," and this as a direct consequence of the now interiorized infinite debt.{166} Oedipus-despot will have to be replaced by Oedipuses-subjects, Oedipuses-submitted, Oedipuses-fathers and Oedipuses-sons. All the formal operations will have to be taken up again in a decoded social field, and resonate in the pure and private element of interiority, of interior reproduction. The repression-repressing apparatus will have to undergo a complete reorganization. Desire, therefore, having completed its migration, will have to know this extreme misery: being turned back against itself, the turning against itself, bad conscience, guilt, which attaches it to the most decoded social field as to the most diseased interiority, desire's trap, its poisonous plant. So long as the history of desire does not know this ending, Oedipus haunts all societies, but as the nightmare of what has not yet happened to them — its hour has not come. (And is this not always Lacan's strength, to have saved psychoanalysis from the frenzied Oedipianization to which it was binding its destiny, to have operated 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 on the basis of that apparatus, law and signifier, phallus and castration yes, Oedipus no!, the despotic age of the unconscious.)

SECTION 8

186City of Ur, starting point of Abraham or of the new covenant. The State was not formed progressively, but surges up fully armed, master stroke in one go, originary Urstaat, eternal model of what every State wants and desires to be. So-called Asiatic production, with the State that expresses it or constitutes its objective movement, is not a distinct formation; it is the base formation, it horizons all of history. From every direction the discovery comes back to us of imperial machines that preceded the traditional historical forms, and that are characterized by State property, bricked communal possession, and collective dependence. Each more "evolved" form is like a palimpsest: it covers over a despotic inscription, a Mycenaean manuscript. Beneath every Black and every Jew, an Egyptian; beneath the Greeks, a Mycenaean; beneath the Romans, an Etruscan. And yet what forgetting falls upon the origin, latency that takes hold of the State itself, and where sometimes writing disappears. It is under the blows of private property, then of commodity production, that the State undergoes its withering away. The earth enters into the sphere of private property and into that of commodities. Classes appear, insofar as the dominant ones no longer merge with the State apparatus, but are distinct determinations that make use of this transformed apparatus. First adjacent to communal property, then a component or conditioning element, then increasingly determining, private property brings about an interiorization of the creditor-debtor relation within the relations of antagonistic classes.{167} But how to explain at once this latency into which the despotic State enters, and this power with which it reforms itself on modified bases, to rebound more "lying," more "cold," more "hypocritical" than ever? This forgetting and this return. On the one hand the antique city, the Germanic commune, feudalism presuppose the great empires, and can only be understood in terms of the Urstaat that serves them as horizon. On the other hand the problem of these forms is to reconstitute the Urstaat as much as possible, taking account of the requirements of their new distinct determinations. For what do private property, wealth, the commodity, the classes signify? The bankruptcy of the codes. The appearance, the surging up of now decoded fluxes that flow over the *socius* and traverse it through and through. The State can no longer content itself with overcoding already coded territorial elements, it must invent specific codes for fluxes that are more and more deterritorialized: place despotism in the service of the new class relation; integrate the relations of wealth and poverty, of commodity and labor; reconcile merchant money with fiscal money; everywhere reinfuse Urstaat into the new state of things. And everywhere the latent model that one will no longer be able to equal, but that one will not be able to keep from imitating. There rings out the Egyptian's melancholy warning to the Greeks: "You Greeks will never be anything but children!"

187This 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 spring forth fully armed from the brain of those who institute it, "the artists with brazen gaze." That is why, in Marxism, one did not quite know what to do with it: it does not enter into the famous five stages, primitive communism, ancient city, feudalism, capitalism, socialism.{168} It is not a formation among others, nor the passage from one formation to another. One might say it is in retreat with respect to what it cuts and with respect to what it re-cuts, as though it bore witness to another dimension, a cerebral ideality superadded to the material evolution of societies, a regulative idea or principle of reflection (terror) that organizes the parts and the flux into a whole. What the despotic State cuts, over-cuts, or overcodes is what comes before, the territorial machine, which it reduces to the state of bricks, of working parts henceforth subject to the cerebral idea. In this sense, the despotic State is indeed the origin, but the origin as abstraction which must comprehend 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 a properly intense energy (what Griaule called "the metaphysical part of mythology," the vibratory spiral) with respect to the extensive social system it conditioned, and what passed from the one to the other — alliance and filiation. But the imperial myth of the origin expresses something else: the gap of this beginning from the origin itself, of extension from the idea, of genesis from 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 thus shows that imperial myths cannot conceive a law of organization immanent to the universe: they need to posit, and to interiorize, this difference between origin and beginnings, sovereign power and genesis of the world; "myth constitutes itself in this distance, it makes of it the very object of its narrative, retracing through the succession of divine generations the avatars of sovereignty up to the moment when a supremacy, this one definitive, puts an end to the dramatic elaboration of the dunesteia."{169} So much so that, in the limit, one no longer really knows what is first, and whether the lineage territorial machine does not presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or which it segmentarizes in its turn. And, in a certain manner, the same must be said of what comes after the originary State, of what this State re-cuts. It over-cuts what comes before, but re-cuts the ulterior formations. There too it is like the abstraction belonging to another dimension, always in retreat and stricken with latency, but which rebounds and returns all the better in the ulterior forms that give it a concrete existence. A protean State, but there was never anything but a single State. Hence the variations, all the variants of the new alliance, yet under the same category. For example, not only does feudalism presuppose an abstract despotic State that it segmentarizes according to the régime of its private property and the rise of its mercantile production, but these latter induce in return 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 mercantile production suffices to shatter feudalism (on many points, on the contrary, it reinforces it, gives it new conditions of existence and survival) and to believe that feudalism by itself is opposed to the State which, on the contrary, as feudal State, is capable of preventing the commodity from introducing the decoding of flux that alone would be ruinous for the system envisaged.{170} And in more recent examples, we must follow Wittfogel when he shows to what extent modern capitalist and socialist States partake of the originary despotic State. Democracies — how not to recognize in them the despot become more hypocritical and colder, more calculating, since he must himself count and code instead of overcoding the accounts? It serves no purpose to draw up a list of differences, in the manner of conscientious historians: village communities here, and there industrial societies, etc. The differences would be determining only if the despotic State were a concrete formation among others, to be treated comparatively. But it is the abstraction, which is realized indeed in the imperial formations, but is realized there only as abstraction (eminent overcoding unity). It takes on its concrete immanent existence only in the ulterior forms that make it return under other figures and in other conditions. Common horizon of what comes before and of what comes after, it conditions universal history only on condition of being, not outside, but always alongside, the cold monster that represents the way in which history is in the "head," in the "brain," the Urstaat.

188Marx recognized that there was indeed a manner in which history went from the abstract to the concrete: "simple categories express relations in which the insufficiently developed concrete may have realized itself, without yet having posited the more complex relation or rapport that is theoretically expressed in the more concrete category; whereas the more developed concrete lets this same category subsist as a subordinate relation."{171} The State was at first this abstract unity integrating sub-aggregates that functioned separately; it is now subordinated to a field of forces whose fluxes it coordinates, and whose autonomous relations of domination and subordination it expresses. It no longer contents itself with overcoding maintained and bricked-up territorialities, it must constitute, invent codes for the deterritorialized fluxes of money, of commodity and of private property. It no longer forms by itself one or several dominant classes, it is itself formed by these classes that have become independent and that delegate it to the service of their power and their contradictions, of their struggles and their compromises with the dominated classes. It is no longer the transcendent law that governs fragments; it must, as best it can, draw a whole to which it renders its law immanent. It is no longer the pure signifier that orders its signifieds, it now appears behind them and depends on what it signifies. It no longer produces an overcoding unity, it is itself produced within the field of decoded fluxes. As a machine, it no longer determines a social system, it is determined by the social system into which it incorporates itself in the play of its functions. In short, it does not cease being artificial, but it becomes concrete, it "tends toward concretization," at the same time as it subordinates itself to the dominant forces. An analogous evolution has been shown to exist for the technical machine when it ceases to be an abstract unity or an intellectual system reigning over separated sub-aggregates, to become a relation subordinated to a field of forces exercising itself as a concrete physical system.{172} But, precisely, this tendency toward concretization in the technical or social machine, is it not here the very movement of desire? We always fall back upon the monstrous paradox: the State is desire that passes from the head of the despot to the heart of the subjects, and from the intellectual law to the entire physical system that disengages or liberates 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 always consists in re-inspiring 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, starting again from zero: to found a spiritual empire, there and in those forms where the State can no longer function as such in the physical system. When the Christians took over the empire, this complementary duality reappeared between those who wanted to reconstruct the Urstaat as much as possible with the elements they found in the immanence of the objective Roman world, and then the pure ones, who wanted to set off again into the desert, to begin a new alliance, to recover the Egyptian and Syriac inspiration of a transcendent Urstaat. What strange seascapes arose, on columns and in the trunks of trees! Christianity in this sense was able to develop a whole play of paranoiac and bachelor machines, a whole train of paranoiacs and perverts who, too, form part of the horizon of our history and populate our calendar.{173} These are the two aspects of a becoming of the State: its interiorization 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 also be the hour of the greatest cynicism. "this cruelty of the animal-man turned back, repressed into his interior life, withdrawing with terror into his individuality; enclosed in the State in order to be domesticated…".

SECTION 9

189The first great movement of deterritorialization appeared with the overcoding of the despotic State. But it is nothing yet beside the other great movement, the one that will be carried out by the decoding of fluxes. Yet decoded fluxes do not suffice for the new cut to traverse and transform the *socius*, that is, for capitalism to be born. Decoded fluxes strike the despotic State with latency, submerge the tyrant, but just as well make him return under unexpected forms — democratize him, oligarchize him, segmentarize him, monarchize him, and always interiorize and spiritualize him, with on the horizon the latent Urstaat whose loss one cannot be consoled for. It is now up to the State to recode, as best it can, through regular or exceptional operations, the product of decoded fluxes. Take the example of Rome: the decoding of land fluxes through privatization of property, the decoding of monetary fluxes through the formation of great fortunes, the decoding of commercial fluxes through the development of a merchant production, the decoding of producers through expropriation and proletarianization — everything is there, everything is given, without producing a capitalism strictly speaking, but a slave régime.{174} Or the example of feudalism: there again private property, merchant production, the monetary influx, the extension of the market, the development of towns, the appearance of seigneurial rent in money or of contractual hiring of labor power in no way produce a capitalist economy, but a reinforcement of feudal charges and relations, sometimes a return to more primitive stages of feudalism, sometimes even the reestablishment of a kind of slavery. And it is well known that the monopolistic action in favor of the guilds and companies favors, not the rise of a capitalist production, but the insertion of the bourgeoisie into a feudalism of town and State, which consists in remaking codes for fluxes decoded as such, and in maintaining the merchant, following Marx's formula, "in the very pores" of the old filled 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 in this regard a great difference between the despotic age and the capitalist age. For they arrive like lightning, the founders of States; the despotic machine is synchronic whereas the time of the capitalist machine is diachronic, the capitalists arise in turn in a series that founds a kind of creativity of history, strange menagerie: schizoid time of the new creative cut.

190Dissolutions define themselves by a simple decoding of fluxes, always compensated by survivals or transformations of the State. One feels death rising from within, and desire itself becoming death drive, latency, but also passing over to the side of those fluxes that virtually carry a new life. Decoded fluxes, who will say the name of this new desire? Fluxes of properties being sold, fluxes of money that flows, fluxes of production and means of production being prepared in the shadows, fluxes of workers deterritorializing themselves: there will have to be the encounter of all these decoded fluxes, their conjunction, their reaction upon one another, the contingency of this encounter, of this conjunction, of this reaction which produce themselves once, for capitalism to be born, and for the old system to die this time from outside, at the same time as the 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 deep-sea navigation, Braudel asks: why not Chinese or Japanese ships, or even Muslim ones? Why not Sinbad the Sailor? It is not technique that is lacking, the technical machine. Is it not rather desire which remains caught in the nets of the despotic State, wholly invested in the despot's machine? "Would then the merit of the West, blocked on its narrow cape of Asia, be to have had need of the world, need to go forth from home?"{175} There is no voyage but schizophrenic (later, the American sense of the frontiers: something to surpass, limits to cross, fluxes to make pass, uncoded spaces to penetrate). Decoded desires, desires of decoding, there have always been, history is full of them. But here decoded fluxes form a desire, a desire that produces instead of dreaming or lacking, a machine of desire, social and technical at once, only through their encounter in one place, their conjunction in a space that takes time. That is why capitalism and its cut do not define themselves simply by decoded fluxes, but by the generalized decoding of fluxes, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized fluxes. It is the singularity of this conjunction that made the universality of capitalism. Simplifying greatly, we can say that the savage territorial machine started out from the connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic machine was founded on the disjunctions of inscription proceeding from the eminent unity. But the capitalist machine, the civilized one, will first establish itself on the conjunction. Then the conjunction no longer designates only remainders that would escape coding, nor consumptions-consummations as in primitive festivals, nor even the "maximum of consumption" in the luxury of the despot and his agents. When the conjunction passes into the first rank in the social machine, it appears on the contrary that it ceases to be tied to *jouissance* as to the excess of consumption of a class, that it makes of luxury itself a means of investment, and folds all the decoded fluxes back onto production, in a "produce for the sake of producing" which rediscovers the primitive connections of labor on condition, on the sole condition of attaching them to capital as to the new deterritorialized filled body, the true consumer from which they seem to emanate (as in the pact of the devil described by Marx, "the industrial eunuch": it is therefore to you if…).{176}

191At the heart of Capital, Marx shows the encounter of two "principal" elements: on one side the deterritorialized worker, become free and naked worker 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 fluxes, flux of producers and flux of money. The encounter might not have taken place, free workers and money-capital existing "virtually" on either side. 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.{177} What is more, each of these elements brings into play several procedures of decoding and deterritorialization of very different origin: for the free worker, deterritorialization of the soil by privatization; decoding of the instruments of production by appropriation; deprivation of the means of consumption by dissolution of the family and the corporation; decoding finally of the worker to the profit of labor itself or of the machine — and, for capital, deterritorialization of wealth by monetary abstraction; decoding of the fluxes of production by merchant capital; decoding of States by financial capital and public debts; decoding of the means of production by the formation of industrial capital, etc. Let us see in still more detail how the elements encounter one another, with conjunction of all their procedures. It is no longer the age of cruelty nor of terror, but the age of cynicism, 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 the age that implies time, precisely for the conjunction of all the decoded and deterritorialized fluxes. As Maurice Dobb has shown, there must first be 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 under conditions that make industrial investment particularly attractive ("price revolution," 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).{178} All sorts of contingent factors favor these conjunctions. So many encounters, for the formation of the thing, the unnameable! But the effect of the conjunction is indeed the more and more profound control of production by capital: the definition of capitalism or of its cut, the conjunction of all the decoded and deterritorialized fluxes, is not defined by commercial capital nor by financial capital, which are only fluxes among others, elements among others, but by industrial capital. No doubt the merchant very quickly had an action on production, either by becoming industrialist himself in trades founded on commerce, or by making artisans his own intermediaries or employees (struggles against the guilds and the monopolies). But capitalism does not begin, the capitalist machine is not assembled, until capital directly appropriates production, and until financial capital and merchant capital are no more than specific functions corresponding to a division of labor in the capitalist mode of production in general. We then find again the production of productions, the production of registrations, the production of consumptions — but precisely in this conjunction of decoded fluxes that makes of capital the new filled social body, whereas commercial and financial capitalism in their primitive forms installed itself only in the pores of the old *socius* whose anterior mode of production it did not change.

192Even before the capitalist production machine is set up, the commodity and money operate a decoding of flux by abstraction. But not in the same manner. First, simple exchange inscribes commercial products as the particular quanta of a unit of abstract labor. It is abstract labor, posed in the exchange relation, that forms the disjunctive synthesis of the apparent movement of the commodity, since it divides itself into the qualified labors to which this or that determinate quantum corresponds. But it is only when a "general equivalent" appears as money that one accedes to the reign of the *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, such that it still appears only as a relation 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 prior characters and modes of inscription of a *socius* considered under its specific mode of production, which does not know and does not recognize abstract labor. As Marx says, the latter is indeed the simplest and most ancient relation of productive activity, but appears as such and becomes practically true only in the modern capitalist machine.{179} That is why, beforehand, commercial monetary inscription does not have a body of its own, and inserts itself only in the intervals of the preexisting social body. The merchant does not cease to play upon maintained territorialities in order to buy where it is cheap and sell where it is dear. Before the capitalist machine, mercantile or financial capital is only in a relation of alliance with non-capitalist production, it enters into that new-alliance which characterizes the precapitalist States (whence the alliance of the merchant and banking bourgeoisie with feudalism). In short, the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases to be a capital of alliance and becomes filiative. Capital becomes filiative capital when money engenders money, or value a surplus-value, "progressive value, money always budding and growing, and as such capital… Value all at once presents itself as a substance moving of itself, for which commodity and money are mere forms. It distinguishes within itself its primitive value and its surplus-value, in the same way that God distinguishes within his person the father and the son, and both are one and of the same age, for it is only by the surplus-value of ten pounds that the first hundred pounds advanced become capital."{180} It is only under these conditions that capital becomes the filled body, the new *socius* or the quasi-cause which appropriates all the productive forces. We are no longer in the domain of the quantum or of the *quantitas*, but in that of the differential relation 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 being what it is, but it no longer appears in simple quantity as a variable relation between independent terms; it is abstraction that has taken upon itself independence, the quality of the terms, and the quantity of the relations. The abstract itself poses the more complex relation in which it will develop "as" something concrete. It is the differential relation *Dy/Dx*, where *Dy* derives from labor power 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 the value of its constituent parts"). It is from the fluxion of the decoded flux, from their conjunction, that the filiative form of capital x + dx flows. What the differential relation expresses is the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of the transformation of surplus-value of code into surplus-value of flux. That a mathematical appearance here replaces the old codes simply means that one is witnessing a bankruptcy of the subsisting codes and territorialities to the benefit of a machine of another species, functioning altogether differently. 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, vampire-like, animates itself only by sucking living labor, and its life is all the more sprightly the more it pumps." Industrial capital thus presents a new-new filiation, constitutive of the capitalist machine, with respect to which mercantile capital and financial capital will now take the form of a new-new alliance by assuming specific functions.

193The famous problem of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, that is, of surplus-value in relation to total capital, can only be understood within the entire field of immanence of capitalism, and within the conditions under which a surplus-value of code is transformed into a surplus-value of flux. First it appears (in accord with Balibar's remarks) that this tendency toward the falling rate of profit has no end, but reproduces itself by reproducing the factors that counteract it. But why does it have no end? Doubtless for the same reasons that make capitalists and their economists laugh when they observe that surplus-value is not mathematically determinable. Yet they have no great cause to rejoice. They ought rather to conclude what they are bent on hiding: namely, that it is not the same money that enters the wage-earner's pocket and that is inscribed in a firm's balance sheet. In one case, impotent monetary signs of exchange-value, a flux of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use-values, a bi-univocal relation between money and an imposed range of products ("what I have a right to, what comes to me, what is therefore mine…"); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, flux of financing, a system of differential coefficients of production that bears witness 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 in which flux of production are appropriated to the disjunctions of capital. The importance has been shown, in the capitalist system, of the 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.{181} That the bank participates in both, or stands at the hinge of both, 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 the simple circulation in which money is developed as a means of payment (the bill of exchange with a determined maturity, which constitutes a monetary form of finite debt). Conversely, bank credit operates a demonetization or dematerialization of money, and rests on the circulation of drafts instead of the circulation of money, traverses a particular circuit in which it takes on and then loses its value as an instrument of exchange, and in which the conditions of the flux imply those of the reflux, giving 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 through a mode of centralization that comprises a backing for credit, a unique 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 capitalist field of immanence, the apparent objective movement in which the inferior and subordinate form is no less necessary than the other (it is necessary that money play on both tables), and in which no integration of the dominated classes could be effected without the shadow of this non-applied principle of convertibility, which suffices nevertheless to ensure that the Desire of the most disadvantaged creature invests with all its forces, independently of any economic knowledge or misrecognition, the capitalist social field as a whole. Flux, who does not desire flux, and relations between flux, and cuts of flux?—which capitalism has known how to make flow and to 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 filiative 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 together, and the investment of desire.{182} One of Keynes's contributions was to reintroduce desire into the problem of money; it is this that must be submitted to the requirements of Marxist analysis. That is why it is unfortunate that Marxist economists too often confine themselves to considerations on the mode of production, and on the theory of money as general equivalent 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 meaning of a return to Marx, to the Marxist theory of money).

194Let us return to the duality of money, to the two tableaus, to the two inscriptions, the one in the wage-earner's account, the other in the firm's balance sheet. To measure the two orders of magnitude with the same analytic unit is a pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as though one were measuring inter-galactic or intra-atomic distances with meters and centimeters. There is no common measure between the value of firms and that of the labor power of wage-earners. That is why the tendential fall has no term. A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of production flux from the standpoint of full output, but it is not so if it is a matter of the production flux and the labor flux on which surplus-value depends. Then the difference does not cancel itself out in the relation that constitutes it as difference of nature, the "tendency" has no term, it has no exterior limit that it could attain or even approach. The tendency has only an internal limit, and never ceases to surpass it, but by displacing it, that is, by reconstituting it, by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by displacement: thus the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this always displaced cut of cut, that is, in this unity of the schiz and the flux. It is already under this aspect that the field of social immanence, such as it discovers itself beneath the withdrawal and transformation of the Urstaat, never ceases to enlarge itself, and takes on a quite particular consistency, which shows the way in which capitalism on its own account has been able to interpret the general principle according to which things only function well on the condition of breaking down, crisis as "a means immanent to the capitalist mode of production." If capitalism is the exterior limit of every society, it is because on its own account it has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit which is capital itself, and which it does not encounter, but rather reproduces by always displacing it.{183} Jean-Joseph Goux analyzes exactly the mathematical phenomenon of the curve without a tangent, and the sense it is liable to take in economics no less than in linguistics: "If the movement tends toward no limit, if the quotient of differentials is not calculable, the present no longer has any sense… The quotient of differentials does not resolve itself, the differences no longer cancel out in their relation. No limit is opposed to the breakage, to the breakage of this breakage. The tendency finds no term, the mobile never reaches 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 breakage."{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 emplacement.

195Now this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the deterritorialization of capitalism. As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a world apart, but an essential piece of the worldwide capitalist machine. It must further be added that the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and shantytowns as 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 a tendency toward the fall or the equalization of the rate of profit is exerted at least partially, carrying the economy toward the most progressive and most automated sectors, a veritable "development of underdevelopment" at the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus-value as a growing 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: on the contrary, they come from modern industries and plantations, generators of high surplus-value, to the point that it is not the developed countries that furnish capital to the underdeveloped countries, but indeed the contrary. So true is it that primitive accumulation is not produced once at the dawn of capitalism, but is permanent and never ceases to reproduce itself. Capitalism exports filiative capital. At the same time that capitalist deterritorialization goes from the center to the periphery, the decoding of fluxes at the periphery is carried out by a "disarticulation" which ensures the ruin of the traditional sectors, the development of extraverted economic circuits, a specific hypertrophy of the tertiary, an extreme inequality in the distribution of productivities and incomes.{185} It is each passage of flux that is a deterritorialization, each displaced limit, a decoding. Capitalism schizophrenizes more and more at the periphery. It nonetheless remains, one will say, that, at the center, the tendential fall keeps its restricted sense, that is, the relative diminution of surplus-value in relation to total capital, ensured by the development of productivity, of automation, of constant capital.

196This problem has been re-posed recently 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 human surplus-value can be maintained as the basis of capitalist production, while at the same time acknowledging that machines too "work" or produce value, that they have always worked, and work more and more in relation to man, who thus ceases to be a constitutive part of the production process to become adjacent to that 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, lowering of the prices of the elements of constant capital, etc.), since these factors on the contrary depend on it. It seems to us, with the same indispensable incompetence, that these problems can only be envisaged under the conditions of the transformation of surplus-value of code into surplus-value of flux. For, so long as we defined precapitalist régimes by surplus-value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted it into surplus-value of flux, we presented things in a summary manner, we acted there too as if the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that would have lost all code value. Now it is not so. On the one hand, codes subsist, even as archaism, but which take on a perfectly current function adapted to the situation in personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker…). But, on the other hand and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flux of a particular type: flux of code at once interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even of a science. It is these flux of code that are themselves also encased, coded or overcoded in precapitalist societies in such a way that they never take on independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer…). But the generalized decoding of flux in capitalism has liberated, deterritorialized, decoded the flux of code on the same basis as the 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 a 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 on the contrary capitalism that makes machines, and that does not cease to introduce new cuts by which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production.

197Several correctives must still be introduced in this regard. For these cuts take time and extend over a great breadth. Never does the diachronic capitalist machine let itself be revolutionized by one or several synchronous technical machines, never does it confer upon its scientists and technicians an independence unknown to previous régimes. Doubtless it may let scientists, mathematicians for example, "schizophrenize" in their corner, and let pass fluxes of socially decoded code that these scientists organize in axiomatics of so-called fundamental research. But the real axiomatic is not there (scientists are left alone up to a certain point, they are let do their own axiomatic; but the moment of serious matters comes: for example indeterminist physics, with its corpuscular fluxes, must be reconciled with "determinism"). The real axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which is substituted for the old codings, and which organizes all the decoded fluxes, including the fluxes of scientific and technical code, to the profit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. That 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 a great mistrust toward machines and the sciences. An innovation is adopted only on the basis of the rate of profit that its investment yields through the lowering of production costs; otherwise, the capitalist maintains the existing equipment, even if it means investing in parallel in another domain.{187} Human surplus-value therefore retains a decisive importance, even at the center and in highly industrialized sectors. What determines the lowering of costs and the raising of the rate of profit by machinic surplus-value is not 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. Which implies diachronic encounters and intersections, as is seen from the [eighteenth] century for example, between the steam engine and textile machines or the 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 their exploitation on a large scale. Here again, the capital of alliance exerts a strong selective pressure on machinic innovations within industrial capital. In short, where fluxes are decoded, the particular fluxes of code that have taken a technological and scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic far more severe than all scientific axiomatics, but far more severe also than all the old codes or overcodings that have disappeared: the axiomatic of the capitalist world market. In short, the fluxes of code "liberated" in science and technique by the capitalist régime engender a machinic surplus-value that does not depend directly on science and technique themselves, but on capital, and which comes to be added to human surplus-value, correcting its relative decline, both together constituting the whole of the surplus-value of flux that characterizes the system. Knowledge, information, and qualified training are no less parts of capital ("knowledge capital") than the most elementary labor of the worker. And just as, on the side of human surplus-value insofar as it resulted from decoded fluxes, we found a fundamental incommensurability or asymmetry (no assignable exterior limit) between manual labor and capital, or else between two forms of money, so here, on the side of machinic surplus-value resulting from scientific and technical fluxes of code, we find no commensurability nor exterior limit between scientific or technical labor, even highly remunerated, and the profit of capital that is inscribed in another writing. The flux of knowledge and the flux of labor are in this regard found in the same situation determined by capitalist decoding or deterritorialization.

198But, if it is true that innovation is received only insofar as it entails a rise in profit through a lowering of production costs, and that there exists a volume of production sufficiently high to justify it, the corollary that follows is that investment in innovation never suffices to realize or to absorb the surplus-value of flux produced on the one side as on the other.{188} Marx clearly showed the importance of the problem: the ever-widening circle of capitalism closes, reproducing on an ever larger scale its immanent limits, only if surplus-value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed, realized.{189} If the capitalist does not define himself by enjoyment, it is not only because his goal is the "producing for producing" that generates surplus-value, but the realization of this surplus-value: an unrealized surplus-value of flux is as if unproduced, and is incarnated in unemployment and stagnation. The principal modes of absorption outside of consumption and investment are easily enumerated: advertising, civil government, militarism, and imperialism. The role of the State in this regard, in the capitalist axiomatic, appears all the more clearly in that what it absorbs is not subtracted from the surplus-value of enterprises, but is added to it, by bringing the capitalist economy closer to its full yield within given limits, and by in turn enlarging these limits, especially in an order of military expenditure that in no way competes with private enterprise — on the contrary (only war succeeded at what the New Deal had failed to do). The role of a politico-military-economic complex is all the more important in that it guarantees the extraction of human surplus-value at the periphery and in the appropriated zones of the center, but in that it itself engenders an enormous machinic surplus-value by mobilizing the resources of capital of knowledge and information, and in that it finally absorbs the greater part of the surplus-value produced. The State, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of anti-production, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning it. We find here a new determination of the properly capitalist field of immanence: not only the play of relations and differential coefficients of decoded fluxes, not only the nature of the sequences that capitalism reproduces on 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, that limits or brakes it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine, and clings closely to it in order to regulate its productivity and to realize its surplus-value (whence, for example, the difference between the despotic bureaucracy and the capitalist bureaucracy). The effusion of the apparatus of anti-production characterizes the entire capitalist system; the capitalist effusion is that of anti-production into production at every level of the process. On the one hand, it alone is capable of realizing the supreme goal of capitalism, which is to produce lack in large aggregates, to introduce lack where there is always too much, by the absorption that 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 also operate their absorption or realization, and which ensure the integration of groups and individuals into the system. Not only lack at the heart of the too-much, but stupidity within knowledge and science: one will see in particular how it is at the level of the State and of the army that the most progressive sectors of scientific or technological knowledge and the most debile archaisms, most heavily charged with current functions, are conjugated.

199The double portrait André Gorz draws of the "scientific and technical worker" takes on its full sense: master of a flux of knowledge, of information and of training, but so well absorbed into capital that there coincides with it the reflux of an organized, axiomatized stupidity, such that, in the evening, returning home, he rediscovers his little machines of desire by tinkering on a television set, oh despair.{190} Certainly, the scientist as such has no revolutionary power, he is the first integrated agent of integration, refuge of bad conscience, forced destroyer of his own creativity. Take the even more striking example of an American-style "career," with abrupt mutations, such as we imagine it: Gregory Bateson begins by fleeing the civilized world by becoming an ethnologist, following the primitive codes and the savage fluxes; then he turns toward fluxes that are more and more decoded, those of schizophrenia, from which he draws an interesting psychiatric theory; then still in search of a beyond, of another wall to pierce, he turns toward dolphins, the language of dolphins, fluxes 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 the absorption of surplus-value? In relation to the capitalist State, the socialist States are children (and even children who taught their father something, about the axiomatizing role of the State). But the socialist States have more difficulty plugging the unexpected leaks of flux, except by direct violence. What on the contrary is called the recuperative power of the capitalist system is that its axiomatic is by nature not more supple, 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 various 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 foodstuffs to the troops fighting against the Vietnamese people, the manufacturers of the complex instruments necessary for 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 the three segments of ever-expanded capitalist reproduction are looped together, which also define the three aspects of its immanence: 1°) the one that extracts human surplus-value from the differential relation between decoded fluxes of labor and of production, and that displaces itself from the center to the periphery, while still maintaining vast residual zones at the center; 2°) the one that extracts machinic surplus-value, from an axiomatic of the fluxes of scientific and technical code, at the "cutting-edge" points of the center; 3°) the one that absorbs or realizes these two forms of surplus-value of flux, by guaranteeing the emission of both, and by perpetually injecting anti-production into the productive apparatus. One schizophrenizes at the periphery, but no less at the center and in the middle.

200The definition of surplus-value must be reworked as a function of the machinic surplus-value of constant capital, which is distinguished from the human surplus-value of variable capital, and as a function of the non-measurable character of this whole of surplus-value of flux. 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 that are nonetheless immanent to one another, by the disparity between two aspects of money which express them, and by the absence of an exterior limit to their relation, the one measuring true economic puissance, the other measuring a purchasing power determined as "income." The first is the immense deterritorialized flux that constitutes the filled body of capital. An economist like Bernard Schmitt finds strange lyrical words to characterize this flux of infinite debt: instantaneous creative flux, which the 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 filled body a negative money (debt inscribed on the liabilities of the banks) and projects at the other extremity a positive money (credit of the productive economy upon the banks), "flux with mutant power" that 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 relation it takes on with goods as soon as it acquires a purchasing power through its distribution to workers or factors of production, through its allocation into incomes, and that it loses as soon as these are converted into real goods (then everything begins again with a new production which will first be born under the first aspect…). Now the incommensurability of the two aspects, of the flux and the reflux, shows that, however much nominal wages may encompass the totality of national income, the wage-earners let escape a great quantity of incomes captured by enterprises, which in turn form by conjunction an influx, a flux this time of continued gross profit, constituting "in a single jet" an undivided quantity flowing on the filled body, whatever the diversity of its allocations (interests, dividends, executive salaries, purchase of production goods, etc.).{193} The incompetent observer has the impression that this whole economic schema, this whole story is profoundly schizo. One sees clearly the aim of the theory, which nonetheless defends itself against any moral reference. Who is robbed? is the serious underlying question, which echoes Clavel's ironic question "Who is alienated?". Now no one is robbed nor can be robbed (just as Clavel said that one no longer knows 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 the distribution into wages that creates purchasing power, instead of presupposing it. Who could rob? Surely not the industrial capitalist as representative of the influx of profit, since "profits flow not in the reflux, but alongside it, in deviation from and not in sanction of the creative flux of incomes." So much suppleness 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 the wage-earners, the working class and the unions, well of course, and henceforth profit will flow alongside wages, both side by side, reflux and influx. One will even find an axiom for the language of dolphins. Marx often alluded to the golden age of the capitalist when he did not stall 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 he comes to declare: no, no one is robbed. For everything then rests on the disparity between two sorts of fluxes, as in an unfathomable abyss where profit and surplus-value are engendered: the flux of economic puissance of merchant capital and the flux derisively named "purchasing power," truly impuissanced 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.

201In a certain manner, capitalist economists are not wrong to present the economy as perpetually "to be monetarized," as though one always had to insufflate money into it from without according to a supply and demand. For it is indeed thus that the whole system holds together and works, and perpetually fills its own immanence. It is indeed thus that it is the global object of an investment of desire. Desire of the wage-earner, desire of the capitalist, everything beats with one and the same desire founded on the differential relation of flux without assignable exterior limit, and in which capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever-enlarged, ever more encompassing scale. 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 desire exceeds so-called objective interest, when it is a matter of flux to be made to flow and to cut. No doubt Marxists recall that the formation of money as a specific relation within capitalism depends on the mode of production that makes the economy a monetary economy. The fact 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 mercantile or monetary form that commands it, and whose flux and relations 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 relations with money, it which registers while taking care not to recognize it a whole system of economic-monetary dependencies at the heart of the desire of each subject it treats, and which constitutes on its own account a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus-value. But what revolutionary path, is there one? — Withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises the third-world countries to do, in a curious renewal of the fascist "economic solution"? Or else go in the opposite direction? That is to say, go still further in the movement of the market, of decoding and of deterritorialization? For perhaps flux are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, 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 as yet seen nothing.

SECTION 10

202Writing has never been the thing of capitalism. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or of the father: it happened long ago, although the event takes a long time to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of vanished signs with which we still write. The reason is simple: writing implies a use of language in general according to which graphism aligns itself with the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a fictive voice from on high functioning as signifier. The arbitrariness of the designated, the subordination of the signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally its consequent decomposition into minimal elements in a field of immanence laid bare by the withdrawal of the despot — all 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? Certainly, capitalism has made and continues to make great use of writing; not only does writing accord 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 them. Nevertheless, writing typically plays the role of an archaism in capitalism, Gutenberg-printing being then the element that gives the archaism a current function. But the capitalist use of language is by right of another nature, and is realized 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 fluxes, instead of still referring under a direct or indirect form to despotic overcoding. Such, it seems to us, is the sense of McLuhan's analyses: to have shown what a language of decoded fluxes was, by opposition to a signifier that garrotes and overcodes the fluxes. First, everything is good for non-signifying language: no phonic, graphic, gestural flux, etc., is privileged in this language which 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.{194} The deterritorialized fluxes of content and expression are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal presupposition, which constitutes figures as the ultimate units of the one and the other. These figures are in no way of the signifier, nor even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are non-signs, or rather non-signifying signs, sign-points with several dimensions, cuts of fluxes, schizzes that form images by their union in an ensemble, but that retain no identity from one ensemble to another. Figures, that is to say schizzes or flux-cuts, are therefore not at all "figurative"; they become so only in a particular constellation that undoes itself for the benefit 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 them, as does that well-named discipline fluidics operating by jets of gas; the computer is a machine of instantaneous and generalized decoding. Michel Serres in this sense defines the correlation of the cut and the flux in the signs of the new technical machines of language, where production is closely determined by information: "Take a road interchange… It is a quasi-point that analyzes, by multiple coverings, along a dimension normal to the space of the network, the lines of flux of which it is the receiver. 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, although it be the same… A topological knot where everything is connected without confusion, where everything flows together and is distributed… For a knot is a point if one wishes, but with several dimensions," which contains and passes on the fluxes far from annulling them.{195} This gridding of production by information manifests once more that the productive essence of capitalism functions or "speaks" only in the language of the signs imposed on it by mercantile capital or the axiomatic of the market.

203There are great differences between such a linguistics of flux and the linguistics of the signifier. Saussurian linguistics, for example, does indeed discover a field of immanence constituted by "value," that is, by the system of relations between ultimate elements of the signifier; but, beyond the fact that this field of immanence still presupposes the transcendence of the signifier, which discovers it if only by its withdrawal, the elements that populate this field have for their criterion a minimal identity that they owe to their relations of opposition, and that they preserve through variations of every type which affect them. The elements of the signifier as distinctive units are regulated by "coded gaps" which the signifier in turn overcodes. From this various consequences follow, but always convergent ones: 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 phonic substance to which writing itself accords a secret privilege. We believe that, from all these points of view and despite certain appearances, Hjelmslev's linguistics is profoundly opposed to the Saussurian and post-Saussurian enterprise. Because it abandons every privileged reference. Because it describes a pure field of algebraic immanence which no longer lets itself be surveyed by any transcendent instance, even one in withdrawal. Because it strings together in this field its fluxes of form and substance, of content and expression. Because it substitutes for the relation of subordination signifier-signified the relation of reciprocal presupposition expression-content. Because the double articulation no longer takes place between two hierarchized levels of language, but between two convertible deterritorialized planes, constituted by the relation between the form of content and the form of expression. Because in this relation one attains to figures that are no longer effects of the signifier, but schizzes, sign-points or cuts of flux that pierce 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 is therein secondary with respect to the axiomatic of fluxes and figures. Because the model of money, in the sign-point or the cut-figure stripped of identity, having now only a floating identity, tends to replace the model of the game. In short, Hjelmslev's very particular situation within linguistics, and the reactions he provokes, seem to us to be explained by this: that he tends toward a purely immanent theory of language, which breaks the double game of the voice-graphism domination, which makes form and substance, content and expression flow according to fluxes of desire, and cuts these fluxes according to sign-points or schiz-figures.{196} 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 also say, ambiguous homage, that it is the only one adapted at once to the nature of capitalist and schizophrenic fluxes: until now the only modern (and not archaic) theory of language.

204The extreme importance of J. F. Lyotard's recent book lies in its being the first generalized critique of the signifier. In its most general proposition, in fact, he shows that the signifier finds itself surpassed both outwardly by figurative images and, inwardly, by the pure figures that compose them, or better still by "the figural" which comes to overturn the coded gaps of the signifier, to introduce itself between them, to work beneath the identity conditions of their elements. In language and writing itself, sometimes letters as cuts, exploded partial objects, sometimes words as undivided flux, indecomposable blocks or filled bodies of tonic value, constitute asignifying signs that surrender themselves to the order of desire, breaths and cries. (In particular, formal researches into handwritten or printed writing change in meaning according to 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, to institute cuts that overflow or break the identity conditions of the sign, that make so many books flow and explode within "the book," entering into multiple configurations to which Mallarmé's typographic exercises already bear witness — always to pass beneath the signifier, to file down the wall: which shows once again that the death of writing is infinite, so long as it rises and comes from within.) Likewise, in the plastic arts, the 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, those "in-between-worlds that are perhaps visible only to children, madmen, and primitives." Or again in the dream, Lyotard shows in very beautiful pages that what works is not the signified, but a figural underneath, 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 or on its regulated elements. Everywhere therefore Lyotard reverses the order of signifier and 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 well as signifieds, treating words as things, fabricating new unities, making with non-figurative figures configurations of images that make and unmake themselves. And these constellations are like flux that refer to the cut of points, just as the latter refer to the fluxion of what they make flow or seep: the only unity without identity is that of the schiz-flux or the cut-flux. The element of the pure figural, the "matrix-figure," Lyotard rightly names desire, which leads us to the gates of schizophrenia as process.{197} But whence then the reader's impression that Lyotard never ceases to arrest the process, and to fold the schizzes back onto the shores he has just left, coded or overcoded territories, spaces and structures, where they do no more than bring "transgressions," disturbances and deformations that are despite everything secondary, instead of forming and carrying further the machines of desire which oppose themselves to structures, the intensities which oppose themselves to spaces? It is because, 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 the whole signifier, and discovers the matrix of the figure in phantasy, the simple phantasy that comes to occult desiring production, all of desire as effective production. But at least for an instant the mortgage of the signifier has been lifted: that enormous despotic archaism which makes so many of us groan and bend, and which others make use of to install a new terrorism, detonating Lacan's imperial discourse into a university discourse of pure scientificity, that "scientificity" just good enough to re-feed our neuroses, to garrote the process once more, to overcode Oedipus by castration, chaining us to the present-day structural functions of a vanished archaic despot. For, assuredly, neither capitalism, nor revolution, nor schizophrenia pass through the paths of the signifier, even and especially in their extreme violences.

205Civilization defines itself by the decoding and deterritorialization of fluxes in capitalist production. All procedures are good for ensuring this universal decoding: the privatization that bears on goods, on 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 unlimitation of the relation between capital and labor power, and also between financing fluxes and revenue fluxes or means of payment; the scientific and technical form taken by the fluxes of code themselves; the formation of floating configurations starting from lines and points without discernible 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 fluxes. Our societies display a keen taste for all the codes, foreign or exotic codes, but it is a destructive and mortuary taste. If decoding doubtless means understanding a code and translating it, it means 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 fluxes and schizophrenic fluxes, under the general theme of a decoding of the fluxes of desire. To be sure, their affinity is great: everywhere capitalism sets schiz-fluxes flowing that animate "our" arts and "our" sciences, just as they congeal in the production of "our own" sick, the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relation of schizophrenia to capitalism far exceeded the problems of way of life, of environment, of ideology, etc., and had to be posed at the deepest level of one and the same economy, of one and the same process of production. Our society produces schizos like Dop shampoo or Renault cars, with the sole difference that they are not saleable. But precisely, how is it to be explained that capitalist production never ceases to arrest the schizophrenic process, to transform its subject into a clinical entity that is locked away, as if it saw in this process the image of its own death come from within? Why does it make of the schizophrenic a sick person, not only in word, but in reality? Why does it lock up its mad rather than seeing in them its own heroes, its own accomplishment? And there where it can no longer recognize the figure of a simple illness, why does it watch over its artists and even its scientists with such care, as if they ran the risk of making dangerous fluxes 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 in turn form a gigantic repression-repression machine with regard to that which nevertheless constitutes its own reality, the decoded fluxes? It is because, as we have seen, capitalism is indeed the limit of every society, insofar as it operates the decoding of the fluxes that the other social formations coded and overcoded. However, it is the relative limit or cuts of every society, because it substitutes for codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic which maintains the energy of the fluxes 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 the fluxes flowing in the free state on a desocialized body without organs. One can therefore say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the term of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism functions only on the condition that it inhibit this tendency, or push back and displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits which it never ceases to reproduce on an enlarged scale. What it decodes with one hand, it axiomatizes with the other. Such is the manner in which one must reinterpret the Marxist law of the counteracted tendency. So much so that schizophrenia permeates the entire capitalist field from one end to the other. But for it the matter is to bind the charges and energies of schizophrenia in a worldwide axiomatic that always opposes new interior limits to the revolutionary power of the decoded fluxes. And it is impossible in such a régime to distinguish, if only in two moments, the decoding and the axiomatization that comes to replace the vanished codes. It is at the same time that the fluxes are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism. Schizophrenia is therefore not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death. The monetary fluxes are perfectly schizophrenic realities, but ones that exist and function only in the immanent axiomatic that wards off and pushes back this reality. The language of a banker, of a general, of an industrialist, of a middle or upper executive, of a minister, is a perfectly schizophrenic language, but one that functions only statistically in the flattening axiomatic of binding that puts it in the service of the capitalist order.{198} (At the higher level of linguistics as science, Hjelmslev can operate a vast decoding of languages only by setting in motion from the start an axiomatic machine founded on the supposedly finite number of the figures considered.) What then becomes of the "truly" schizophrenic language, and of the "truly" decoded, unbound fluxes that manage to pass the wall or the absolute limit? The capitalist axiomatic is so rich that one more axiom is added, for the books of a great writer whose accountable characteristics of vocabulary and style can always be studied by electronic machine, or for the discourse of the mad whom one can always listen to within the framework of a hospital, administrative, and psychiatric axiomatic. In short, the notion of schiz-flux or flux-cut has appeared to us to define capitalism as well as schizophrenia. But it is not at all in the same manner, and these are not at all the same things, depending on whether the decodings are or are not taken back up in an axiomatic, depending on whether one remains with the great aggregates functioning statistically or one crosses the barrier which separates them from the unbound molecular positions, depending on whether the fluxes of desire reach this absolute limit or are content to displace a relative immanent limit which reconstitutes itself further on, depending on whether the processes of deterritorialization are or are not doubled by re-territorializations that control them, depending on whether money burns or blazes.

206Why not say simply that capitalism replaces one code with another, that it effects a new type of coding? For two reasons, one of which represents a kind of moral impossibility, the other a logical impossibility. In precapitalist formations one encounters every cruelty and terror, fragments of the signifying chain are struck with secrecy, secret societies or initiation groups — but there is never anything unavowable, properly speaking. It is with the thing, capitalism, that the unavowable begins: there is not one economic or financial operation which, supposed translated into terms of code, would not burst forth in its unavowable character, 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 consumption goods, prestige goods, and women and children); the proper object of the code is therefore to establish necessarily indirect relations between these qualified and, as such, incommensurable flux. Such relations indeed imply quantitative extractions on flux of different kinds, but these quantities do not enter into equivalences that would presuppose "something" unlimited, they form only composites themselves qualitative, essentially mobile and limited, whose difference between elements compensates the disequilibrium (thus the relation of prestige and consumption in the finite debt-block). All these characters of the code-relation — indirect, qualitative and limited — show sufficiently 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 as 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 feudalism for example, because surplus labor as form of surplus-value constitutes a flux qualitatively and temporally distinct from that of labor, and must therefore enter into a composite itself qualitative implicating non-economic factors.{199} Or how the 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 filled body of the earth and are attributed to it. In short, there is code only where a filled body as instance of anti-production folds back upon the economy that it appropriates. This is why the sign of desire, as economic sign that consists in making the flux flow and cutting them, is doubled by a sign of power necessarily extra-economic, though it has its causes and its effects in the economy (for example, the sign of alliance in relation to the power of the creditor). Or, what amounts to the same, surplus-value is here determined as surplus-value of code. The code-relation 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 therefore implies a system of collective appreciation or evaluation, an ensemble of organs of perception, or better of belief, as condition of existence and survival of the society in question: thus the collective investment of organs, which makes it so that men are directly coded, and the appreciative eye, such as we have analyzed it in the primitive system. One will note that these general traits that characterize a code are found again precisely in what is today called the 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, to the extent that it brings into play couplings between qualified flux, exclusively indirect interactions, qualitative composites essentially limited, organs of perception, and extra-chemical factors that select and appropriate the cellular connections.

207So many reasons for defining capitalism by a social axiomatic, which is opposed in every respect to codes. First, money as general equivalent represents an abstract quantity indifferent to the qualified nature of fluxes. But the equivalence itself refers to the position of an unlimited: in the formula M-C-M, "the circulation of money as capital possesses its end in itself, for it is only by this ever-renewed movement that value continues to valorize 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, have shown how much the introduction of money as equivalent, which allows one to begin with money and end with money, therefore never to finish, suffices to disturb the circuits of qualified fluxes, to decompose 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 fluxes, it is a direct relation between decoded fluxes whose respective quality does not preexist it. The quality of the fluxes results only from their conjunction as decoded fluxes; they would remain purely virtual outside this conjunction; this conjunction is just as much the disjunction of the abstract quantity through which it becomes something concrete. *Dx* and *dy* are nothing independently of their relation, which determines the one as pure quality of the flux of labor, the other as pure quality of the flux of capital. It is therefore the inverse procedure to that of a code, and which expresses the capitalist transformation of surplus-value of code into surplus-value of flux. Hence the fundamental change in the régime of power. For, if one of the fluxes 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 flux of financing and flux of means of payment or of income; such an extension signaled only that there is no industrial essence of capital that does not function as merchant, financial, and commercial capital, and in which money does not take on other functions than its form as equivalent. But thus the signs of power cease entirely to be what they were from the point of view of a code: they become directly economic coefficients, instead of doubling the economic signs of desire and expressing on their account non-economic factors determined to be dominant. That the flux of financing is at a quite other 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 any need for a code to secure surplus-labor when the latter finds itself confounded qualitatively and temporally with labor itself in one and the same simple magnitude (condition of surplus-value of flux).

208Capital as *socius* or filled body therefore distinguishes itself from any other, in that it is valid by itself as a directly economic instance, and falls back upon production without bringing in extra-economic factors that would inscribe themselves in a code. With capitalism the filled body becomes truly naked, like the worker himself, hooked onto this filled body. It is in this sense that the apparatus of anti-production ceases to be transcendent, penetrates all of production and becomes coextensive with it. In the third place, these developed conditions of the destruction of all code in the becoming-concrete make the absence of limit take on a new meaning. It no longer designates simply the unlimited abstract quantity, but the effective absence of limit or of term for the differential relation in which the abstract becomes something concrete. Of capitalism we say at once that it has no exterior limit, and that it has one: it has one which is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of fluxes, but it functions only by repulsing and conjuring away this limit. And likewise it has interior 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 the power of capitalism is precisely 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 never ceases to fill this field. But this deterritorialized field finds itself determined by an axiomatic, contrary to the territorial field determined by the primitive codes. The differential relations as they are filled by surplus-value, the absence of exterior 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 capitalism's immanent axiomatic. And everywhere monetarization comes to fill the gulf of capitalist immanence, introducing into it, as Schmitt says, "a deformation, a convulsion, an explosion, in short a movement of extreme violence." From this finally follows a fourth character, which opposes the axiomatic to the codes. It is that the axiomatic has no need to write in full flesh, to mark bodies and organs, nor to fabricate a memory for men. Contrary to the 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 any need for belief, and it is only with the tip of his lips that the capitalist laments that today no one believes in anything anymore. "For this is how you speak: we are whole, real, without belief or 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 clever or the competent know how to decode, to understand from a half-word. Moreover, despite the abundance of identity cards, of files and means of control, capitalism has no need even to write in books to supply for the vanished marks of bodies. These are only survivals, archaisms with an actual function. The person has really become "private," insofar as it derives from abstract quantities and becomes concrete in the becoming-concrete of these same quantities. It is these that are marked, no longer the persons themselves: your capital or your labor power, the rest does not matter, we will always find you again within the enlarged limits of the system, even if an axiom must be made just for you. There is no longer any need to invest the organs collectively, they are sufficiently filled by the floating images that capitalism does not cease to produce. Following a remark by Henri Lefebvre, these images proceed less to a publication of the private than to a privatization of the public: the entire world unfolds within the family, without one's having to leave one's TV. Which gives private persons, as we shall see, a very particular role in the system: a role of application, no longer of implication in a code. The hour of Oedipus approaches.

209If capitalism therefore proceeds by an axiomatic, and not by code, one must not believe that it replaces the *socius*, the social machine, with an ensemble of technical machines. The difference in nature between the two types of machines subsists, although both are machines properly speaking, without metaphor. The originality of capitalism is rather that the social machine has for its parts the technical machines as constant capital that hooks itself onto the filled body of the *socius*, and no longer men, who have 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 not at all by itself a simple technical machine, even an automatic or cybernetic one. Bourbaki says it well of scientific axiomatics: 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 assisted by "the powerful levers" of technique. How much truer this is of the social axiomatic: the manner in which it fills its own immanence, in which it pushes back 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 up — all of this implies social organs of decision, of management, of reaction, of inscription, a technocracy and a bureaucracy that are not reducible to the functioning of technical machines. In short, the conjunction of decoded flux, their differential relations and their multiple schizzes or fractures, demand a whole regulation whose principal organ is the State. The capitalist State is the regulator of decoded flux as such, insofar as they are caught in the axiomatic of capital. In this sense it indeed accomplishes the becoming-concrete that 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 the decoded and axiomatized flux. It accomplishes it so well that, in another sense, it alone represents a true rupture, a cut with it, contrary to the other forms that had established themselves on the ruins of the *Urstaat*. For the *Urstaat* defined itself by overcoding; and its derivatives, from the ancient city to the monarchic State, already found themselves in the presence of decoded flux or flux in the process of decoding themselves, which doubtless rendered the State more and more immanent and subordinated to the effective field of forces; but, precisely because the circumstances were not given for these flux to enter into conjunction, the State could content itself with saving fragments of overcoding and codes, with inventing others, even preventing with all its forces the conjunction from producing itself (and for the rest resuscitating 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 the becoming-immanent to the highest point, it is to the extent that it ratifies the generalized bankruptcy of codes and overcodings, to the extent that it evolves entirely within this new axiomatic of conjunction of a nature unknown until then. Once again, this axiomatic, it does not invent it, since it is conflated with capital itself. On the contrary, it is born from it, it results from it, it only ensures the regulation of it, it regulates or even organizes its misfirings as conditions of functioning, it monitors or directs its progress of saturation and the corresponding enlargements of limit. Never has a State so lost power, in order to put itself with so much force at the service of the sign of economic power. And this role, the capitalist State has had it very early on, whatever one says, from the beginning, from its gestation under still half-feudal or monarchic forms: from the point of view of the flux of "free" workers, control of the labor force and of wages; from the point of view of the flux of industrial and commercial production, granting of monopolies, favorable conditions for accumulation, struggle against overproduction. There has never been a liberal capitalism: the action against monopolies refers first to a moment when commercial and financial capital still makes alliance with the old system of production, and when nascent industrial capitalism can ensure production and the market only by obtaining the abolition of these privileges. That there is in this no struggle against the very principle of a State control, on condition that it be the suitable State, is seen clearly in mercantilism, insofar as it expresses the new commercial functions of a capital that has secured direct interests in production. As a general rule, State controls and regulations only tend to disappear or fade in cases of abundance of labor force and unusual expansion of markets.{201} That is to say, when capitalism functions with a very small number of axioms within sufficiently broad relative limits. This situation has long since ceased, 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 on an ever-enlarged scale (axiom of displacement from the center to the periphery). Capitalism could digest the Russian revolution only by ceaselessly adding new axioms to the old ones, axiom for the working class, for the unions, etc. But axioms, it is always ready to add some, it adds them for still other things, and far more minuscule, entirely derisory ones, it is its proper passion which changes nothing of the essential. The State is therefore determined to play an increasingly important role in the regulation of axiomatized flux, both with regard to production and its planning and to the economy and its "monetarization," to surplus-value and its absorption (by the State apparatus itself).

210The regulatory functions of the State imply no sort of arbitration between classes. That the State is wholly in the service of the so-called dominant class is a practical evidence, but one that does not yet yield its theoretical reasons. These reasons are simple: from the standpoint of the capitalist axiomatic, there is only one class with a universalist vocation, the bourgeois class. Plekhanov remarks that the discovery of class struggle and of its role in history goes to the French school of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Saint-Simon; now precisely those who sing the struggle of the bourgeois class against the nobility and feudalism stop short before the proletariat and deny that there can be any class difference between the industrialist or the banker and the worker, but only fusion in a single flux as between profit and wage.{202} There is something here other than an ideological blindness or denial. 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 as a function of the bourgeoisie as decoding and decoded class. It is the only class as such, insofar as it leads the struggle against codes and merges with the generalized decoding of flux. On this score it suffices to fill the capitalist field of immanence. And, in fact, something new is produced with the bourgeoisie: the disappearance of *jouissance* as end, the new conception of the conjunction according to which the only end is abstract wealth and its realization under 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 bourgeois field of immanence, as it is defined by the conjunction of decoded flux, the negation of all transcendence or exterior limit, the effusion of anti-production within production itself, institutes an incomparable slavery, an unprecedented subjection: there is no longer even a master, now only slaves command slaves, there is no longer any need to burden the animal from without, it burdens itself. Not that man is ever the slave of the technical machine; but as slave of the social machine, the bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus-value for ends that, taken as a whole, have nothing to do with his *jouissance*: more slave than the lowest of slaves, first servant of the famished machine, beast of reproduction of capital, interiorization of the 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 the one appears to be an individual mania is in the other the effect of the social mechanism of which he is but a cog."{203} It will be said that there is nonetheless a dominant class and a dominated class, defined by surplus-value, the distinction between the flux of capital and the flux of labor, the flux of financing and the flux of wage income. But this is only partly true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two in differential relations, and integrates them both in the ever-expanding reproduction of its own limits. So much so that the bourgeois is entitled to say, not in terms of ideology but in the very organization of his axiomatic: there is but one machine, that of the great mutant decoded 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 consumer or production goods, and into which wages and profits are merged. 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, that implies there be only one. The theoretical opposition is elsewhere: it is between the decoded flux as they enter an axiomatic of class on the filled body of capital, and the decoded flux which liberate themselves no less from this axiomatic than from the despotic signifier, which cross this wall and the wall of this wall, and begin to flow on the filled body without organs. It is between the class and those outside the class. Between the servants of the machine and those who blow it up or blow up its cogs. Between the régime of the social machine and that of the machines of desire. Between the relative interior limits and the absolute exterior limit. If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos, in their fundamental intimacy at the level of decoding, in their fundamental hostility at the level of the axiomatic (whence the resemblance, in the portrait the nineteenth-century socialists make of the proletariat, between the latter and a perfect schizo).

211That is why the problem of a proletarian class belongs first of all 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 extorted) 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 is not incarnated in a consciousness which, certainly, does not create it, but actualizes it in an organized party capable of proposing for 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 overcome and displace its interior limits and always to 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 posed and still poses a problem. A supposedly socialist State implies a transformation of production, of the units of production and of economic calculation. But this transformation can be carried out only on the basis of an already conquered State, which finds itself before the same axiomatic problems of extraction of a surplus or of a surplus-value, of accumulation, of absorption, of market and of monetary calculation. From then on, either the proletariat prevails in conformity 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 stand in for the bourgeoisie as "great-absentee"; or the bourgeoisie keeps control of the State, even if it must secrete its own techno-bureaucracy, and above all add a few more axioms for the recognition and integration of the proletariat as second class. It is correct to say that the alternative is not between market and planning, given how necessarily planning is introduced into the capitalist State, and how the market subsists within the socialist State, if only as a State monopoly market. But precisely, how to define the true alternative without supposing all the problems resolved? The immense work of Lenin and of the Russian Revolution was to forge a class consciousness conforming to objective being or interest, and as a consequence to impose on the 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 turning around it by continuing its true mole's labor, always cuts of cuts that allowed it to integrate sections of the recognized class into its axiomatic, while pushing further away, to the periphery or into enclaves, the uncontrolled revolutionary elements (no more controlled by official socialism than by capitalism). Then the choice no longer appeared except between the new terrorist and rigid axiomatic, quickly saturated, of the socialist State, and the old cynical axiomatic, all the more dangerous as it is supple and never saturated, of the capitalist State. But, in truth, the most direct question is not whether an industrial society can do without a surplus, without absorption of surplus, without a planning and merchant State, and even without an equivalent of the bourgeoisie: it is at once evident that it cannot, but also that the question posed in these terms is not well posed. Nor is it whether class consciousness, incarnated in a party, in a State, betrays or does not betray the objective class interest to which one would attribute a sort of possible spontaneity, stifled by the instances that claim to represent it. Sartre's analysis in the *Critique de la raison dialectique* seems to us profoundly correct, according to which there is no spontaneity of class, but only of "group": hence the necessity of distinguishing "groups in fusion" and the class that remains "serial," represented by the party or the State. And the two are not at the same scale. For class interest remains of the order of the great molar aggregates; it defines only a collective preconscious, necessarily represented in a distinct consciousness about which there is not even any reason at this level to ask whether it betrays or not, alienates or not, deforms or not. The true unconscious, on the contrary, is in group desire, which sets in play the molecular order of the machines of desire. That is where the problem is, between the unconscious desires of group and the preconscious interests of class. It is only on the basis of this, as we shall see, that one can pose the questions that derive indirectly from it, concerning the preconscious of class and the representative forms of class consciousness, concerning the nature of interests and the process of their realization. Always Reich returns, with his innocent demands that reclaim the rights of a prior distinction between desire and interest: "The leadership (must have) no more pressing task, besides the precise knowledge of the objective historical process, than that of understanding: a) what progressive ideas and desires exist according to strata, professions, age groups and sexes; b) what desires, anxieties and ideas hinder the development of the progressive aspect — traditional fixations."{204} (The leadership rather has the tendency to answer: when I hear the word desire, I pull out my revolver.)

212It is that desire is never deceived. Interest may be deceived, misrecognized or betrayed, but not desire. Hence 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 takes advantage of this, but so does socialism, the party and the party leadership. How to explain that desire delivers itself over to operations that are not misrecognitions, but perfectly reactionary unconscious investments? And what does Reich mean when he speaks of "traditional fixations"? They too are part of the historical process, and bring us back to the modern functions of the State. Modern civilized societies define themselves through procedures of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize on one side, they reterritorialize on the other. These neo-territorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; only, they are archaisms with a perfectly current function, our modern manner of "bricking up," of gridding, of reintroducing fragments of code, of resuscitating old ones, of inventing pseudo-codes or jargons. Neo-archaisms, after Edgar Morin's formula. They are extremely complex and varied, these modern territorialities. Some are rather folkloric, but nonetheless represent social and eventually political forces (from bowls players to home distillers, by way of veterans). Others are enclaves whose archaism can just as well nourish a modern fascism as release a revolutionary charge (ethnic minorities, the Basque problem, the Irish Catholics, the Indian reservations). Some form as if spontaneously, in the very current of the movement of deterritorialization (neighborhood territorialities, territorialities of housing developments, the "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 has doubtless been within capitalism the most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritorialization. But the socialist State too has its own minorities, its own territorialities, which reform themselves against it, or which it itself elicits and organizes (Russian nationalism, party territoriality: the proletariat could constitute itself as a class only on the basis of artificial neo-territorialities; in parallel, the bourgeoisie reterritorializes itself in sometimes the most archaic forms). The crude 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 regulation of decoded, deterritorialized fluxes, one of the principal aspects of this function consists in reterritorializing, in order to prevent the decoded fluxes from fleeing on all sides of the social axiomatic. One sometimes has the impression that the fluxes of capital would gladly send themselves to the moon, if the capitalist State were not there to bring them back to earth. For example: deterritorialization of financing fluxes, but reterritorialization through purchasing power and means of payment (role of the central banks). Or else the movement of deterritorialization that goes from the center toward the periphery is accompanied by a peripheral reterritorialization, by a sort of economic and political auto-centering of the periphery, either in the modernist forms of a State socialism or capitalism, or in the archaic form of local despots. At the limit, it is impossible to distinguish deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which are caught one in the other, or are like the obverse and reverse of a single process.

213This essential aspect of regulation by the State is explained still 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 fluxes that traces out archaic or artificial neo-territorialities. Marx has shown what the foundation of political economy properly speaking was: the discovery of an abstract subjective essence of wealth, in labor or production — one could just as well say in desire ("It was an immense advance when Adam Smith rejected every determination of the activity creative of wealth and considered only labor pure and simple: neither manufacturing labor, nor commercial labor, nor agriculture, but all activities without distinction… the abstract universality of the activity creative of wealth").{205} So much for the great movement of decoding or deterritorialization: the nature of wealth is no longer sought on the side of the object, in exterior conditions, territorial machine or despotic machine. But Marx adds at once that this essentially "cynical" discovery finds itself corrected by a new territorialization, as a new fetishism or a new "hypocrisy." Production as abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the forms of property that objectify it once again, that alienate it by re-territorializing it. Not only had the mercantilists, while sensing the subjective nature of wealth, determined it as a particular activity still bound to a despotic "money-making" machine; not only had the physiocrats, pressing this presentiment still further, bound 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 at once in the private property of the means of production. (And one cannot say in this respect that so-called common property changes the meaning of this movement.) Moreover, if it is no longer a matter of making the history of political economy, but the real history of the corresponding society, one understands still better why capitalism never ceases to re-territorialize what it deterritorialized at first hand. It is in *Capital* that Marx analyzes the true reason for the double movement: on the one hand, capitalism can proceed only by ceaselessly developing the subjective essence of abstract wealth, producing for producing, 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 do so only within the framework of its own limited goal, as a determinate mode of production, "production for capital," "valorization of existing capital."{206} Under the first aspect, capitalism never ceases to exceed its own limits, deterritorializing ever further, "dating itself in a universal cosmopolitan energy that overthrows every barrier and every bond"; but, under the second aspect, strictly complementary, capitalism never ceases to have limits and barriers that are interior, immanent to it, and that, precisely because they are immanent, do not let themselves be exceeded except by reproducing themselves on an enlarged scale (always more re-territorialization — local, worldwide, and planetary). That is why the law of the tendential fall, that is to say of limits never attained because always exceeded and always reproduced, seemed to us to have as its corollary, and even as its direct manifestation, the simultaneity of the two movements of deterritorialization and re-territorialization.

214An important consequence follows from this. It is that the social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and never stops oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would gladly resuscitate as overcoding and re-territorializing unity, and the unleashed fluxes that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, by means of world dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while they decode or let be decoded the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are caught between two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoid despotic sign, the signifier-sign of the despot that they try to reanimate as unity of code; the sign-figure of the schizo as 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 never stop being at once behind and ahead of themselves.{207} How to reconcile the nostalgia and the necessity of the Urstaat with the exigency and inevitability of the fluxion of fluxes? How to ensure that decoding and deterritorialization, constitutive of the system, do not make it flee through one end or another that would escape the axiomatic and Steal the machine (a Chinese on the horizon, a Cuban with missiles, an Arab hijacker of planes, a kidnapper of consuls, a Black Panther, a May '68, or even drugged hippies, enraged faggots, etc.). One oscillates between reactionary paranoid overcharges and subterranean, schizophrenic and revolutionary charges. More, one hardly knows how it turns one way or the other: the two ambiguous poles of delirium, their transformations, the way in which an archaism or a folklore, in such and such a circumstance, can suddenly be charged with a dangerous progressive value. How it turns fascist or revolutionary, this is the problem of the universal delirium about which everyone keeps silent, first and foremost the psychiatrists (they have no idea about it; why would they?). Capitalism, and socialism too, are as if torn between the despotic signifier, which they adore, and the schizophrenic figure, which carries them along. So we are entitled to maintain two earlier conclusions that seemed to oppose each other. On the one hand, the modern State forms a veritable cut forward, in relation to the despotic State, in function of its accomplishment of a becoming-immanent, of its generalized decoding of fluxes, of its axiomatic that comes to replace codes and overcodings. But, on the other hand, there has never been and there is only one State, the Urstaat, the Asiatic despotic formation, which constitutes in withdrawal the sole cut for all of history, since even the modern social axiomatic can only function by resuscitating it as one of the poles between which its own cut is exercised. Democracy, fascism or socialism, which one is not haunted by the Urstaat as unequalable model? The chief of police of the local dictator Duvalier was called Desyr.

215Simply, it is not by the same procedures that a thing is resuscitated and has been raised up. We have distinguished three great social machines corresponding to savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples. The first is the underlying territorial machine, which consists in coding the fluxes on the filled body of the earth. The second is the transcendent imperial machine which consists in overcoding the fluxes on the filled 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 that it conserves by gathering them together, overcoding them, appropriating surplus labor. The third is the modern immanent machine, which consists in decoding the fluxes on the filled body of capital-money: it has realized immanence, it has rendered the abstract concrete as such, naturalized the artificial, replacing the territorial codes and despotic overcoding by an axiomatic of decoded fluxes, and a regulation of these fluxes; it operates the second great movement of deterritorialization, but this time because it lets nothing of the codes and overcodes subsist. Yet what it does not let subsist, it recovers by its own original means; it re-territorializes where it has lost territorialities, it creates new archaisms where it destroys the old — and the two are wedded. The historian says: no, the modern State, its bureaucracy, its technocracy, do not resemble the ancient despotic State. Evidently, since in one case it is a matter of reterritorializing decoded fluxes, whereas in the other case it is a matter of overcoding territorial fluxes. The paradox is that capitalism makes use of the Urstaat to operate its re-territorializations. But, imperturbable, the modern axiomatic at the depth 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 imperturbable and cynical character, great forces work upon it, which form the other pole of the axiomatic, its accidents, its failures and its chances of leaping, of making what it decodes pass beyond the wall of its immanent regulations as well as of its transcendental resurrections. Each type of social machine produces a certain kind of representation, whose elements are organized at the surface of the *socius*: the system of connotation-connexion in the savage territorial machine, which corresponds to the coding of the fluxes; 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 the fluxes. Deterritorialization, axiomatic, and re-territorialization, such are the three surface elements of the representation of desire in the modern *socius*. Therefore we fall back upon the question: what is in each case the relation of social production and desiring production, once it has been said that there is always between the two an identity of nature, but also a difference of régime? Can it be that the identity of nature is at its highest point in the régime of modern capitalist representation, because it is realized there "universally" in immanence, and in the fluxion of decoded fluxes? But also that the difference of régime is greatest there, and that this representation exercises on desire an operation of repression stronger than any other, because, by virtue of immanence and decoding, anti-production has spread throughout production, instead of remaining localized in the system, releasing a fantastic death instinct that now impregnates and crushes desire? And what is this death which always rises from within, but which must arrive from without — and which, in the case of capitalism, rises with all the more power as one does not yet clearly see what this outside is that will make it arrive? In short, the general theory of society is a generalized theory of fluxes; it is in terms of the latter that one must estimate the relation of social production and desiring production, the variations of this relation in each case, the limits of this relation in the capitalist system.

SECTION 11

216In the territorial or even despotic machine, economic social reproduction 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; the relations of filiation and alliance are determining, or rather "determined to be dominant." What is marked, inscribed on the *socius*, in fact, 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 economic social reproduction according to one's rank from the standpoint of alliances and filiations, but also of the despotic machine that doubles these by the relations of the new alliance and of direct filiation (whence the role of the sovereign's family in despotic overcoding, and of the "dynasty," whatever its mutations, its uncertainties, which always inscribe themselves in the same category of new alliance). It is no longer at all the same in the capitalist system.{208} Representation no longer relates to a distinct object, but to productive activity itself. The *socius* as filled body has become directly economic as capital-money; it tolerates no other presupposition. What is inscribed or marked is no longer producers or non-producers, but the forces and means of production as abstract quantities that become effectively concrete in their relating 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, placed outside the field; to speak as Aristotle does, it is no more than the form of the matter or of the human material that finds itself subordinated to the autonomous social form of economic reproduction, and that comes to the place the latter assigns it. That is to say, the elements of production and of anti-production do not reproduce themselves as men do themselves, but find in them a simple material that the form of economic reproduction preorganizes in a mode entirely distinct from the one it has as human reproduction. Precisely because it is privatized, placed outside the field, the form of the material or of human reproduction engenders men whom one has no trouble supposing all equal among themselves; but, in the field itself, the form of economic social reproduction has already preformed the form of the material so as to engender, where required, the capitalist as derived function of capital, the worker as derived function of labor power, etc., in such a way that the family finds itself in advance traversed by the order of classes (it is indeed in this sense that segregation is the sole origin of equality…){209}

217This setting of the family outside the social field is also its greatest social opportunity. For it is the condition under which the entire social field is going to be able to apply itself to the family. Individual persons are first of all social persons, that is to say, functions derived from abstract quantities; they themselves become concrete in the placing-into-relation or the axiomatic of these quantities, in their conjunction. They are exactly configurations or images produced by the sign-points, the cuts-flux, the pure "figures" of capitalism: the capitalist as personified capital, that is to say, as a 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, of despair, of revolt, of violence or of oppression. But starting from non-figurative figures or from the cuts-flux that produce them, these images will themselves be figuring and reproductive only by informing a human material whose specific form of reproduction falls back outside the social field that nonetheless determines it. Private persons are therefore second-order images, images of images, that is to say, simulacra that thereby receive 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, by way of alliances and filiations, opens onto the whole social field, is coextensive with it and recuts its coordinates, it is no more, one would say, than a simple tactic upon which the social field closes back, to which the social field applies its autonomous demands of reproduction, and which it recuts in all its dimensions. The alliances and filiations no longer pass through men, but through money; so the family becomes microcosm, fit 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, is content to apply and envelop 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 that is determined to invest only the simulacrum of them. The familial determinations become the application of the social axiomatic. The family becomes the subset to which the set of the social field applies itself. Since each one has a father and a mother privately, it is a distributive subset that simulates for each one the collective set of social persons, that loops its domain and scrambles its images. Everything is folded back onto the triangle father-mother-child, which resonates by responding "papa-mama" each time it is stimulated with the images of capital. In short, Oedipus arrives: it is born in the capitalist system from the application of first-order social images to second-order private familial images. It is the arrival-set that responds to a socially determined departure-set. 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 of reproduction, when the conjunction recovers in it the sense of a simple unit of consumption, it is father-mother that we consume. In the departure-set there is the boss, the leader, 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 arrival-set, at the limit, there is no longer anything but papa, mama and me, the despotic sign collected by papa, the residual territoriality assumed by mama, and *le moi* divided, cut, castrated. This operation of folding-back, of folding or of application, is it not what makes Lacan say, deliberately betraying the secret of psychoanalysis as applied axiomatic: what appears "to play more freely in what is called analytic dialogue depends in fact on a substratum perfectly reducible to a few essential and formalizable articulations."{210} Everything is preformed, arranged in advance. The social field where each one acts and is acted upon as collective agent of enunciation, agent of production and of anti-production, is folded back onto Oedipus, where each one now finds himself caught in his corner, cut along the line that divides him into individual subject of the statement and subject of enunciation. The subject of the statement 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 familial conjunction results from the capitalist conjunctions, insofar as they apply themselves to privatized persons. Papa-mama-me, one is sure to find them everywhere, since one has applied everything to them. The reign of images, such is the new way in which capitalism uses the schizzes and diverts the flux: composite images, images folded back onto images, in such a way that at the outcome of the operation, the little *moi* of each one, related to his father-mother, is truly the center of the world. Much more underhanded than the subterranean 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 hieroglyphs,… we want objective, real reality,… that is to say the Kodak-idea… For every man, every woman, the universe is only what surrounds his or her absolute little image of himself or of herself… An image! A kodak-snapshot in a universal film of snapshots."{211} Each one as little triangulated microcosm, the narcissistic *moi* merges with the oedipal subject.

218Oedipus finally…, it is in the end a very simple operation, easily formalizable in fact. Yet it engages universal history. We have seen in what sense schizophrenia was the absolute limit of every society, insofar as it sends through decoded and deterritorialized flux 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 the decoded flux, and re-territorializes the deterritorialized flux. Thus capitalism finds in schizophrenia its own exterior limit, which it never ceases to push back and conjure away, while it itself produces its immanent limits which it displaces and enlarges ceaselessly. But a displaced interior limit, capitalism needs in yet another way: precisely in order to neutralize or push back the absolute exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit, it needs to interiorize it, this time by restricting it, by making it pass no longer between social production and desiring production which detaches itself from it, but within social production, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction onto which the former folds back, between the social whole and the private sub-whole to which the former applies itself. Oedipus is this displaced or interiorized limit, desire allows itself to be caught there. The Oedipal triangle is the intimate and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism's efforts at social re-territorialization. A displaced limit, because it is the displaced represented of desire, such was Oedipus always for every formation. But in primitive formations this limit remains unoccupied, to the very extent that the flux are coded and that the play of alliances and filiations maintains extended families at the scale of the determinations of the social field, preventing any secondary folding-back of the latter onto the former. In despotic formations, the Oedipal limit is occupied, symbolically occupied, but not lived or inhabited, insofar as imperial incest operates an overcoding which in turn flies over the whole social field (repressing representation): the formal operations of folding-back, of extrapolation, etc., which will later belong to Oedipus, are already sketched out, but in a symbolic space where the object of the heights is constituted. It is only in the capitalist formation that the Oedipal limit finds itself not only occupied, but inhabited and lived, in the sense that the social images produced by the decoded flux effectively 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 as it completes its migration into the in-depth elements of representation: the displaced represented has become as such the representative of desire. It therefore goes without saying that this becoming or this constitution does not occur under the species imagined in earlier social formations, because imaginary Oedipus results from such a becoming, and not the inverse. It is not through a flux of shit or a flood of incest that Oedipus arrives, but through the decoded flux of capital-money. The floods of incest and of shit derive from it only secondarily, insofar as they carry along those private persons onto which the flux of capital fold back or apply themselves (whence the complex genesis entirely deformed in the psychoanalytic equation shit = money: in fact, it is a matter of a system of encounters or conjunctions, of derivatives and resultants between decoded flux).

219In Oedipus there is a recapitulation of the three states or three machines. For it is prepared in the territorial machine, as empty unoccupied limit. It is formed in the despotic machine as symbolically occupied limit. But it fills itself and accomplishes itself only by becoming the imaginary Oedipus of the capitalist machine. The despotic machine conserved the primitive territorialities, and the capitalist machine resuscitates the Urstaat as one of the poles of its axiomatic, it makes of the despot one of its images. That is why Oedipus gathers everything together, 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 is the whole series, fetishes, idols, images and simulacra: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, everything is taken up again by the images of capitalism, which pushes them along and reduces them to the Oedipal simulacrum. The representative of the local group with Laius, territoriality with Jocasta, the despot with Oedipus himself: "motley painting of everything that has ever been believed." It is not astonishing that Freud went looking in Sophocles for the central image of Oedipus-despot, the myth become tragedy, in order to make it radiate in two opposed directions, the primitive ritual direction of Totem and Taboo, the private direction of modern dreaming man (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 of folding-down [rabattement] that will constitute it in the modern field: the cause of triangulation. Hence the extreme importance, but also the indeterminacy, the undecidability of the thesis of the most profound innovator in psychoanalysis, who 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 the 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 attain castration…! What does the equation desire-castration mean, save a prodigious operation in fact, which consists in replacing desire under the law of the despot, in introducing lack into it at the deepest level and in saving us from Oedipus by a fantastic regression. Fantastic and brilliant regression: it had to be done, "no one helped me," as Lacan says, in order to shake off the yoke of Oedipus and lead it to the point of its auto-critique. But it is like the story of the resistance fighters who, wanting to blow up a pylon, balanced the plastic charges so well that the pylon went up 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 that makes the object of the heights, overflying and overcoding, withdraw, give way to a social field of immanence in which the decoded fluxes produce images and fold them down. Hence the two aspects of the signifier, barred transcendent object taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the field laid bare (somewhat as, following the tradition, one passes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus).

220A transcendent object increasingly spiritualized, for a field of forces increasingly immanent, increasingly interiorized: such is the evolution of the infinite debt — through Catholicism, then the Reformation. The extreme spiritualization of the despotic State, the extreme interiorization of the capitalist field define bad conscience. The latter is not the contrary of cynicism; it is, in private persons, the correlate of the cynicism of social persons. All the cynical procedures of bad conscience, such as Nietzsche, then Lawrence and Miller, analyzed them in order to define the European man of civilization, — the reign of images and hypnosis, the torpor they propagate, — the hatred against life, against all that is free, that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death drive, — depression, guilt used as a means of contagion, the vampire's kiss: aren't you ashamed to be happy? follow my example, I won't let go of you until you too say "it's my fault," O the ignoble contagion of the depressed, neurosis as the sole illness, which consists in making others ill, — the permissive structure: let me cheat, steal, slit throats, kill! but in the name of the social order, and let papa-mama be proud of me, — the double direction given to ressentiment, turning back against oneself and projection against the other: the father is dead, it's my fault, who killed him? it's your fault, it's the Jew, the Arab, the Chinese, all the resources of racism and segregation, — the abject desire to be loved, the whining at not being so enough, at not being "understood," along with the reduction of sexuality to the "dirty little secret," that whole psychology of the priest, — there is not a single one of these procedures that does not find in Oedipus its nourishing soil and its sustenance. Not a single one of these procedures either that does not serve and develop in psychoanalysis: the latter as new avatar of the "ascetic ideal." Once again, it is not psychoanalysis that invents Oedipus: it only gives Oedipus a last territoriality, the couch, as a last law, the analyst as despot and collector of money. But the mother as simulacrum of territoriality, and the father as simulacrum of despotic law, with *le moi* cut, cleaved, castrated, are the products of capitalism insofar as it mounts an operation that has no equivalent in other social formations. Everywhere else the familial position is only a stimulus for the investment of the social field by desire: familial images function only by opening onto social images with which they couple or confront each other 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 into which they are plunged (cf. Ndembu schizo-analysis). It is so even in the peripheral zones of capitalism, where the effort made by the colonizer to oedipianize the native, African Oedipus, finds itself 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 desire's investment, which goes from the familial stimulus to social organization (or disorganization), is in some way covered over by a backflow that folds social investment back onto familial investment as pseudo-organizer. The family has become the site 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, wherever one turns, one finds nothing but father-mother: that 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.

221Marx said: Luther's merit is to have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object, but as interior religiosity; the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo is to have determined the essence or nature of wealth, no longer as objective nature, but as abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence, activity of production in general. But, as this determination takes place in the conditions of capitalism, they objectify the essence anew, alienate it and re-territorialize it, this time in the form of the private property of the means of production. So much so that capitalism is doubtless the universal of every society, but only to the extent that it is capable of carrying its own critique to a certain point, that is, the critique of the procedures by which it re-enchains what, within it, tended to liberate itself or to appear freely.{212} The same must be said of Freud: his greatness is to have determined the essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to objects, goals, or 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 private man (whence the situation of Oedipus, at first marginal in the Three Essays, which then closes in more and more upon desire). Everything happens as though Freud were having himself forgiven for his profound discovery of sexuality, by telling us: at least it won't leave the family! The dirty little secret, instead of the great open expanse glimpsed. The familialist folding-back, instead of the drift of desire. Instead of the great decoded fluxes, the little streams recoded in mama's bed. Interiority instead of a new relation with the outside. Through psychoanalysis, it is always the discourse of bad conscience and guilt that rises up and finds its nourishment (what is called curing). And, on at least two points, Freud absolves the real exterior family of all fault, the better to interiorize them, fault and family alike, in the smallest member, the child. The way in which he posits an autonomous repression, independent of social repression; the way in which he renounces the theme of the child's seduction by the adult, in order to substitute for it the individual fantasy that makes the real parents into so many innocents or even victims.{213} For the family must appear in two forms: one in which it is doubtless guilty, but only in the way the child lives it intensely, interiorly, and which merges with the child's own guilt; the other in which 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 disalienation, if only through the way it is reconstituted in transference). This is what Foucault has shown 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 the psychiatry of the nineteenth century had wanted to organize in the asylum — "the imperative fiction of the family," the reason-father and the madman-minor, the parents who are themselves ill only from their childhood —, all this finds its accomplishment outside the asylum, in psychoanalysis and the analyst's office. Freud is the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry. He mobilizes all the resources of myth, of tragedy, of dream, to re-enchain desire, this time on the inside: an intimate theater. Yes, nevertheless, Oedipus is the universal of desire, the product of universal history — but on a condition that Freud does not fulfill: 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, of its singularity, of its irony and of its own critique. And what are these conditions, this point of self-critique? To discover, beneath the familial folding-back, the nature of the social investments of the unconscious. To discover, beneath the individual fantasy, the nature of group fantasies. Or, what amounts to the same thing, to push the simulacrum to the point where it ceases to be image of image, in order to find the abstract figures, the flux-schizzes, that it harbors while hiding them. To substitute, for the private subject of castration, cleaved into subject of enunciation and subject of the statement referring only to the two orders of personal images, the collective agents which on their own account refer to machinic arrangements. To pour the theater of representation back into the order of desiring production: the whole task of schizo-analysis.

CHAPTER 4 - : Introduction to Schizo-analysis

SECTION 1

222Which comes first, the chicken or the egg, but also the father and mother or the child? Psychoanalysis acts as though 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 pre-existence (the child is child only in relation to a father and a mother). One sees this clearly in the originary position of a father of the horde. Oedipus itself would be nothing without the identifications of the parents with the children; and one cannot conceal that everything begins in the head of the father: is that what you want, to kill me, to sleep with your mother?… It is first of all an idea of the father: thus Laius. It is the father who makes an infernal racket, and who brandishes the law (the mother is rather complacent: one mustn't make a fuss about it, it's a dream, a territoriality…). Lévi-Strauss says it very well: "The initial motif of the reference myth consists in an incest with the mother of which the hero makes himself guilty. Yet this guilt seems to exist above all in the mind of the father, who desires the death of his son and contrives to provoke it… In the final account, the father alone figures as guilty: guilty of having wanted to take revenge. And it is he who will be killed. This curious detachment with respect to incest appears in other myths."{214} Oedipus is first of all an idea of the adult paranoiac, before being an infantile feeling of the neurotic. Thus psychoanalysis extricates itself badly from an infinite regression: the father must have been a child, but could only have been so in relation to a father, who was himself a child, in relation to another father.

223How does a delirium begin? It may be that cinema is apt to seize the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytic and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence. One by Nicholas Ray, supposed to represent the formation of a cortisone delirium: an overworked father, a high-school teacher, who works overtime at a radio-taxi station, treated for cardiac troubles. He begins to deliriate about the educational system in general, the necessity of restoring a pure race, the salvation of moral and social order, then passes to religion, the opportuneness of a return to the Bible, Abraham… But what did he do, Abraham? Why, precisely he killed or wanted to kill his son, and perhaps God's only wrong was to stop his arm. But he, the hero of the film, does he not himself have a son? Why, why… What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, religious field: the delirious person applies to his family and his son a delirium that overflows them on 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 eminently possess this character, and that is not originally economic, political, etc., before being crushed in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic mincer. It is not Schreber who will deny it (nor his father, inventor of the Pangymnasticon and of a general pedagogical system). Then, everything changes: the infinite regression forced us to postulate a primacy of the father, but a primacy always relative and hypothetical that made us go on 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 folding-down of the former. 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 take up again the example of the Marquesans, analyzed by Kardiner: he distinguishes an adult alimentary anxiety linked to an endemic dearth, and an infantile alimentary 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 the infantile experience, the maternal breast and the familial structure, is already a state of the cuts and the flux of the social field as a whole, flux of women and of foodstuffs, registrations and distributions. The adult is never an after-the-fact of the child, but both in the family aim at the determinations of the field in which she and they bathe simultaneously.

224Hence the necessity of maintaining three conclusions. 1°) From the point of view of regression, which has only a 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 interior feeling experienced by the son. The first wrong of psychoanalysis is to act as if things began with the child. Which 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, this is because it encloses us in simple reproduction or generation. And even so, 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 the subject of reproduction, that is, the process of auto-production of the unconscious (unity of history and Nature, of Homo natura and Homo historia). It is certainly not sexuality that is in the service of generation, it is progressive or regressive generation that is in the service of sexuality as cyclical movement by which the unconscious, remaining always "subject," reproduces itself. There is therefore no longer any reason to ask which is first, the father or the 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 social investment in relation to familial investment, it is the investment of the social field in which the father, the child, the family as sub-set, are at the same time plunged. 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 wrong of psychoanalysis, at the very moment when it was completing the separation of sexuality from reproduction, is to have remained prisoner of an impenitent familialism that condemned it to evolve solely in the 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 the 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 an 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 of an axiomatic, of a combinatorics informing the fluxes. The same holds for the social field: its coding or its axiomatic first define within it a communication of unconsciouses. This phenomenon of communication, which Freud encountered in a marginal manner in his remarks on occultism, in fact constitutes the norm, and pushes into the background the problems of hereditary transmission that agitated the Freud-Jung polemic.{217} It appears that, in the common social field, the first thing the son represses, or has to repress, or attempts to repress, is the unconscious of the father and of the mother. The failure of that repression, such is the basis of the neuroses. But this communication of unconsciouses has in no way the family as its principle, it has as its principle the community of the social field as object of the investment of desire. In every respect, the family is never determining, but only determined, first as starting stimulus, then as ensemble of arrival, finally as intermediary or interception of communication.

225If familial 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 of the adult; if it is true that the child, through territoriality-mama and law-papa, already aims at the schizzes and the encoded or axiomatized fluxes of the social field —, we must situate the essential difference within this domain. Delirium is the matrix in general of every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious play of disinvestments, counter-investments, over-investments. 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 paranoid fascizing type or pole, which invests the formation of central sovereignty, over-invests 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 one of yours, of the superior class and race. And a schizo-revolutionary type or pole, which follows the lines of flight of desire, passes through the wall and makes the fluxes pass, mounts its machines and its groups in fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery, proceeding inversely to the preceding one: I am not one of yours, I am eternally of the inferior race, I am a beast, a negro. Honest people say that one must not, that it is not good, that it is ineffective, that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that flight is revolutionary, withdrawal, freaks, on condition of dragging the sheet along or making a piece of the system flee. To pass through the wall, even if one has to make oneself a negro in the manner of John Brown. George Jackson: "It may be that I flee, but throughout my flight I am looking for 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 is released, sometimes even within the worst archaisms; inversely, the manner in which it turns or closes back fascist, in which it falls back into archaism. To stay with literary examples: the Céline case, the great deliriant who evolves by communicating more and more with the paranoia of the father. The Kerouac case, the artist with the most sober means, the one who made a revolutionary "flight," and who finds himself in full dream of great 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 always also to make them carry along fascizing, moralizing, puritan and familialist territorialities? These oscillations of the unconscious, these subterranean passages from one type to the other in libidinal investment, often the coexistence of the two, form one of the principal objects of schizo-analysis. The two poles united by Artaud in the magic formula: Heliogabalus-anarchist, "the image of all human contradictions, and of contradiction in the principle." But no passage prevents or suppresses the difference of 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 hinder or interrupt it ("the breakdown"), on the other hand because we have posited paranoia no less than schizophrenia as independent of any pseudo-familial etiology, in order 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 familial investments that depends on the contrary on the cuts and the 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 under father-mother the economic, financial, social, cultural problems that traverse a family: its belonging or its desire to belong to a superior or inferior "race," the reactionary or revolutionary tenor of a familial group with which it already prepares its ruptures and its conformities. What a soup, what a coacervate, the family, agitated by eddies, dragged in one direction or another, such that the Oedipal bacillus takes or does not take, imposes its mould or does not succeed in imposing it according to directions of a wholly other nature that traverse it from the outside. We mean that Oedipus is born from an application or a folding-down onto personalized images, which presupposes a social investment of paranoid type (this is why Freud discovers the family romance, and Oedipus, first apropos of paranoia). Oedipus is a dependence of paranoia. Whereas schizophrenic investment commands a wholly other determination of the family, gasping, quartered according to the dimensions of a social field that neither closes back nor folds down: 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 cleft of schizophrenia, against paranoid castration; and the line of flight against the "blue line."

226Why these words, paranoia and schizophrenia, like talking birds and girls' first names? Why do social investments follow this dividing line that gives them a properly delirious content (to deliriate history)? And what does this line consist of, how do we define schizophrenia and paranoia upon it? We suppose that everything happens on the body without organs; but the latter has, as it were, two faces. Elias Canetti has shown well how the paranoiac organized masses and "packs." The paranoiac combines them, opposes them, maneuvers them.{219} The paranoiac machines masses, he is the artist of great molar ensembles, statistical formations or gregarities, organized crowd phenomena. He invests everything under the species of great numbers. On the evening of the battle, Colonel Lawrence aligns the young naked corpses on the filled body of the desert. President Schreber agglutinates the little men by thousands on his body. 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 on the contrary plunges into singularities, their interactions and their connections at a distance or of different orders, the paranoiac has chosen the first: he does macro-physics. And that 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 the perspectives of great ensembles. And doubtless it would be an error to oppose these two dimensions as the collective and the individual. On the one hand, the micro-unconscious presents no fewer 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).{220} Therefore it is rather a question of the difference between two kinds of collections or populations: the great ensembles and the micro-multiplicities. In both cases, the investment is collective, it is that of a collective field; even a single particle has an associated wave as flux which defines the inexistent space of its presences. Every investment is collective, every fantasy is a group fantasy, and, in this sense, a position of reality. But the two types of investment are distinguished radically, according as the one bears on the molar structures that subordinate the molecules to themselves, and the other, on the contrary, on the molecular multiplicities that subordinate the structured crowd phenomena to themselves. The 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 group-subject in the transversal multiplicities that carry desire as a molecular phenomenon, that is to say partial objects and flux, by opposition with the ensembles and the persons.

227It is true that the social investments take place on the *socius* itself as filled body, and that their respective poles relate necessarily to the character or to the "map" of this *socius*, earth, despot, or money-capital (for each social machine, the two poles, paranoiac and schizophrenic, distribute themselves in variable manner). Whereas the paranoiac properly speaking, the schizophrenic properly speaking, operate not on the *socius*, but on the body without organs in the pure state. Then one would say that the paranoiac, in the clinical sense of the word, makes us attend 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 swarming with worms, bacilli, lilliputian figures, animalcules and homunculi, with their organization and their machines, tiny strings, cords, teeth, nails, levers and pulleys, catapults: thus in Schreber the millions of spermatozoa in the divine rays, or the souls that lead on his body a brief existence of little men. Artaud says: this world of microbes which is nothing but coagulated nothingness. The two faces of the body without organs are therefore the one where there are organized, on a microscopic scale, the mass phenomenon and the corresponding paranoiac investment, the other, sub-microscopic scale, where there are arranged 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 paranoia-schizophrenia partition takes place. Must one therefore believe that the social investments are second projections, as if a great two-faced schizonoiac, father of the primitive horde, were at the base of the *socius* in general? We have seen that this is not at all the case. 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, money-capital, are clothed filled bodies, as the body without organs is a naked filled body; but the latter is at the limit, at the end, not at the origin. And no doubt the body without organs haunts all forms of *socius*. But in this very sense, if the social investments can be said paranoiac or schizophrenic, it is to the extent that they have paranoia and schizophrenia as ultimate products under the determined conditions of capitalism. From the point of view of a universal clinic, one can present paranoia and schizophrenia as the two amplitude edges of a pendulum oscillating around the position of a *socius* as filled body and, at the limit, of a body without organs one of whose faces is occupied by the molar ensembles, the other, peopled by molecular elements. But one can also present a single line on which the different *socius*es, their plane and their great ensembles, are strung; on each of these planes, a paranoiac dimension, another perverse, a type of familial position, and a dotted line of flight or schizoid breakthrough. The great line ends at 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 start, schizophrenic process, pure schizophrenic process of deterritorialization. Or else it strikes, it rebounds, falls back onto the most miserable arranged territorialities of the modern world as simulacra of the preceding planes, gets stuck 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 the oedipal neuroses.

SECTION 2

228What does this distinction of two regions mean, one molecular and the other molar, one micropsychic or micrological, the other statistical and gregarious? Is there here anything other than a metaphor carrying over to the unconscious a distinction grounded in physics, when one opposes intra-atomic phenomena and crowd phenomena by statistical accumulation, obeying laws of ensemble? But, in truth, the unconscious is of physics; it is not at all by metaphor that the body without organs and its intensities are matter itself. Nor do we claim to resuscitate the question of an individual psychology and a collective psychology, and of the anteriority of one or the other; this distinction, such as it appears in *Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego*, remains entirely caught 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 matter of a necessary relation between forces inextricably bound, some being elementary forces through which the unconscious produces itself, the others being resultants which react upon the first, statistical ensembles through which the unconscious represents itself, and already undergoes repression and suppression of its elementary productive forces.

229But how to speak of machines in this microphysical or micropsychic region, there where there is desire, that is to say not only functioning, but formation and self-production? A machine functions according to the prior linkages of its structure and the order of position of its parts, but does not put itself in place any more than it forms or produces itself. This is what animates the ordinary polemic of vitalism and mechanism: the aptitude of the machine to account for the functionings of the organism, but its fundamental inaptitude to account for its formations. Mechanism abstracts from machines a structural unity by which it explains the functioning of the organism. Vitalism invokes an individual and specific unity of the living, which every machine presupposes insofar as it subordinates itself to organic persistence and extends its autonomous formations outward. But one will notice that, in one way or another, the machine and desire thus remain in an extrinsic relation, whether desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or the machine itself is a system of means in function of the ends of desire. The link remains secondary and indirect between the two, in the new means that desire appropriates as in the derivative desires that machines elicit. A profound text by Samuel Butler, "The Book of the Machines," nevertheless allows us to go beyond these points of view.{221} It is true that this text at first seems only to oppose the two ordinary theses, the one according to which organisms are for the moment only more perfect machines ("The very things we believe to be purely spiritual are nothing but ruptures 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 extensions of the organism ("The lower animals keep their limbs at home, in their own bodies, while most of man's limbs are free, and lie detached, now here, now there, in different places in the world"). But there is a Butlerian way of carrying each of the theses to an extreme point at which it can no longer be opposed to the other, a point of indifference or dispersion. On the one hand, Butler is not content to say that machines extend the organism, but that they are really limbs 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 is not content to say that organisms are machines, but that they contain such an abundance of parts that they must be compared to very different parts of distinct machines referring to one another, machined upon one another. This is the essential thing, a double passage to the limit operated by Butler. He shatters the vitalist thesis by calling into question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and even more the mechanist thesis, by calling into question the structural unity of the machine. It is said that machines do not reproduce themselves, or reproduce only through the intermediary of man, but "is there anyone who can claim that the red clover has no reproductive system because the bumblebee, and the bumblebee alone, must serve as go-between for it to reproduce? The bumblebee is part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each of us came from infinitesimally small animalcules whose identity was entirely distinct from our own, and which are part of our own reproductive system; why should we not be part of that of the machines?… What deceives us is that we consider every complicated machine as a single object. In reality, it is a city or a society in which 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 limbs and we think that their combination forms an Individual that came from a single center of reproductive action. But this conclusion is anti-scientific, and the simple fact that a steam engine has never been made by another or by two other machines of its own species in no way authorizes us to say that steam engines have no reproductive system. In reality, each part of any steam engine whatever is procreated by its particular and special procreators, whose function is to procreate that part, and that part alone, while the combination of parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system…" In passing, Butler encounters the phenomenon of surplus-value of code, when a part of a machine captures within its own code a fragment of the code of another machine, and thereby reproduces itself thanks to a part of another machine: the red clover and the bumblebee; or the orchid and the male wasp it attracts, which it intercepts by carrying on its flower the image and the odor of the female wasp.

230At this point of dispersion of the two theses, it becomes a matter of indifference to say that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two definitions are equivalent: man as "vertebro-machined animal," or as "aphid parasite of machines." The essential thing is not in the passage to infinity itself, the infinity composed of machine parts or the temporal infinity of animalcules, but rather in what surfaces by virtue of this passage. Once the structural unity of the machine has been undone, once the personal and specific unity of the living being has been deposed, a direct link appears between the machine and desire, the machine passes into 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, alongside the machine, all around the periphery, parasite of machines, accessory of vertebro-machined desire. In short, the true difference is not between the machine and the living being, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are equally two states of the living being. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living being taken in its specific and even personal unity, are mass phenomena or molar aggregates; it is on this score that they refer from outside the one to the other. And even if they distinguish themselves and oppose themselves, it is only as two senses within one and the same statistical direction. But, in the other direction, deeper or intrinsic, of multiplicities, there is compenetration, direct communication between molecular phenomena and the singularities of the living being, that is, between the little machines dispersed throughout every machine, and the little formations swarming throughout every organism: a domain of indifference of the microphysical and the biological, which makes it so that there are as many living beings in the machine as machines in the living being. Why speak of machines in this domain, when there are none, it seems, properly speaking (no structural unity nor preformed mechanical linkages)? "there is the possibility of formation of such machines, in indefinitely superposed relays, in cycles of functioning meshed one within the other, which once assembled will obey the laws of thermodynamics, but which, in their assembly, do not depend on these laws, since the assembly chain begins in a domain where by definition there are not yet any statistical laws… At this level, functioning and formation are still confounded as in the molecule; and, from this level on, the two divergent paths open which will lead, the one to the more or less regular clusters of individuals, the other to the perfectings of individual organization whose simplest schema is the formation of a tube…"{222} The true difference is therefore between molar aggregates on the one hand, whether social, technical, or organic, and on the other hand machines of desire, which are of molecular order. Here is what machines of desire are: formative machines, whose very breakdowns are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from formation; chronogenetic machines confounded with their own assembly, operating by non-localizable linkages and dispersed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization, formations in fragments and detached parts, with surplus-value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part apart or, following 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 fluxes 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 the flux-schizzes.

231When subsequently, or rather on the other hand, machines find themselves unified on the structural plane of the techniques and institutions that give them a visible existence like a steel armature, when living beings find themselves likewise structured by the statistical unities of their persons, of their species, varieties and milieus, — when a machine appears as a single object, and a living being as a single subject, — when connections become global and specific, disjunctions, exclusive, conjunctions, bi-vocal, — desire has no need to project itself into these forms become opaque. These are immediately the molar manifestations, the statistical determinations of desire and of its own machines. They are the same machines (there is no difference of nature): here as organic, technical or social machines apprehended in their mass phenomenon to which they subordinate themselves, there as machines of desire apprehended in their submicroscopic singularities which subordinate to themselves the mass phenomena. That is why we refused from the start the idea that machines of desire belong to the domain of the dream or of the imaginary, and come to double the other machines. There is only desire and milieus, fields, forms of gregariousness. That is to say: molecular machines of desire are in themselves the investment of the great molar machines or of the configurations they form under the laws of large numbers, in one direction or the other of subordination, in one direction and the other of subordination. Machines of desire on the 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 those statistical forms into which they enter as so many stable forms, unifying, structuring and proceeding through great heavy ensembles; the selective pressures that group the parts retain some, exclude others, organizing the crowds. These are therefore the same machines, but it is not at all the same régime, the same relations of magnitude, the same uses of syntheses. There is functionalism only at the submicroscopic level of machines of desire, machinic arrangements, machinery of desire (engineering); for, there alone, functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production are confounded. Every molar functionalism is false, since organic or social machines do not form themselves in the same manner as they function, and since technical machines are not assembled in the way they are used, but precisely imply determined conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what does not produce itself as it functions has a sense, and also an end, an intention. Machines of desire on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what one makes with them, what they make in themselves.

232They function according to régimes of syntheses that have no equivalent in large aggregates. Jacques Monod has defined the originality of these syntheses, from the point of view of a molecular biology or a "microscopic cybernetics" indifferent to the traditional opposition between mechanism and vitalism. The fundamental traits of the synthesis are here the arbitrary nature of the chemical signals, the indifference to the substrate, the indirect character of the interactions. Such formulas are negative only in appearance, and only in relation to the laws of aggregates, 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 of reactivity… An allosteric protein must be considered a specialized product of molecular engineering, allowing an interaction to be established between bodies devoid of chemical affinity, and thus to subordinate any given reaction to the intervention of compounds chemically foreign and indifferent to that reaction. The operating principle of allosteric (indirect) interactions therefore authorizes an entire freedom in the choice of subordinations which, escaping every chemical constraint, will all the better be able to obey only the physiological constraints by virtue of which they will be selected according to the increment of coherence and efficacy that they confer on the cell or on the organism. It is in the final analysis the very gratuity of these systems which, opening to molecular evolution a practically infinite field of exploration and experimentation, has allowed it to construct the immense network of cybernetic interconnections…"{223} How, starting from this domain of chance or real disorganization, large configurations organize themselves that necessarily reproduce a structure, under the action of D.N.A. and its segments, the genes, performing veritable drawings of lots, forming switch-points like lines of selection or evolution — this is indeed what is shown by all the stages 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 has been able in this sense to insist on a common character of human cultures and of living species, as "Markov chains" (partially dependent aleatory phenomena). For, in the genetic code as in the social codes, what is called signifying chain is a jargon more than a language, made of non-signifying elements which take on a meaning or an effect of signification only in the large aggregates that 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 depth of man, the It: the schizophrenic cell, the schizo molecules, their chains and their jargons. There is a whole biology of schizophrenia; molecular biology is itself schizophrenic (like microphysics). But, inversely, schizophrenia, the theory of schizophrenia is biological, biocultural, insofar as it considers the machinic connections of molecular order, their distribution into maps of intensity on the giant molecule of the body without organs, and the statistical accumulations that form and select the large aggregates.

233On this molecular path, Szondi committed himself, discovering a genic unconscious that he opposed to Freud's individual unconscious as well as to Jung's collective unconscious.{225} This genic or genealogical unconscious he often happens to call familial; and Szondi himself proceeded to the study of schizophrenia with familial ensembles as units of measure. But the genic unconscious is hardly familial, much less so than Freud's, since the diagnosis is conducted by relating desire to photos of hermaphrodites, of assassins, etc., instead of folding it back as usual onto images of papa-mama. At last a bit of relation with the outside… A whole alphabet, a whole axiomatic with photos of madmen; to test "the need for paternal sentiment" on a scale of portraits of assassins, that takes some doing, one may well say that it remains within Oedipus, in truth it opens it singularly… The hereditary drive-genes therefore play the role of simple stimuli that enter into variable combinations following vectors that grid out an entire historical social field — analysis of destiny. In fact, the truly molecular unconscious cannot confine itself 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 the proteins. Proteins are at once produced and units of production, it is they that constipate the unconscious as cycle or the auto-production of the unconscious, ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement of machines of desire and of the syntheses of desire. We have seen that, through reproduction and its objects (familially or genetically determined), it is always the unconscious that produces itself in an orphan cyclical movement, cycle of destiny in which it always remains subject. It is precisely on this point that the independence by right of sexuality with respect to generation rests. Now this direction along which the molar must be surpassed toward the molecular, Szondi senses so well that he rejects every statistical interpretation of what is wrongly called his "test." Moreover, he calls for a surpassing of contents toward functions. But this surpassing he carries out only, this direction he follows 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 freely choose and combine. Thereby he misses the internal or molecular elements of desire, the nature of their machinic choices, arrangements and combinations — and the true question of schizo-analysis: what are they, your own drive-machines of desire? and what functioning, into what syntheses do they enter, do they operate? what use do you make of them, in all the transitions that go from the molecular to the molar and inversely, and that constitute the cycle in which the unconscious, remaining subject, produces itself?

234We 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 manners in which machines of desire must be considered, one does not clearly see what they have to do with a properly sexual energy: whether one relates them to the molecular order which is their own, or whether one relates them to the molar order in which they form organic or social machines, and invest organic or social milieus. It is in fact difficult to present sexual energy as directly cosmic and intra-atomic, and equally as directly social historical. One may well say that love has to do with proteins and with society… Is this not to begin once again the old liquidation of Freudianism, by substituting for the libido a vague cosmic energy capable of all metamorphoses, or a sort of socialized energy capable of all investments? Or else Reich's final attempt concerning a "biogenesis," which is not without reason qualified as schizo-paranoiac? One recalls that Reich concluded to the existence of an intra-atomic cosmic energy, orgone, generator of an electric flux and bearer of submicroscopic particles, the 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 was therefore the association of the two functionings, mechanical and electrical, in a sequence with two poles, molar and molecular (mechanical tension, electric charge, electric discharge, mechanical relaxation). Thereby, 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 particular sequence within the living. And above all he maintained the basic psychoanalytic truth, of which he could denounce in Freud the supreme renunciation: the independence of sexuality with respect to reproduction, the subordination of progressive or regressive reproduction to sexuality as cycle.{226} If one considers the detail of Reich's final theory, we confess that its at once schizophrenic and paranoiac character presents no inconvenience for us, on the contrary. We confess that any rapprochement of sexuality with cosmic phenomena of the "electric storm," "bluish mist and blue sky" type, the blue of orgone, "St. Elmo's fires and sunspots," fluids and fluxes, matters and particles, seems to us finally more adequate than the reduction of sexuality to the lamentable little familialist 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 stretched out on his couch who speaks to us of love, of its power and of 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 Reichian 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. Lacking only are the confirmations of common sense: why, in what way is this sexuality?

235On love, cynicism has said everything, or claimed to say everything: to wit, that it is a matter of a large-scale copulation of organic and social machines (at the bottom of love, the organs; at the bottom of love, economic determinations, money). But what is proper to cynicism is to lay claim to scandal where there is none, and to pass for audacious without audacity. Rather than its platitude, the delirium of good sense. For the first evidence is that desire does not have persons or things as its object, but entire milieus that it traverses, vibrations and fluxes of every nature that it espouses, introducing cuts and captures, desire always nomadic and migrant whose character is first of all "gigantism": no one has shown this 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, by opposition to the 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 poorly understand on what principles psychoanalysis grounds its conception of desire, when it supposes that the libido must desexualize itself or even sublimate itself in order to proceed to social investments, and conversely re-sexualizes these only in the course of processes of pathological regression.{227} Unless the postulate of such a conception is still familialism, which maintains that sexuality operates only in the family, and must transform itself in order to invest larger ensembles. In truth, sexuality is everywhere: in the way a bureaucrat caresses his files, a judge renders justice, a businessman makes money flow, the bourgeoisie buggers the proletariat, etc. And there is no need to pass through metaphors, any more than the libido needs to pass through metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists hard. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people hard. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much power of cut and of flux as these coercive machines. It is not by desexualizing extension that the libido invests the great ensembles; it is on the contrary by restriction, blockage and folding-back that it is determined to repress its fluxes in order to contain them in narrow cells of the "couple," "family," "persons," "objects" type. And no doubt such a blockage is necessarily founded: the libido passes into consciousness only in relation to such-and-such a body, such-and-such a person it takes as object. But our "object choice" itself refers back to a conjunction of fluxes of life and of society, which this body, this person intercept, receive and emit, always in a biological, social, historical field in which we are equally plunged 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 fluxes whose libidinal tenor of properly unconscious investment they translate. From then on, however founded the amorous blockage may be, it changes function singularly, depending on whether it engages desire in the Oedipal impasses of the couple and the family in the service of repressive machines, or whether on the contrary it condenses a free energy capable of fueling a revolutionary machine (here again, everything has been said by Fourier, when he shows the two opposed directions of the "capture" or "mechanization" of the passions). But it is always with worlds that we make love. And our love addresses itself to that libidinal property of the beloved, of closing itself off or opening itself up 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 Marx's famous formula: the relation of man and woman is "the immediate, natural, necessary relation of man with man"? That is to say, the relation between the two sexes (man with woman) is only the measure of the relation of sexuality in general insofar as it invests great ensembles (man with man)? Whence what has been called the specification of sexuality into 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 there necessarily flow both the two sexes in their separation (the two homosexual series of man with man, of woman with woman) and in their statistical relations within this ensemble?

236But Marx says something still more mysterious: that the true difference is not that of the two sexes within man, but that of the human sex and the "non-human sex."{228} Obviously it is not a question of beasts, of animal sexuality. It is a question of something altogether different. If sexuality is the unconscious investment of large molar aggregates, this is because on its other face it is identical with the play of the molecular elements that constitute these aggregates under determinate conditions. The dwarfism of desire as correlate of its gigantism. Sexuality is strictly one with the machines of desire insofar as they are present and acting within social machines, in their field, their formation, their functioning. Non-human sex is the machines of desire, the molecular machinic elements, their arrangements and their syntheses, without which there would be neither human sex specified in the large aggregates, nor human sexuality capable of investing these aggregates. In a few sentences, Marx, though so sparing and so reticent when it comes to sexuality, blew up that of which Freud and all of psychoanalysis on the contrary will remain forever prisoners: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! What we call anthropomorphic representation is just as much the idea that there are two sexes as the idea that there is only one. We know how Freudianism is traversed by the strange idea that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which woman defines herself as lack, the feminine sex as absence. One might at first believe that such a thesis grounds the omnipresence of a masculine homosexuality. Yet it does nothing of the sort; what is grounded here is rather the statistical aggregate 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 object of the heights, which distributes lack on two non-superposable 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 comedy of the formulas according to which one accedes to desire through castration. But the idea that there would really be two sexes, after all, is no better. This time one tries, like Melanie Klein, to define the feminine sex by positive characters, even if terrifying ones. If not from anthropomorphism, one at least gets out of phallocentrism. But this time, far from grounding the communication of the two sexes, one rather grounds their separation into two still statistical homosexual series. And one does not get out of castration at all. Simply, instead of being the principle of sex conceived as male sex (the great cut Phallus soaring above), castration becomes the result of sex conceived as feminine sex (the little absorbed buried penis). We therefore say that castration is the foundation of the anthropomorphic and molar representation of sexuality. It is the universal belief that at once unites and disperses men and women under the yoke of a single 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 nonetheless so profound commentary on Marx's text, when he assigns the opening of the non-human as being "the subject's entry into desire through castration"? Long live castration so that desire be strong? One desires well only fantasies? What a perverse, human, all-too-human idea. What an idea coming from bad conscience, and not from the unconscious. The anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in what grounds it, the ideology of lack. On the contrary, the molecular unconscious is unaware of castration, because partial objects lack nothing and as such form free multiplicities; because the multiple cuts never cease producing flux, instead of repressing them into a single same 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 makes woman contain as many men as man, and man as many women, capable of entering with one another, the ones with the others, into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. To make love is not to make only one, nor even two, but to make a hundred thousand. That is what the machines of desire or the non-human sex are: not one nor even two sexes, but n… sexes. Schizo-analysis is the variable analysis of the n… sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on him and that he gives himself of his own sexuality. The schizo-analytic formula of the desiring revolution will first be: to each one his sexes.

SECTION 3

237The thesis of schizo-analysis 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 poured it back 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 the law… The psychoanalyst is doubtless the first to say that belief, strictly speaking, is not an act of the unconscious; it is always the preconscious that believes. Must one not even say that it is the psychoanalyst who believes, the psychoanalyst in us? Would belief be an effect on conscious material, exerted at a distance by unconscious representation? But, inversely, what has reduced the unconscious to this state of representation, if not first of all a system of beliefs put in the place of productions? In truth, it is at the same time that social production finds itself alienated in supposedly autonomous beliefs, and that desiring production finds itself diverted into supposedly unconscious representations. And it is the same agency, we have seen, the family, that performs this double operation, denaturing, disfiguring, leading social desiring production into an impasse. 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 for all that suppressed, it continues to rumble, to drone beneath the representative agency that smothers it, and which it can in return make resonate up to the breaking point. Representation must then swell 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), in order that it bite effectively upon the zones of production. Are myth and tragedy not, however, themselves productions, forms of production? Surely not; they are so only when related to real social production, to real desiring production. Otherwise, they are ideological forms, which have taken the place of the units of production. Oedipus, castration, etc., who believes in it? Is it the Greeks? But the Greeks did not produce as they believed? Is it the Hellenists, who believe that the Greeks produced in this way? At least the nineteenth-century Hellenists, those of whom Engels said: one would say they believe in it, in myth, in tragedy… Is it the unconscious that represents to itself Oedipus, castration? or is it the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst in us, who thus represents the unconscious? For never has Engels's remark 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 have long since ceased.)

238Always the case of Schreber: Schreber's father invented and fabricated astonishing little machines, sadico-paranoiac, for the constrained use of children so that they would hold themselves up straight, for example head-clamps with metal rods and leather straps.{229} These machines play no role in the Freudian analysis. Perhaps it would have been more difficult to crush the entire social-political content of Schreber's delirium had one taken account of these machines of desire of the father and of their obvious participation in a pedagogical social machine in general. For the whole question is this: of course, the father acts on the child's unconscious — but does he act as father of the family in an expressive familial transmission, or as agent of a machine, in a machinic information or communication? The President's machines of desire communicate with those of his father; but it is precisely thereby that they are, from childhood on, libidinal investment of a social field. The father has a role there only as agent of production and of anti-production. Freud on the contrary chooses the first way: it is not the father who refers back to machines, but just the contrary; thenceforth there is no longer even occasion to consider the machines, neither as machines of desire, nor as social machines. In return, one will swell the father with all the "powers of myth and of religion," and of phylogenesis, so that the little familial representation appears to be coextensive with the field of the delirium. The production couple, machines of desire and social field, gives way to a representative couple of an entirely different nature, family-myth. Once again, have you seen a child play: how he already peoples the technical social machines with his own machines of desire, O sexuality — the father or the mother being in the background, from whom the child borrows parts and gears as needed, and who are there as emitting, receiving, or intercepting agents, benevolent agents of production or suspicious agents of anti-production?

239Why grant mythic and tragic representation this senseless privilege? Why install expressive forms, and a whole theater, there where there were fields, workshops, factories, units of production? The psychoanalyst plants his circus in the stupefied unconscious, a whole Barnum in the fields and in the factory. This 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 going back to the heroic times of life, you destroy the very principles of heroism, for the hero, no more than he doubts his strength, never looks backward. Hamlet no doubt took himself for a hero, and for every Hamlet-born, the only path to follow is the one Shakespeare traced for him. But the question would be whether we are Hamlet-borns. Are you born Hamlet? Have you not rather given birth to Hamlet within yourself? But the question that seems to me most important is this: why return to myth?… This ideological junk that the world has used to build its cultural edifice is losing its poetic value, its mythic character, because through a series of writings dealing with sickness, and consequently with the possibilities of getting out of it, the terrain is being cleared, new edifices can rise up (this idea of new edifices is odious to me, but it is only the consciousness of a process, and not the process itself). For now, my process, in this case all the lines I write, consists solely in energetically cleansing the uterus, in subjecting it to a curettage of sorts. Which leads me to the idea, not of a new edifice, of new superstructures meaning culture, therefore lie, but of a perpetual birth, of a regeneration, of life… There is no life possible in myth. Only myth can live in myth… This faculty of giving birth to myth comes to us from consciousness, consciousness which develops endlessly. That is why, speaking of the schizophrenic character of our epoch, I said: as long as the process is not finished, the belly of the world will be the third eye. What did I mean by that? If not that, from this world of ideas in which we splash about, 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 operate the immaculate conception."{230} Everything is in these pages of Miller: the leading of Oedipus (or of 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 cleansing of the unconscious, schizo-analysis as curettage of the unconscious, the opposition of the matricial cleft to the line of castration, the splendid affirmation of an orphan-unconscious and producer, the exaltation of the process as schizophrenic process of deterritorialization which must produce a new earth, and at the limit the functioning of the machines of desire against tragedy, against "the disastrous drama of personality," against "the inevitable confusion of mask and actor." It is obvious 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 the rescue every commonplace, Schopenhauer, and the Nietzsche of *The Birth of Tragedy*. He believes that Miller is ignorant of all this, and does not for a moment ask himself why Nietzsche himself broke with *The Birth of Tragedy*, why he ceased to believe in tragic representation…

240Michel Foucault has profoundly shown what cut was introduced by the irruption of production into the world of representation. Production may be that of labor or that of desire, it may be social or desiring, it appeals to forces that no longer let themselves 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 collapse or this engulfing of the classical world of representation, Foucault assigns its date to the end of the eighteenth and to the nineteenth century. It seems therefore that the situation is much more complex than we are saying; for psychoanalysis participates to the highest degree in this discovery of unities of production, which submit every possible representation to themselves instead of being subordinated to them. Just as Ricardo founds political or social economy by discovering quantitative labor at the principle of every representable value, Freud founds desiring economy by discovering quantitative libido at the principle of every representation of the objects and ends of desire. Freud discovers the subjective nature or the abstract essence of desire, as Ricardo discovers the subjective nature or the abstract essence of labor, beyond every representation that would attach them to particular objects, ends, or even sources. Freud is therefore the first to bring out desire pure and simple, as Ricardo brought out "labor pure and simple," and thereby the sphere of production that effectively overflows representation. And, just like 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 mounting of an analytic machine capable of decoding them: the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible, the partial connections, the included disjunctions, the nomadic conjunctions, the flux and the polyvocal chains, the transductive cuts — and the relation of machines of desire as formations of the unconscious with the molar formations that they statistically constitute in organized crowds, the apparatus of repression-originary repression that follows from it… Such is the constitution of the analytic field; and this sub-representative field will continue to survive and to function, even through Oedipus, even through the myth and the tragedy that nevertheless mark the reconciliation of psychoanalysis with representation. The fact remains that a conflict traverses the whole of psychoanalysis, between the mythic and tragic familial representation, and desiring and social production. For myth and tragedy are systems of symbolic representations that still lead desire back to determinate exterior conditions as to particular objective codes — the body of the earth, the despotic body — and that thus thwart the discovery of the abstract or subjective essence. One has been able to remark in this sense that, each time Freud puts back in the foreground the consideration of psychic apparatuses, of desiring and social machines, of drive-mechanisms and institutional mechanisms, his interest in myth and tragedy tends to decrease, at the same time as he denounces in Jung, and then in Rank, the restoration of an exterior representation of the essence of desire as objective, alienated in myth or tragedy.{232}

241How to explain this very complex ambivalence of psychoanalysis? We must distinguish several things. In the first place, symbolic representation does grasp the essence of desire, but it does so by referring desire to great objectities as to particular elements that fix its objects, aims, and sources. Thus myth refers desire to the element of the earth as filled body, and to the territorial code that distributes prohibitions and prescriptions; and tragedy refers it to the filled body of the despot and to the corresponding imperial code. From then on, the comprehension of symbolic representations may 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 displacement, and expresses less a stable element than the conditioned passage from one element to another: mythic representation does not express the element of the earth, but rather the conditions under which this element fades 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 fades to the benefit 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 altogether other: instead of referring symbolic representation to determinate 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 discovering the secret of this or that code, but rather undoing the codes in order to attain quantitative and qualitative fluxes of libido that traverse dream, phantasy, pathological formations as well as myth, tragedy, and social formations. Psychoanalytic interpretation does not consist in competing in code, in adding a code to the codes already known, but in decoding in an absolute manner, in releasing something uncodable by virtue of its polymorphism and its polyvocity.{234} It then appears that psychoanalysis's interest in myth (or tragedy) is an essentially critical interest, since the specificity of myth, objectively understood, must melt away in the subjective sun of libido: it is indeed the world of representation that collapses, or tends to collapse.

242This is to say, in the second place, that psychoanalysis's link with capitalism is no less profound than that of political economy. This discovery of decoded and deterritorialized fluxes is the same one made 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 the 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 generalized decoding or process of deterritorialization: "Thus the most simple abstraction, which modern economy places in the first rank, and which expresses an ancestral phenomenon valid for all forms of society, nevertheless appears as practically true, in this abstraction, only as a category of the most modern society." It is the same with abstract desire as libido, as subjective essence. Not that one should establish a simple parallelism between capitalist social production and desiring production, or between the fluxes of money-capital and the fluxes of shit of desire. The relation is much closer: the machines of desire are nowhere else than in the social machines, so that the conjunction of decoded fluxes 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, such as it appears in capitalism, is inseparably that of political economy and of psychoanalysis, beyond the determined systems of representation.

243This is not to say, evidently, that capitalist man, or man within capitalism, desires to work or works according to his desire. The identity of desire and work is rather, not a myth, but the active utopia par excellence which designates the limit of capitalism to be crossed within desiring production. But why, precisely, is desiring production at the always-thwarted limit of capitalism? Why does capitalism, at the same time as it discovers the subjective essence of desire and of work — common essence insofar as activity of production in general — never cease alienating it anew, and immediately, in a repressive machine which separates the essence in two, and maintains it separated, abstract labor 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 does indeed have as its limit the decoded fluxes of desiring production, but it never ceases to push them back by binding them in an axiomatic which 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 is constructed on the ruins of the territorial and despotic, mythic and tragic representations, but it restores them in its service and under another form, as images of capital. Marx sums it all up by saying that the abstract subjective essence is discovered by capitalism only to be chained up anew, alienated, no longer it is true in an exterior and independent element as objectity, but in the element itself subjective of private property: "Formerly, man was exterior to himself, his state was that of real alienation; now, this state has changed into the act of alienation, of dispossession." In fact, it is the form of private property that conditions the conjunction of the decoded fluxes, that is, their axiomatization in a system where the flux of the means of production, as the property of the capitalists, relates itself to the flux of so-called free labor, as the "property" of the workers (so that State restrictions on the matter or content of private property do not at all affect this form). It is again the form of private property that constitutes the center of capitalism's factitious re-territorializations. It is this form, finally, that produces the images filling the field of immanence of capitalism, "the" capitalist, "the" worker, etc. In other terms, capitalism does indeed imply the collapse of the great determined objective representations, to the profit of production as universal interior essence, but it does not for this reason exit the world of representation; it only operates a vast conversion of this world, giving it the new form of an infinite subjective representation.{235}

244We seem to be moving away from the concerns of psychoanalysis, and yet never have we been so close to them. For there too, as we have seen previously, it is in 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 secure its own conversion without this application which hollows it out, splits it, and folds it back onto itself. Then abstract subjective Labor, as it is represented in private property, has as 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 the great determinate objective representations. For the limit of the decoded fluxes of desiring production must indeed be conjured away twice, displaced twice: once by the positing of immanent limits that capitalism does not cease to reproduce on an ever wider scale, and again by the tracing of an interior limit which folds this social reproduction back onto the restricted familial reproduction. The ambiguity of psychoanalysis with respect to myth and tragedy is therefore explained thus: it undoes them as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a universal subjective libido; but it recovers them, and promotes them as subjective representations that raise the mythic and tragic contents to infinity. It treats myth and tragedy, but treats them as the dreams and phantasies of private man, Homo familia — and in fact dream and phantasy are to myth and tragedy what private property is to common property. What plays in myth and tragedy as an objective element is thus taken up and elevated by psychoanalysis, but as the unconscious dimension of subjective representation (myth as the dream of humanity). What plays as an 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 deposed despot, banished, deterritorialized, but one re-territorializes onto the Oedipus complex conceived as the papa-mama-*moi* of just anyone today. Psychoanalysis, and the Oedipus complex, gather up all beliefs, everything that has been believed in every age by humanity, but in order to bring it to the state of a denegation that preserves the belief without believing in it (it is only a dream…: the most severe piety, today, does not demand any more…). Hence this double impression: that psychoanalysis is opposed to mythology no less than to the mythologists, but at the same time carries myth and tragedy to the dimensions of the subjective universal — if Oedipus himself is "without a complex," the Oedipus complex is without Oedipus, as narcissism is without Narcissus.{236} Such is the ambivalence that runs through psychoanalysis, and that overflows the particular problem of myth and tragedy: with one hand it undoes the system of objective representations (myth, tragedy) in favor of the subjective essence conceived as desiring production, and with the other hand pours this production back into a system of subjective representations (dream, phantasy, of which myth and tragedy are posited as developments or projections). Images, nothing but images. What remains at the end is an intimate and familial theater, the theater of private man, which is no longer either desiring production or objective representation. The unconscious as stage. A whole theater in the place of production, one that disfigures it still more than could myth and tragedy reduced to their ancient resources alone.

245Myth, tragedy, dream, phantasy — and myth and tragedy reinterpreted as functions of dream and phantasy —: such is the representative series that psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production, social and desiring production. A theatrical series, in place of the series of production. But why precisely does representation, once become subjective, take this theatrical form ("Between psychoanalysis and theater there is a mysterious bond…")? The eminently modern reply of certain recent authors is well known: theater releases the finite structure of infinite subjective representation. What "release" signifies here is very complex, since the structure can never present anything but its own absence, or represent something non-represented in representation: but it is, so it is said, the privilege of theater to stage that metaphoric and metonymic causality which marks at once the presence and the absence of the structure in its effects. André Green, at the very moment when he raises reservations about the sufficiency of the structure, raises them only in the name of a theater necessary to its actualization, playing the role of a revealer, the site through which it becomes visible.{237} Octave Mannoni, in his fine analysis of the phenomenon of belief, likewise takes the model of theater to show how the disavowal of belief in fact implies a transformation of belief, under the effect of a structure which theater incarnates or stages.{238} We must understand that representation, when it ceases to be objective, when it becomes infinite subjective, that is, imaginary, in fact loses all consistency, unless it refers back to a structure that determines as much the place and the functions of the subject of representation, of the objects represented as images, as the formal relations among them all. Symbolic then no longer at all designates the relation of representation to an objectity as element, but the ultimate elements of subjective representation, pure signifiers, pure non-represented representatives from which derive at once the subjects, the objects, and their relations. The structure thus designates the unconscious of subjective representation. The series of this representation now presents itself: 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 fit to reveal the universality of this structure, including in the objective representations which it recovers and reinterprets as functions of the hidden representatives, of their migrations and variable relations. All beliefs are gathered up, taken up again in the name of a structure of the unconscious: we are still pious. Everywhere, the great play of the symbolic signifier that is incarnated in the signifieds of the imaginary — Oedipus as universal metaphor.

246Why theater? How strange it is, this unconscious of theater and papier-mâché. Theater taken as the model of production. Even in Althusser one witnesses the following operation: the discovery of social production as "machine" or "machinery," irreducible to the world of objective representation (*Vorstellung*); but at once the reduction of the machine to the structure, the identification of production with a structural and theatrical representation (*Darstellung*).{239} Now it is the same with desiring production as with social production: each time that production, instead of being grasped in its originality, in its reality, finds itself thus folded back onto a space of representation, it can no longer have value except through its own absence, and appears as a lack within that space. In his search for the structure in psychoanalysis, Moustafa Safouan can present it as a "contribution to a theory of lack." It is in the structure that the welding of desire to the impossible is made, and lack defined as castration. It is from the structure that the most austere chant rises in honor of castration: yes, yes, it is by castration that we enter into the order of desire — once desiring production has been spread out in the space of a representation that lets it subsist only as absence and as lacking to itself. For one imposes upon the machines of desire a structural unity that gathers them into a molar ensemble; one refers the partial objects to a totality that can appear only as that which they lack, and as what is lacking to itself in lacking them (the great Signifier "symbolizable by the inherence of a — 1 to the set of signifiers"). How far will one go in the development of a lack of lack that traverses the structure? Such is the structural operation: it arranges lack within the molar ensemble. Then, the limit of desiring production — the limit that separates the molar ensembles and their molecular elements, the objective representations and the machines of desire — is now altogether displaced. It now passes only within the molar ensemble itself insofar as it is hollowed out by the furrow of castration. The formal operations of the structure are those of extrapolation, of application, of bi-univocization which fold the social ensemble of departure back onto a familial ensemble of arrival, the familial relation becoming "metaphorical of all the others," and preventing the 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 makes visible, he assigns two particularly striking ones: that theater raises the familial relation to the state of a universal metaphorical structural rapport, from which derive the imaginary play and place of the persons; and, inversely, that it pushes back into the wings the play and functioning of the machines, behind a limit that has become impassable (exactly as in the phantasm, the machines are there, but behind the wall). In short, the displaced limit no longer passes between objective representation and desiring production, but between the two poles of subjective representation, as infinite imaginary representation and finite structural representation. From then on one can 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 the differentiations: it is the same thing that one finds on either side, according to a rule of inverse rapport, or of double bind. The whole of production led into 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 by the very fact of its lacking, one finds it again entirely in symbolic castration. And to be sure the structure gives us no means of escaping familialism; on the contrary, it tightens the tourniquet, it confers upon the family a universal metaphorical value at the very moment when it has lost its objective literal values. Psychoanalysis avows its ambition: to take over from the failing family, to replace the family bed in shambles with the analytic couch, to make the "analytic situation" incestuous in its essence, to make it proof or guarantor of itself, and have it stand in for Reality.{240} It is indeed of this that it is finally a question, 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, and the son too, Oedipus the despot. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing more than images that turn in infinite subjective representation. But these images, we recover the force to believe in them, from the depths of a structure that regulates our rapports with them and our identifications as so many effects of a symbolic signifier. The "good identification"… We are all Chéri-Bibi at the theater, crying out before Oedipus: there's a fellow like me, there's a fellow like me! Everything is taken up again, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, in the guise of shadows projected upon a theater. The great territorialities have collapsed, but the structure proceeds to all the subjective and private re-territorializations. What a perverse operation, psychoanalysis, in which this neo-idealism culminates, this restored cult of castration, this ideology of lack: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! In truth, they do not know what they are doing, nor what mechanism of repression they serve, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter the office of an analyst without knowing at least that everything is played 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 the reforestation of modern man upon the "rock" of castration.

247Quite other was the path traced by Lacan. He does not content himself, like the analytic squirrel, with turning in the wheel of the imaginary and the symbolic, of the Oedipal imaginary and the Oedipianizing structure, of the imaginary identity of persons and the structural unity of machines, colliding everywhere with the dead-ends of a molar representation that the family closes upon itself. What use is it to pass from the imaginary duel to the symbolic third (or fourth), 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 an initial set, the other when the family imposes upon them a personal unity with imaginary signifieds that distribute, that "vacuolize" the lack in a terminal set: two abductions of machines, insofar as the structure places its articulation in them, insofar as the parents place their fingers in them. To go back from the images to the structure would be of little reach, and would not get us out of representation, if the structure did not have an underside which is like the real production of desire. This underside 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 to varying 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 precisely as their support is specified under no structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs which fills space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire which compose a signifying chain, but which are not themselves signifying, not answering to the rules of a linguistic chess game, but to the drawings of a lotto game which brings out now a word, now a drawing, now a thing or a bit of a thing, each depending on the others only through the order of the random drawings and holding together only through the absence of link (non-localizable liaisons), having no other status than that of being dispersed elements of machines of desire themselves dispersed.{241} It is this whole underside of the 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.

248How structure issues from it, following planes of consistency or of structuration, lines of selection, which correspond to the great statistical aggregates or molar formations, which determine linkages and fold production back onto representation: this is where 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 themselves become signifying under the action of a despotic symbol which totalizes them in the name of its own absence or its own withdrawal. For-here-yes-in fact: the production of desire can only be represented as a function of an extrapolated sign which gathers all its elements into an aggregate and which itself does not form part of that aggregate. This is where the absence of link necessarily appears as an absence, and no longer as a positive force. This is where desire is necessarily related to a missing term, whose very essence is to be missing. The signs of desire, not being signifying, become so in representation only as a function of a signifier of absence or of lack. Structure forms itself and appears only as a function of the symbolic term defined as lack. The great Other as nonhuman sex gives way, in representation, to a signifier of the great Other as a term always missing, all-too-human sex, phallus of molar castration.{242} But this is also where Lacan's approach takes on its full complexity; for, to be sure, he does not close an Oedipal structure back over the unconscious. He shows on the contrary that Oedipus is imaginary, nothing but an image, a myth; and that this image or these images are produced by an Oedipianizing structure; and that this structure acts only insofar as it reproduces the element of castration, which, for its part, is not imaginary, but symbolic. There are the three great planes of structuration, which correspond to the molar aggregates: Oedipus as imaginary reterritorialization of private man, produced under the structural conditions of capitalism, insofar as the latter reproduces and resuscitates the archaism of the imperial symbol or of the vanished despot. The three at once are necessary: precisely in order to lead Oedipus to the point of its self-critique. To lead Oedipus to such a point is the task undertaken by Lacan. (Likewise, Elisabeth Roudinesco has seen well that, in Lacan, the hypothesis of an unconscious-language does not close the unconscious back into a linguistic structure, but leads linguistics to its point of self-critique, by showing how the structural organization of signifiers still depends on a great despotic Signifier acting as archaism.){243} What is the point of self-critique? It is that point where structure, beyond the images that fill it and the symbolic that conditions it in representation, discovers its underside as a positive principle of non-consistency which dissolves it: where desire is poured back into the order of production, related to its molecular elements, and where it lacks nothing, because it defines itself as natural and sensuous objective being, at the same time that the real defines itself as the objective being of desire. For the unconscious of schizo-analysis is ignorant of persons, aggregates and laws; of images, structures and symbols. It is orphan, as it is anarchist and atheist. It is not orphan in the sense that the name of the father would designate an absence, but in the sense that it produces itself everywhere the names of history designate present intensities ("the sea of proper names"). It is not figurative, for its figural is abstract, the schiz-figure. 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.

249Destroy, destroy: the task of schizo-analysis goes by way of destruction, a whole cleansing, a whole curettage of the unconscious. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the *moi*, the puppet of the *surmoi*, guilt, the law, castration… It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as psychoanalysis performs under the analyst's benevolent neutrality. For these are destructions à la Hegel, ways of conserving. How could the famous neutrality fail to make us laugh? And what psychoanalysis calls, dares to call, the disappearance or dissolution of the Oedipus complex? We are told that Oedipus is indispensable, the source of every possible differentiation, and saves us from the terrible undifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, herself forms part of Oedipus; her indifferentiation is only the obverse of the exclusive differentiations 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 surmounted, and that it is so by castration, latency, desexualization and sublimation. But castration, what is it save Oedipus once again, to the nth power, and become symbolic, all the more virulent? And latency, that pure fable, what is it save the silence imposed on the machines of desire so that Oedipus may develop, fortify itself in us, accumulate its venomous sperm, the time required to become capable of propagating itself, of passing into our future children? And the elimination of castration anxiety in its turn, desexualization and sublimation, what are they save the divine acceptance, the infinite resignation of bad conscience, which for the woman consists in "transmuting her desire for the penis into a desire for the man and for the child," and for the man in assuming his passive attitude and "bowing before a substitute for the father"?{244} We have all the more "exited" Oedipus inasmuch as we become a living example, a poster, a theorem in act, for making our children enter into it: we have evolved into Oedipus, we have structured ourselves into 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 by castration / that we accede / to Deeeeesire…". What is called the disappearance of Oedipus is Oedipus become an idea. Only the idea can inject the venom. Oedipus must become an idea so that, each time, its arms and its legs, its lips and its moustache grow back: "In reliving the reminiscent dead, your *moi* becomes a kind of mineral theorem that constantly demonstrates the vanity of life."{245} We have been triangulated into Oedipus, and we will triangulate within it. From family to couple, from couple to family. In truth, the analyst's benevolent neutrality is very limited: it ceases as soon as one ceases to answer papa-mama. It ceases as soon as one introduces a little machine of desire, the tape recorder, into the analyst's office, it ceases as soon as one makes a flux pass that does not let itself be stamped by Oedipus, the mark of the triangle (you are told that your libido 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 the stamp of this bureaucracy is, and because an appeal to the pre-Oedipal does not suffice to escape it: the pre-Oedipal is like the post-Oedipal, it is still a way of bringing all desiring production back to Oedipus — the an-Oedipal. When Reich denounces the way psychoanalysis puts itself at the service of social repression, he does not yet go far enough, because he does not see that the bond of psychoanalysis with capitalism is not only ideological, that it is infinitely tighter, more constricted; and that psychoanalysis depends directly on an economic mechanism (whence its relations with money) by which the decoded fluxes of desire, as they are caught in the axiomatic of capitalism, must necessarily be folded back onto a familial field in which the application of this axiomatic is effected: Oedipus as the last word of capitalist consumption, sucking on papa-mama, getting oneself stamped and triangulated on the couch, "so therefore…". No less than the bureaucratic or military apparatus, psychoanalysis is a mechanism for the absorption of surplus-value; and it is so not from the outside, extrinsically, but its very form and finality are marked by this social function. It is not the pervert, nor even the autist, that escapes psychoanalysis, it is the whole of psychoanalysis that is a gigantic perversion, a drug, a radical cut with reality, beginning with the reality of desire, a narcissism, a monstrous autism: the autism proper and the intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital. At the limit, psychoanalysis no longer measures itself against any reality, no longer opens onto any outside, but itself becomes the test of reality, and the guarantor of its own test, reality as the lack to which one brings back outside and inside, departure and arrival: psychoanalysis index sui, with no reference other than itself or "the analytic situation."

250Psychoanalysis says quite well that the unconscious representation can never be grasped independently of the deformations, disguises, or displacements that it undergoes. The unconscious representation therefore comprises essentially, by virtue of its law, a represented [représenté] displaced with respect to an instance in perpetual displacement. But two illegitimate conclusions are drawn from this: that this instance can be discovered starting from the displaced represented; and this, because this instance itself belongs to representation, as a non-represented representative, or as a lack "that protrudes in the overfullness of a representation." It is that displacement refers back to very different movements: sometimes it is a matter of the movement by which desiring production never 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 into the interior of 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 the molecular elements never cease to pass through the meshes. We have seen in this perspective how the law of representation denatured the productive forces of the unconscious, and in its very structure induced a false image that caught desire in its trap (impossibility of concluding from the prohibited to what is really prohibited). 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 in which repressive social production gets itself replaced by beliefs, that in which repressed desiring production finds itself replaced by representations. And certainly it is not psychoanalysis that makes us believe: Oedipus and castration, we ask for them, we ask for more of them, and these demands come from elsewhere and from deeper. But psychoanalysis has found the following means, and fulfills the following function: to make beliefs survive even after their repudiation! to make those who no longer believe in anything still believe, … to remake for them a private territoriality, a private Urstaat, a private capital (the dream as capital, said Freud…). This is why schizo-analysis must inversely give itself over with all its forces to the necessary destructions. Destroy beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And never for this task will it have too malevolent an activity. Blow up Oedipus and castration, intervene brutally, each time a subject intones the song of myth or the verses of tragedy, always bring it back to the factory. As Charlus says, "but we don't give a damn about his old grandmother, eh, little scoundrel!" Oedipus and castration, nothing but reactional formations, resistances, blockages and armorings, the destruction of which does not come fast enough. Reich senses a fundamental principle of schizo-analysis when he says that the destruction of resistances must not wait for the discovery of the material.{246} But it is for an even more radical reason than the one he thought: it is that there is no unconscious material, such that schizo-analysis has nothing to interpret. There are only resistances, and then machines, machines of desire. Oedipus is a resistance; if we have been able to speak of the intrinsically perverse character of psychoanalysis, it is because perversion in general is the artificial re-territorialization of the flux of desire, of which machines on the contrary are the indices of deterritorialized production. Psychoanalysis re-territorializes on the couch, in the representation of Oedipus and of castration. Schizo-analysis must on the contrary release the deterritorialized flux of desire, in the molecular elements of desiring production. Let us recall the practical rule enunciated by Leclaire following Lacan, the rule of the right to non-sense as to the absence of link: you will not have reached the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you find or restore a link between two elements… (But why, afterwards, see in this extreme dispersion, machines dispersed in every machine, only a pure "fiction" that must give way to the Real defined as lack, Oedipus or castration returning at a gallop, at the same time that the absence of link is folded back onto a "signifier" of absence charged with representing it, with linking it itself and with making us pass back from one pole to the other of displacement? One falls back into the molar hole while claiming to unmask the real.)

251What 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 in a wholly different way than psychoanalysis believes. The decoded fluxes of desire form the free energy (libido) of the machines of desire. The machines of desire trace themselves out and point along a tangent of deterritorialization that traverses the representative milieus and runs along the body without organs. To depart, to flee, but by making flee… The machines of desire themselves are the flux-schizes or the cuts-fluxes that cut and flow at once on the body without organs: not the great wound represented in castration, but the thousand little connections, disjunctions, conjunctions through which each machine produces a flux in relation to another that cuts it, and cuts a flux that another produces. But these decoded and deterritorialized fluxes of desiring production, how would they not be folded back onto some representative territoriality, how would they not form yet another, even on the body without organs as the indifferent support of a final representation? Even those who best know how to "depart," who make of departure something as natural as being born and dying, those who plunge in search of the non-human sex, Lawrence, Miller, set up somewhere far off a territoriality that still forms an anthropomorphic and phallic representation, the Orient, Mexico, or Peru. Even the schizo's stroll or voyage does not effect great deterritorializations without borrowing territorial circuits: Molloy's stumbling march with his bicycle preserves the mother's room as residue of a goal; the wavering spirals of the Unnamable keep as their uncertain center the family tower around which he continues to turn while trampling his own; the infinite series of juxtaposed and unlocalized parks of Watt still has a reference to Mr. Knott's house, alone capable of "driving the soul outside," but also of recalling it to its place. We are all little dogs, we need circuits, and to be taken out for walks. Even those who best know how to disconnect themselves, to unplug, enter into connections of machines of desire that reform little earths. Even Gisela Pankow's great deterritorialized ones are led to discover, beneath the roots of the uprooted tree that traverses their body without organs, the image of a family castle.{247} We previously distinguished two poles of delirium, as the schizophrenic molecular line of flight and the paranoid molar investment; but it is just as much the perverse pole that opposes itself to the schizophrenic pole, as the reconstitution of territorialities to the movement of deterritorialization. And if perversion in the narrowest sense effects a very particular type of re-territorialization in artifice, perversion in the broad sense comprises all the types, not only the artificial ones, but the exotic, the archaic, the residual, the private, etc.: thus Oedipus and psychoanalysis as perversion. Even the schizophrenic machines of Raymond Roussel convert themselves into perverse machines of a theater that represents Africa. In short, no deterritorialization of the schizophrenic fluxes of desire that is not accompanied by global or local re-territorializations, which always reform stretches of representation. Moreover, one can evaluate the force and obstinacy of a deterritorialization only 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 man, a certain mulatto woman. Deterritorialization, one can never grasp it in itself, one grasps only indices of it in relation to territorial representations. Take the example of the dream: yes, the dream is Oedipal, and there is nothing to be surprised at, because it is a perverse re-territorialization in relation to the deterritorialization of sleep and nightmare. But why return to the dream, why make of it the royal road of desire and the unconscious, when it is the manifestation of a *surmoi*, of an over-powerful and over-archaized *moi* (the Urszene of the Urstaat?) And yet within the dream itself, 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 and of making flow, of carrying off and being carried off. The airplane of the parental coitus, the father's car, the grandmother's sewing machine, the little brother's bicycle, all objects of theft, in the double sense of *voler* [to fly / to steal]…, the machine is always infernal in the family dream. It introduces cuts and fluxes that prevent the dream from closing back upon its scene and systematizing itself in its representation. It brings to bear an irreducible factor of non-sense, which will develop elsewhere and outside, in the conjunctions of the real as such. Psychoanalysis gives a very poor account of this, with its Oedipal obstinacy; for one re-territorializes on persons and milieus, but one deterritorializes on machines. Is it Schreber's father who acts through the intermediary of the machines, or, on the contrary, the machines that function through the intermediary of the father? Psychoanalysis fixates on the imaginary and structural representatives of re-territorialization, whereas schizo-analysis follows the machinic indices of deterritorialization. Always the opposition of the neurotic on the couch, as ultimate and sterile earth, last exhausted colony, with the schizo out for a stroll in a deterritorialized circuit.

252Excerpt 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 he makes the plank fall on his head a second time — 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 all, at this moment of the film, of whether the spectator should see the accident coming, or be surprised by it. Everything happens as though the spectator, at that moment, were no longer in his seat, were no longer in a position to observe things. A sort of perceptual gymnastics has led him, step by step, not to identify with the character of *Modern Times*, but to feel so immediately the resistance of events that he accompanies this character, has the same surprises, the same forebodings, the same habituation as he does. Thus the famous eating machine, which is in one 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, also psychotic, of the worker caught in the machine, whose overturned head alone 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, in the course of the film's sequences, progressively displaces the reactions, makes them recede, level by level, until the moment when the spectator is no longer master of his circuits, and tends spontaneously to borrow either a shorter path, which is not practicable, which is barred, or 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 of the optimism of the final image. The two terms do not suit the film. Charles Chaplin, in *Modern Times*, rather sketches, on a very small scale, with a dry stroke, the outline of several oppressive manifestations. Fundamental ones. The principal character, whose role Chaplin holds, has neither to be passive nor active, consenting nor refractory, because he is the tip of the pencil that traces the outline, he is the stroke itself… That is why the final image is without optimism. One does not see what optimism would be doing as a conclusion to this account. This man and this woman seen from behind, all black, whose shadows are projected by no sun, are not advancing toward anything. The wireless poles bordering the road on the left, the leafless trees bordering it on the right do not meet at the horizon. There is no horizon. The bare hills opposite form only a bar merged with the void that overhangs them. This man and this woman are no longer alive, it leaps to the eye. It is not pessimistic either. What had to happen has happened. They have not killed themselves. They have not been gunned 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."{248}

253In its destructive task, schizo-analysis must proceed as fast as possible, but it can also only proceed with great patience, great prudence, undoing successively the representative territorialities and re-territorializations 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 exasperate it, or that make it turn in circles, and that re-territorialize it into neurosis, into perversion, into psychosis. To the point where 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 back through the old earths, study their nature, their density, search out how the machinic indices that allow it to be surpassed are grouped on each of them. Familial Oedipal earths of neurosis, artificial earths of perversion, asylum earths of psychosis — how, on them, to reconquer the process each time, to take up the voyage again constantly? The Recherche du temps perdu as great enterprise of schizo-analysis: all the planes are traversed up to their molecular line of flight, schizophrenic breakthrough; so in the kiss where the face of Albertine leaps from one plane of consistency to another in order finally to undo itself in a nebula of molecules. The reader, for his part, always risks stopping at some plane, and saying yes, that's where Proust explains himself. But the narrator-spider never ceases undoing webs and planes, taking up the voyage again, spying out the signs or indices that function as machines and will make him go further. This movement itself is humor, black humor. The familial and neurotic earths of Oedipus, where the global and personal connections are established — 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 shoe-lacing machine. The perverse earths of homosexuality, where the exclusive disjunctions of women with women, of men with men are established, leap in the same way as a function of the machinic indices that undermine them. The psychotic earths, with their on-the-spot conjunctions (Charlus is therefore certainly mad, Albertine therefore perhaps was!), are traversed in their turn up to the point where the problem no longer poses itself, no longer poses itself thus. The narrator continues his own affair, up to the unknown homeland, the unknown earth that is created only by his own work in progress, the Recherche du temps perdu "in progress," functioning as a machine of desire capable of gathering and processing all the indices. He goes toward those new regions where the connections are always partial and non-personal, the conjunctions nomadic and polyvocal, the disjunctions included, where homosexuality and heterosexuality can no longer be distinguished: world of transversal communications, where the at last conquered nonhuman sex mingles with the flowers, new earth where desire functions according to its molecular elements and fluxes. Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension, it takes place immobile, in a room and on a body without organs, intensive voyage that undoes all the earths for the benefit of the one it creates.

254The patient resumption of the process or on the contrary its interruption, the two are so tightly intertwined that they can only be evaluated one within the other. The voyage of the schizo, how would it be possible independently of certain circuits, how could it do without a land? But, inversely, how to be sure that these circuits do not reform the all-too-familiar lands of the asylum, of artifice, or of the family? We always come back to the same question: what does the schizo suffer from, the schizo whose sufferings are unspeakable? Does it suffer from the process itself, or rather from its interruptions, when it is neuroticized in the family on the land of Oedipus, when the one who does not let itself be oedipianized is psychoticized on asylum land, when the one who escapes the asylum and the family is pervertized in an artificial milieu? Perhaps there is only one illness, neurosis, the oedipal rot against which all the pathogenic interruptions of the process are measured. Most modern attempts — day hospital, night hospital, patient clubs, home hospitalization, institution, and even anti-psychiatry — remain threatened by a danger that Jean Oury has been able to analyze in depth: how to avoid the institution reforming an asylar structure, or constituting perverse and reformist artificial societies, or residual mothering and paternalist pseudo-families? We are not thinking of the 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 breed of patients begging by reaction that an asylum be given back to them, or a little Beckettian land, a trash bin in which to catatonize themselves in a corner. But, in a less overtly repressive genre, who says that the family is a good place, a good circuit for the deterritorialized schizo? It would be astonishing all the same, "the therapeutic potentialities of the familial milieu"… Then the entire village, the neighborhood? What molar unity will form a sufficiently nomadic circuit? How to prevent the chosen unity, even were it 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 subjected group? How will it give free rein to the process, when its entire molar organization has the function of binding the molecular process? And even anti-psychiatry, particularly sensitive to the schizophrenic breakthrough and to the intense voyage, exhausts itself in proposing the image of a group-subject which immediately repervertizes itself, with old schizos charged with guiding the more recent ones, and, by way of relay, little chapels or, shabbily, a convent in Ceylon.

255Only 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 locate social alienation and mental alienation on the same line, and tend to identify them by showing how the familial instance prolongs one into the other.{249} Between the two, however, the relation is rather one of included disjunction. For the decoding and deterritorialization of fluxes defines the very process of capitalism, that is to say, its essence, its tendency, and its external limit. But we know that the process does not cease to be interrupted, or the tendency thwarted, or the limit displaced, by reterritorializations and subjective representations that operate at the level of capital as subject (the axiomatic) as well as at the level of the persons who effectuate 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 relation of exclusion. But the deterritorialization of fluxes in general effectively merges with mental alienation, insofar as it includes the reterritorializations that let it itself subsist only as the state of a particular flux, flux of madness which is defined thus because it is charged with representing everything that escapes in the other fluxes from the axiomatics and from the applications of reterritorialization. Inversely, in all the reterritorializations of capitalism, one will be able to find the form of social alienation in act, insofar as they prevent fluxes from fleeing the system, and maintain labor within the axiomatic framework of property, and desire within the applied framework of the family; but this social alienation in turn includes mental alienation, which itself finds itself represented or reterritorialized into neurosis, perversion, psychosis (mental illnesses).

256A true 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 the fluxes the schizoid movement of their deterritorialization, in such a way that this character can no longer qualify a particular residue as flux of madness, but affects equally the fluxes of labor and of desire, of production, of knowledge and of creation in their most profound 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 supplement of all the other fluxes, including those of science and art — it being understood that it is called madness, and appears as such, only because it is deprived of this supplement and finds itself reduced to bearing witness all alone for deterritorialization as universal process. It is solely its undue privilege, beyond its strength, that drives it mad. Foucault in this sense announced an age in which madness would disappear, not only because it would be poured into the controlled space of mental illnesses ("great tepid aquariums"), but on the contrary because the exterior limit it designates would be crossed by other fluxes escaping control on every side, and carrying us along.{250} It must therefore be said that one will never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you ain't seen nothing yet, irreversible process. And when we consider what is profoundly artificial in the perverse re-territorializations, but also in the psychotic hospital re-territorializations, or the neurotic family ones, we cry out: more perversion still! more artifice still! until the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization necessarily creates by itself a new earth. Psychoanalysis is particularly satisfying in this regard: its whole perverse cure consists in transforming the family neurosis into an artificial neurosis (of transference), and in erecting the couch, little island with its commander, the psychoanalyst, into an autonomous territoriality of ultimate artifice. Then, scarcely a supplementary effort suffices for everything to topple, and to carry us at last toward other distances. The flick of schizo-analysis, which relaunches the movement, reconnects with the tendency, and pushes the simulacra to the point where they cease to be artificial images and 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 along with its tendency, its take-off, its very deterritorialization. Movement of the theater of cruelty; for it is the only theater of production, there where the fluxes cross the threshold of deterritorialization and produce the new earth (not a hope, but a simple "observation," a "blueprint," where the one who flees makes flee, and traces the earth in deterritorializing himself). Active vanishing point where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, the (schizo)-analytic machine become pieces and parts of one another.

SECTION 4

257But the negative or destructive task of schizo-analysis is in no way separable from its positive tasks (all are conducted necessarily at the same time). The first positive task consists in discovering in a subject the nature, formation, or functioning of his machines of desire, independently of any interpretation. What are they, your machines of desire, what do you make enter into your machines, and come out, how does it work, what are your non-human sexes? The schizo-analyst is a mechanic, and schizo-analysis is solely functional. In this respect it cannot stop at the still interpretive examination (from the standpoint of the unconscious) of the social machines in which the subject is caught as cog or as user, nor of the technical machines that are in his favored possession, or that he perfects or even fabricates by tinkering, nor of the use he makes of machines in his dreams and fantasies. These are still too representative, and represent units that are too large — even the perverse machines of the sadist or the masochist, the influencing machines of the paranoiac… We have seen in general that the pseudo-analyses of the "object" were truly the lowest degree of analytic activity, even and above all when they claim to double the real object with an imaginary object; and the dream-key is better than a marketplace psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, the consideration of all these machines, whether they be real, symbolic, or imaginary, must indeed intervene in a quite determinate manner: but as functional indices that put us on the track of the machines of desire, to which they are more or less close and akin. The machines of desire in fact are only reached from a certain threshold of dispersion onward, which lets neither their imaginary identity nor their structural unity subsist (these instances are still of the order of interpretation, that is, of the order of the signified or the signifier). The machines of desire have partial objects for their parts; the partial objects define the working machine or the working parts, but in such a state of dispersion that one part never ceases to refer to a part of an entirely other machine, like the red clover and the bumblebee, the wasp and the orchid flower, the bicycle horn and the rat's ass dead. Let us not hasten to introduce a term that would be like a phallus structuring the ensemble and personifying the parts, unifying and totalizing. Everywhere there is libido as machine energy, and neither the horn nor the bumblebee has the privilege of being a phallus: the latter only intervenes in the structural organization and the personal relations that follow from it, where each one, like the worker called up for war, abandons his machines and sets to struggling for a trophy as great absentee, with one same sanction, one same derisory wound for all, castration. The whole of this struggle for the phallus, ill-understood will to power, anthropomorphic representation of sex, this whole conception of sexuality that horrifies Lawrence, precisely because it is only a conception, because it is an idea that "reason" imposes on the unconscious and that it introduces into the drive-sphere, and not at all a formation of that sphere. It is there that desire finds itself trapped, specified to the human sex, in the molar ensemble unified and identified. But the machines of desire on the contrary live under the régime of dispersion of molecular elements. And one does not understand what the partial objects are if one does not see in them such elements, instead of parts of a whole even when fragmented. As Lawrence said, analysis does not have to concern itself with anything that resembles a concept or a person, "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.

258Let us therefore return again to the rule Serge Leclaire so well enunciated, even if he sees in it only a fiction instead of the 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 a same entity, nor the differentiations of a unique being, like the masculine and the feminine in human sex, but differents or really-distincts, distinct "beings," such as one finds in the dispersion of non-human sex (the clover and the bumblebee). As long as schizo-analysis does not reach these *dispars*, 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 fragmented organism, but an emission of pre-individual and pre-personal singularities, a pure multiplicity dispersed and anarchic, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, glued together by real distinction or by the very absence of any link. Such are the Beckettian schizoid sequences: pebbles, pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe-bowl, a small soft undetermined packet, a bicycle-bell cap, half a crutch… ("if one indefinitely stumbles upon the same set of pure singularities, one may think one has approached the singularity of the subject's desire").{252} Certainly, one can always institute, or restore some link between these elements: organic links between the organs or fragments of organs that may belong to 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 that 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 proposed by their inventor, Melanie Klein. For, organs or fragments of organs, they in no way refer back to an organism that would function phantasmatically as lost unity or totality to come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification or totalization. Every structure deposited, every memory abolished, 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. That is why, when we insisted earlier on the difference between machines of desire and all the figures of molar machines, we did indeed think that the ones were in the others and did not exist without them, but we had to mark the difference of régime and of scale between the two species.

259It is true that one will rather ask how these conditions of dispersion, of real distinction and of absence of link allow any machinic 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 connective synthesis of partial objects is indirect since one of them, at each point of its presence in the field, always cuts a flux that the other emits or produces relatively, even as it emits in turn a flux that others cut. It is the fluxes that are as if two-headed, and through which every productive connection operates such as we have tried to give an account of it with the notion of flux-schiz or cut-flux. So that the veritable activities of the unconscious, making flow and cutting, consist in the passive synthesis itself insofar as it ensures the relative coexistence and 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 that emit them, but not the fields of presence with respect to the objects a and b that populate and cut them, so that the partial a and the partial b become in this respect 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 can no longer be distinguished by exclusion there where the two fluxes no longer overlap: one then finds oneself 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 the fluxes, but of a permutation of the objects that emit them: one discovers fringes of interference at the edge of each field of presence, which testify to the residue of one flux in the other, and form residual conjunctive syntheses guiding the passage or the felt becoming from one to the other. Permutation with 2, 3, n organs; deformable abstract polygons that play upon the figurative Oedipal triangle, and never cease to undo it. All these indirect passive syntheses, by binarity, overlap or permutation, are one and the same machinery of desire. But who will tell the machines of desire of each one, what analysis minute enough? Mozart's machine of desire? "Stretch your ass up to your mouth, … ah, my ass burns me like fire, what can that mean? Perhaps a turd wants to come out? Yes, yes, turd, I know you, I see you and I smell you. What is it, is it possible?…"{253}

260These syntheses necessarily imply the position of a body without organs. This is because the body without organs is in no way the contrary of the organs-partial objects. 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 it can as the support which appropriates the production of flux. It can just as well repel the organs-objects as attract them, appropriate them to itself. But in repulsion no less than in attraction, it does not oppose itself to them, it merely assures its own opposition, and their opposition, with an organism. It is to the organism that the body without organs and the organs-partial objects are conjointly opposed. The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts, and which neither unifies nor totalizes them, which is added to them as a new really distinct part. When it repels the organs, thus in the assembly of the paranoiac machine, it marks the external limit of the pure multiplicity which they themselves form as non-organic and non-organized multiplicity. And when it attracts them and falls back upon them, in the process of a fetishist miraculating machine, it does not totalize them, no more does it unify them in the manner of an organism: the organs-partial objects hook themselves onto it, and enter upon it into the new syntheses of included disjunction and nomadic conjunction, of overlapping and permutation, which continue to repudiate the organism and its organization. It is indeed through the body, and indeed through the organs, that desire passes, but it is not through the organism. That is why the partial objects are not the expression of a fragmented, exploded organism, which would presuppose an undone totality or parts liberated from a whole; nor is the body without organs the expression of a re-glued or "de-differentiated" organism which would overcome its own parts. At bottom, the organs-parts and the body without organs are one and the same thing, one and the same multiplicity which must be thought as such by schizo-analysis. The partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs, and the body without organs, the raw matter of the partial objects.{254} The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to such or such a degree of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts which produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0. The body without organs 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 insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on that account exclude or oppose one another. The partial objects and the body without organs are the two material elements of the schizophrenic machines of desire: the former as working pieces, the latter as immobile motor; the former as micro-molecules, the latter as giant molecule — the two together in a relation of continuity at the two ends of the molecular chain of desire.

261The chain is like the apparatus of transmission or reproduction in the machine of desire. Insofar as it joins together (without uniting them, without unifying them) the body without organs and the partial objects, it merges at once with the distribution of the latter on the former, and with the folding-back of the former onto the latter from which appropriation follows. Therefore the chain implies another type of synthesis than the fluxes do: it is no longer the lines of connection that traverse the productive parts of the machine, but a whole network of disjunction on the registration surface of the body without organs. And no doubt we have been able to present things in a logical order in which the disjunctive synthesis of registration seemed to succeed the connective synthesis of production, a portion of the energy of production (libido) being converted into energy of registration (numen). But in fact there is no succession from the point of view of the machine itself, which ensures the strict coexistence of chains and fluxes, as of the body without organs and the partial objects; the conversion of a portion of the energy does not occur at one moment or another, but is a prior and constant condition of the system. The chain is the network of included disjunctions on the body without organs, insofar as they cut across the productive connections; it makes them pass to the body without organs itself, and thereby channels or "codifies" the fluxes. 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 the two together: on the one hand a salification of the filled body as supporting territoriality, on the other the erection of a despotic signifier on which the entire chain depends. In this respect, the axiomatic may be profoundly opposed to codes, since it works on decoded fluxes, but it itself can proceed only by carrying out re-territorializations and resuscitating the signifying unity. The very notions of code and of the axiomatic therefore seem to hold only for molar aggregates, where the signifying chain forms some determinate configuration on a support that is itself specified, and as a 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 wholly otherwise with the properly molecular chain: insofar as the body without organs is a non-specific and non-specified support that marks the molecular limit of the molar aggregates, the chain no longer has any other function than to deterritorialize the fluxes and to make them pass through the wall of the signifier. Therefore to undo the codes. The function of the chain is no longer to code the fluxes on a filled body of the earth, of the despot, or of capital, but on the contrary to decode them on the filled body without organs. It is a chain of flight, and no longer of code. The signifying chain has become a chain of decoding and of deterritorialization, which must be grasped and can be grasped only as the underside of codes and territorialities. This molecular chain is still signifying because it is made of signs of desire; but these signs are no longer signifying at all, insofar as they are under the régime of included disjunctions where everything is possible. These signs are points of any nature whatsoever, abstract machinic figures that play freely on the body without organs and form as yet no structured configuration (or rather form one no longer). As Monod says, we must conceive of a machine which is such by its functional properties, but not by its structure "in which nothing is discernible but the play of blind combinations."{255} Precisely, the ambiguity of what biologists call the genetic code is apt to make us understand such a situation: for if the corresponding chain effectively forms codes, insofar as it coils itself into exclusive molar configurations, it undoes the codes by unfurling itself along a molecular fiber that includes all possible figures. Likewise, in Lacan, the symbolic organization of structure, with its exclusions that come from the function of the signifier, has as its underside the real disorganization of desire. One would say that the genetic code refers back to a genic decoding: it suffices to grasp the functions of decoding and of deterritorialization in their proper positivity, insofar as they imply a particular, metastable state of the chain, distinct at once from every axiomatic and from every code. The molecular chain is the form under which the genic unconscious, always remaining a subject, reproduces itself. And this, we have seen, is the first inspiration of psychoanalysis: it does not add a code to all those that are already known. The signifying chain of the unconscious, Numen, does not serve to discover or to decipher codes of desire, but on the contrary to make pass fluxes of desire that are absolutely decoded, Libido, and to find in desire that which scrambles all codes and undoes all lands. It is true that Oedipus will reduce psychoanalysis to the rank of a simple code, with the familial territoriality and the signifier of castration. Worse still, it will happen that psychoanalysis itself wants to be worth an axiomatic: this is the famous turning point where it no longer even refers to the familial scene, but only to the psychoanalytic scene supposed to guarantee its own truth, and to the psychoanalytic operation supposed to guarantee its own success — the couch as axiomatized land, the axiomatic of the "cure" as successful castration! But, in thus recoding or axiomatizing the fluxes of desire, psychoanalysis makes a molar use of the signifying chain that entails a misrecognition of all the syntheses of the unconscious.

262The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of terror have well understood, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero-intensity. The model of death appears when the body without organs repels and deposes the organs — no mouth, no tongue, no teeth… to the point of auto-mutilation, to the point of suicide. And yet there is no real opposition between the body without organs and the organs as partial objects; the only real opposition is with the molar organism which is their common enemy. In the machine of desire, one sees the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces it to depose its organs, to immobilize them, to silence them, but also, pushed by the working parts, which then function in an autonomous or stereotyped manner, to reactivate them, to reinsufflate them with local movements. These are different parts of the machine, different and coexisting, different in their very coexistence. Therefore it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would be qualitatively opposed to the desires of life. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs. There are not two desires here, but two parts, two kinds of parts of the machine of desire, in the dispersion of the machine itself. Yet the problem subsists: how can this function together? For this is not yet a functioning, but only the (non-structural) condition 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, attracts the organs onto the body without organs, and appropriates them to it in the apparent objective movement. Repulsion is the condition of the machine's functioning, but attraction is the functioning itself. That the functioning depends on the condition, we see clearly insofar as it works only by breaking down. One can then say in what this working or functioning consists: in the cycle of the machine of desire, it is a matter of constantly translating, of constantly converting the model of death into something altogether other which is the experience of death. Of converting the death that rises from within (in the body without organs) into death that arrives from without (onto the body without organs).

263But it seems that the obscurity accumulates, for what is it, the experience of death, distinct from the model? There again is it a desire for death? A being-for-death? Or else an investment of death, even a speculative one? None of all that. The experience of death is the most ordinary thing of the unconscious, precisely because it makes itself in life and for life, in every passage or every 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 that which grows or diminishes under an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski said, "an influx is necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have tried to show in this sense how the relations of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, emotions, which imply a new energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the syntheses of conjunction. One would say that the unconscious as real subject has scattered around the whole perimeter of its cycle an apparent subject, residual and nomadic, that passes through all the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: last piece of the machine of desire, the adjacent piece. It is these intense becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions that feed deliriums and hallucinations. But, in themselves, they are closest to the matter whose zero degree they invest in itself. It is they that conduct 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 conducts in its own life the experience of death, and envelops it. And no doubt every intensity is extinguished in the end, every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Then death effectively arrives. 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 one does not finish dying," and the other under which this same subject, fixed as I, dies effectively, that is to say finally ceases to die since it finishes by dying, in the reality of a last instant that fixes it thus as I while undoing the intensity, bringing it back to the zero that it envelops.{256} From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personological deepening, but something altogether different: there is a return from the experience of death to the model of death, in the cycle of the machines of desire. The cycle is closed. For a new departure, because I is another? The experience of death must have given us precisely enough enlarged experience, to live and to know that the machines of desire do not die. And that the subject as adjacent piece is always a "one" that conducts the experience, not an I that receives the model. Because 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 to go from the model to the experience, and to depart again, return from the model to the experience, that is what schizophrenizing death is, the exercise of the machines of desire (their secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). They tell us this, the machines, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than the delirium and farther than the 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 putting to work of other pieces adjacent to the perimeter, which have no less the right to say One than we ourselves. "Let him burst in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has collapsed." The eternal return as experience, and deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire.

264How curious it is, the adventure of psychoanalysis. It ought to be a song of life, on pain of being worthless. Practically, it ought to teach us to sing life. And here from it emanates the saddest song of death, the most undone: eiapopeia. Freud, from the start, by his obstinate dualism of drives, never ceased wanting to limit the discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death instinct against Eros, it was no longer simply a limitation, it was a liquidation of libido. Reich was not deceived on this point, 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 repudiated the sexual position no less than Jung and Adler: indeed, the assignment of the death instinct deprives sexuality of its motor role, at least on one essential point which is the genesis of anxiety, since the latter becomes the autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its 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 desire of death — and how? by turning death in principle against death, by making turned-back death into a force of desire, by putting it at the service of a pseudo-life through an entire culture of the feeling of guilt… There is no need to begin this story over again, where psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up the old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, culture-broth, judging life, depreciating life, measuring it against death, and keeping 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 was going to take place in a modified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for the worse, but also for the better.{257} Psychoanalysis becomes the formation of a new type of priests, animators of bad conscience: it is from it that one is ill, but it is by it also that one will be cured! Freud did not hide what is really at issue with the death instinct: it is not a question of any fact, but only of a principle, a question of principle. The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, ungivable and not given in experience. This very point is altogether remarkable: it is because death, according to Freud, has neither model nor experience, that Freud makes of it a transcendent principle.{258} So much so that the psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since there was no model or experience in the unconscious, the others, that there was a death instinct precisely because there was no model and no experience. We say on the contrary: there is no death instinct because there is a model and an experience of death in the unconscious. Death is then a piece of machine of desire, which must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle.

265If Freud needs it as a principle, it is by virtue of the demands of the dualism that requires a qualitative opposition between the drives (you shall not exit conflict): when the dualism of the sexual drives and the drives of *le moi* has only a topical bearing, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But it is the same enterprise that continues itself and fortifies itself: to eliminate the machinic element of desire, the machines of desire. It is a matter of eliminating libido, insofar as the latter 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, since everything must pass through a neutral indifferent energy, the one that emanates from Oedipus, capable of being added to one or the other of the two irreducible forms — to neutralize, to mortify life.{259} The topical and dynamic dualities have for their goal to set aside the point of view of functional multiplicity which alone is economic. (Szondi will pose the problem well: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, that is to say oedipally, rather than n drive-genes, eight molecular genes for example, functioning machinically?) If one searches in this direction for the ultimate reason for which Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as principle, one will find it in practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the facts, it has much to do with the conception one forms of practice, and that one wishes to impose. Freud carried out 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 *le moi*, since he recoded it on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration —, then he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned against itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, 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 preserving life… Yes, even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, destroyer of himself, it is still the wound that constrains him to live…"{260} It is Oedipus, marshy land, that gives off a deep odor of rot 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 to love, 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 is necessary, in the name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananke, that desire turn against itself, that it produce its shadow or its ape, and find a strange artificial force to vegetate in the void, at the heart of its own lack. For better days? It is necessary — but who speaks thus? what abjection? — that it become desire to be loved, and worse, whimpering desire to have been loved, desire that is reborn from its own frustration: no, papa-mama didn't love me enough… Sick desire lies down on the couch, artificial marsh, little earth, little mother. "Look: you cannot walk, you stumble, you no longer know how to use your legs… and the sole cause of it is your desire to be loved, a sentimental and whimpering desire that takes all firmness from your knees."{261} 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 knitting woman; another time in an antiseptic 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 it the right means for better days? And are not all the destructions carried out by schizo-analysis worth more than this psychoanalytic conservatory, do they not partake more of an affirmative task? "Stretch out 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 the depositary of a universal wisdom (= code), but a vagabond like you (deterritorialized), perhaps you will cease to vomit your sewer waters, however melodious their echo in your ears; perhaps you will rise up on your two paws, and begin to sing with all the voice that God (numen) gave you as a present. To confess, to feign, to complain, to lament, it always costs dearly. To sing, that's free. And not only free — one enriches the others (instead of infecting them)… The world of phantasms is the one we have not finished conquering. It is a world of the past, not of the future. To go forward while clinging to the past, is to drag along with oneself the convict's ball and chain… There is not one of us who is not guilty of a crime: that, enormous one, of not living life fully."{262} You were not born Oedipus, you grew Oedipus in yourself; and you count on getting out of it by the phantasm, by castration, but that is in turn what you grew in Oedipus, namely yourself, the horrible circle. Shit on your whole mortifying theater, imaginary or symbolic. What does schizo-analysis demand? Nothing other than a bit of true relation with the outside, a bit of real reality. And we claim the right of a radical lightness and incompetence, that of entering the analyst's office, and saying it smells bad in here. It smells of great death and the little *moi*.

266Freud himself stated clearly the link between his "discovery" of the death instinct and the war of 14-18, which remains the model of capitalist war. And more generally, the death drive celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis with capitalism; before that, it was still a hesitant engagement. What we have tried to show concerning capitalism is how it inherited a mortifying transcendent instance, the despotic signifier, but made it effuse throughout the entire immanence of its own system: the filled body, become that of capital-money, suppresses the distinction between anti-production and production; it everywhere mixes anti-production with the productive forces, in the immanent reproduction of its own ever-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 pathway that psychoanalysis rediscovers and remakes with the death drive: the latter is no more than pure silence in its transcendent distinction from life, but effuses all the more through all the immanent combinations it forms with that same life. Immanent, diffuse, absorbed death — such is the state the signifier assumes in capitalism, the empty square that one displaces everywhere to plug up the schizophrenic escapes and to tourniquet the lines of flight. 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 weekend car accidents, planned death in Bengal, etc.). Modern man "raves much more. His delirium is a switchboard with thirteen telephones. He gives his orders to the world. He doesn't like the ladies. He is brave, too. He is decorated by the armful. In man's game, the death drive, the silent drive, is decidedly well placed, perhaps next to egoism. It holds the place of zero on the roulette wheel. The casino always wins. So does death. The law of large numbers works for it…"{263} This is for us the moment, if ever there was one, to take up a problem we had left in suspense. Granted that capitalism works on decoded fluxes as such, how is it that it is infinitely more distant from desiring production than are the primitive or even barbarian systems, which nevertheless code and overcode the fluxes? Granted that desiring production is itself a decoded and deterritorialized production, how is one to explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its statistics, operates an infinitely vaster repression of this production than the preceding régimes, which nevertheless did not lack repressive means? We have seen that the molar statistical aggregates of social production stood in a relation of variable affinity with the molecular formations of desiring production. What must be explained is that the capitalist aggregate is the least affine, at the very moment when it decodes and deterritorializes by the armful.

267The answer is death instinct, in calling instinct in general the conditions of life historically and socially determined by the relations of production and anti-production in a system. We know that molar social production and molecular desiring production must be judged both 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 manner potential and actualize themselves only in inverse ratio. That is to say: where the régimes are closest, the identity of nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and where the identity of nature appears at its maximum, the régimes differ to the highest degree. If we consider primitive or barbarian ensembles, we see that the subjective essence of desire as production finds itself referred back to great objectities, territorial or despotic body, which act as natural or divine presuppositions, which therefore ensure the coding or overcoding of the fluxes of desire by introducing them into systems of representation themselves objective. So one can say that the identity of nature between the two productions is there entirely hidden: as much by the difference between the objective *socius* and the subjective filled body of desiring production, as by the difference between the qualified codes and overcodings of social production and the chains of decoding or of deterritorialization of desiring production, and by the whole repressive apparatus represented in the savage prohibitions, the barbarian law and the rights of anti-production. And yet, far from the difference of régime being accentuated and deepened, it is on the contrary reduced to a minimum, because desiring production as absolute limit remains an exterior limit, or else remains unoccupied as an interiorized and displaced limit, so much so that the machines of desire function this side of their limit within the frame of the *socius* and its codes. This is why the primitive codes and even the despotic overcodings bear witness to a polyvocity which functionally brings them close to a chain of decoding of desire: the parts of machines of desire function in the very gears of the social machine, the fluxes of desire enter and exit through the codes which by the same stroke do not cease to inform the model and the experience of death elaborated in the unity of the social-desiring apparatus. And there is all the less death instinct in that the model and the experience are better coded in a circuit which does not cease to graft the machines of desire onto the social machine and to implant the social machine into the machines of desire. Death comes all the more from outside in that it is coded from within. This is true especially of the system of cruelty, where death inscribes itself in the primitive mechanism of surplus-value as in the movement of the finite blocks of debt. But, even in the system of despotic terror, where the debt becomes infinite and where death undergoes an exhaustion which tends to make of it a latent instinct, a model nonetheless subsists in the overcoding law, and an experience for the overcoded subjects, at the same time that anti-production remains set apart as the lord's share.

268It is very different in capitalism. Precisely because the flux of capital are decoded and deterritorialized flux, — precisely because the subjective essence of production discovers itself in capitalism, — precisely because the limit becomes interior to capitalism which does not cease to reproduce it, and also to occupy it as an interiorized and displaced limit —, the identity of nature must appear for itself between social production and desiring production. 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 mounts an apparatus of repression of which neither savagery nor barbarism could give us the idea. The fact is that, against the background of the collapse of the great objectities, the decoded and deterritorialized flux of capitalism are not taken up again or recuperated, but immediately seized in an axiomatic without code that relates them to the universe of subjective representation. Now this universe has for its function the splitting of the subjective essence (identity of nature) into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private property which reproduces the ever-enlarged interior limits, and that of abstract desire alienated in the privatized family which displaces ever narrower interiorized limits. It is the double alienation labor-desire that does not cease to increase and deepen the difference of régime at the heart of the identity of nature. At the same time as death is decoded, it loses its relation with a model and an experience, and becomes instinct, that is to say effuses in the immanent system where each act of production finds itself inextricably mixed with the instance of anti-production as capital. There where codes are undone, the death instinct seizes the repressive apparatus, and sets about directing the circulation of libido. Mortuary axiomatic. One can then believe in liberated desires, but which, like cadavers, feed on images. One does not desire death, but what one desires is dead, already dead: images. Everything labors in death, everything desires for death. In truth, capitalism has nothing to recuperate; or rather its powers of recuperation most often coexist with what is to be recuperated, and even precede it. (How many revolutionary groups as such are already in place for a recuperation 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 is precisely what gives them an apparent revolutionary position.) In such a world, there is not a single living desire that would not suffice to blow up the system, or that would not do so by one end through which everything would end up following and being engulfed — a question of régime.

269Here are the machines of desire, — with their three parts: the working parts, the immobile motor, the adjacent part, — their three energies: Libido, *Numen* and *Voluptas*, — their three syntheses: the connective syntheses of partial objects and fluxes, 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, a 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 belonging to deterritorialized ensembles. It is a matter of finding what someone's machines of desire are, how they work, with which syntheses, which racings, which constitutive misfirings, with which fluxes, which chains, which becomings in each case. Likewise this positive task cannot be separated from the indispensable destructions, from the destruction of the molar ensembles, structures and representations that keep the machine from functioning. It is not easy to recover the molecules, even the giant molecule, their paths, their zones of presence and their proper syntheses, across the great heaps that fill the preconscious, and that delegate their representatives into the unconscious itself, immobilizing the machines, silencing them, gumming them up, sabotaging them, jamming them, nailing them down. It is not the lines of pressure of the unconscious that matter, it is on the contrary its lines of flight. It is not the unconscious that puts pressure on consciousness, it is consciousness that puts pressure and a tourniquet on it, to keep it from fleeing. As for the unconscious, it is like the Platonic contrary at the approach of its contrary: it flees or it perishes. What we have tried to show from the beginning is how the productions and formations of the unconscious were, not simply repulsed by an agency 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, comprehensions, expressions that no longer have anything to do with its real functioning: thus all the statues, the Oedipal images, the phantasmatic stagings, the symbolics of castration, the effusion of the death instinct, the perverse re-territorializations. So that one can never, as in an interpretation, read the repressed through and in repression, since the latter never ceases to induce a false image of what it represses: illegitimate and transcendent uses of syntheses according to which the unconscious can no longer function in conformity with its own constituting machines, but can 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 gives rise to the inevitable illusions (including structure and the signifier) by which consciousness fashions for itself an image of the unconscious in conformity with its wishes — we are still pious, psychoanalysis remains in the pre-critical age.

270And no doubt these illusions would never take hold, if they did not benefit from a coincidence and a support in the unconscious itself, which secure the "grip." We have seen what this support is: it is originary repression, as exercised by the body without organs at the moment of repulsion, within molecular desiring production. Without this originary repression, repression properly speaking could never be delegated into the unconscious by molar forces, and crush desiring production. Repression properly speaking profits from an occasion without which it could not insinuate itself into the machinery of desire.{264} Contrary to psychoanalysis, which itself falls into the trap by making the unconscious fall into its trap, schizo-analysis follows the lines of flight and the machinic indices all the way to the machines of desire. If the essential of the destructive task is to undo the Oedipal trap of repression properly speaking, and all its dependencies, each time in a manner adapted to the "case," the essential of the first positive task is to secure the machinic conversion of originary repression, here too in a variably adapted manner. That is: to undo the blockage or the coincidence on which repression properly speaking rests, to transform the apparent opposition of repulsion (body without organs–partial-object machines) into a condition of real functioning, to secure this functioning in the forms of attraction and of the production of intensities, thereafter to integrate the misfires into attractive functioning as enveloping the zero degree within the produced intensities, and thereby to set the machines of desire going again. Such is the focal and delicate point, which holds for transference in schizo-analysis (to disperse, to schizophrenize the perverse transference of psychoanalysis).

SECTION 5

271The difference of régime should not, however, 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. So too there is no molecular chain that does not intercept and reproduce entire blocks of molar code or axiomatic, nor any such blocks that do not contain or seal fragments of molecular chain. A sequence of desire finds itself prolonged by a social series, or else a social machine has in its gears pieces of machines of desire. The desiring micro-multiplicities 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 the molar social investments, since in any case the molecular formations are such investments. That is why our terminology, concerning the two poles, has necessarily varied. Sometimes we opposed the molar and the molecular, as paranoid lines of integration, signifying and structured, and schizophrenic lines of flight, machinic and dispersed; or again as the tracing of perverse re-territorializations and the movement of schizophrenic deterritorializations. Sometimes, on the contrary, we opposed them as two great types of equally social investments, the one sedentary and bi-univocalizing, of reactionary or fascist tendency, the other nomadic and polyvocal, of revolutionary tendency. In fact, 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 no less invested than in the paranoid formula "I am one of yours, and very much of our own, 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 an investment as strong and determined as the other? And why are there two types of social investment, corresponding to the two poles? It is because the molar and the molecular are everywhere: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which varies only according to the two senses of subordination, depending on whether the molecular phenomena subordinate themselves to the great ensembles, or on the contrary subordinate them. At one of the poles, the great ensembles, the great forms of gregariousness, do not prevent the flight that carries them off, 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 distancing oneself from the social, in living on the margin: it makes the social take flight 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 blow up what must blow up, make fall what must fall, make take flight what must take flight, ensuring at each point the conversion of schizophrenia as process into effectively revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first of all the one who can no longer bear "all that," money, the stock exchange, the forces of death, as Nijinsky said — values, morals, fatherlands, religions and private certainties? From the schizo to the revolutionary there is only the entire difference between the one who flees, and the one who knows how to make what he flees flee, bursting a foul pipe, making a flood pass through, liberating a flux, re-cutting a schiz. 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 to flee is not courageous, one responds: 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 fascizing investments, the schizophrenic flight convertible into revolutionary investment. Blanchot says admirably, of this revolutionary flight, of this fall that must be thought and conducted as the most positive: "What is this flight? The word is poorly chosen to please. Courage, however, is to accept fleeing rather than living quietly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, fatherlands, religions and those private certainties that our vanity and our self-complacency generously bestow upon us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think to stand thus upright and at rest, among stable things. They know nothing of that immense rout into which they go, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous humming of their ever quicker steps which carry them impersonally by a great immobile movement. Flight before flight. [Take one of those men] who, having had the revelation of the mysterious drift, can no longer bear to live in the false semblances of the sojourn. At first he tries to take this movement upon himself. He would like to distance himself personally. He lives on the margin… [But] perhaps that is the fall, that it can no longer be a personal destiny, but the lot of each in all."{265} In this regard, the first thesis of schizo-analysis is: every investment is social, and in any case bears upon a historical social field.

272Let us recall the major traits of a molar formation or a form of gregariousness. They operate 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, finds itself composed as a whole, as a global or complete object. It is in relation to this new order that the partial objects of molecular order appear as a lack, while at the same time the whole itself is said to be lacking to the partial objects. It is thus that desire will be soldered to lack. The thousand cut-fluxes that define the positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity are folded back onto vacuoles of lack that operate this soldering in a statistical aggregate of molar order. Freud showed well in this sense how one passes from the psychotic multiplicities of dispersion, founded on cuts or schizzes, to large vacuoles globally determined, of the neurosis and castration type: the neurotic needs a global object in relation to which partial objects can be determined as lack and inversely.{266} But, more generally, it is the statistical transformation of molecular multiplicity into a molar aggregate that organizes lack on a large scale. Such an 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 proper to it (these means are not the same, for example, in a society of the despotic type, or in a capitalist society where the market economy brings them to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown). This soldering of desire with lack is precisely what gives desire collective and personal ends, goals, or intentions — instead of desire taken in the real order of its production which behaves as a molecular phenomenon devoid of goal and intention. Therefore one must not believe that statistical accumulation is a result of chance, a chance result. It is on the contrary the fruit of a selection exerted on the elements of chance. When Nietzsche says that selection is exerted most often in favor of the great number, he launches a fundamental intuition that will inspire modern thought. For he means that great numbers or great aggregates do not preexist a selective pressure that would draw out singular lines from them, but that, quite to the contrary, they are born of this selective pressure that crushes, eliminates, or regularizes singularities. It is not selection that presupposes a primary gregariousness, but gregariousness that presupposes selection, and that is born of it. "Culture" as a selective process of marking or inscription invents the great numbers in favor of which it is exerted. This is why statistics is not functional but structural, and bears on chains of phenomena that selection has already placed in a state of partial dependence (Markov chains). One sees this even in the genetic code. In other words, gregariousnesses are never arbitrary, they refer back to qualified forms that produce them by creative selection. The order is not: gregariousness → selection, but on the contrary molecular multiplicity → forms of gregariousness exerting selection → molar or gregarious aggregates that follow from it.

273What are these qualified forms, "formations of sovereignty" as Nietzsche said, which play the role of totalizing, wearing, signifying objectities, fixing organizations, lacks and goals? They are the filled bodies which determine the different modes of the *socius*, veritable heavy aggregates of the earth, of the despot, of capital. Filled bodies or clothed matters, which are distinguished from the filled 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 not explained by any goal, any end, since it is they that fix goals and ends. The form or quality of this or that *socius*, body of the earth, body of the despot, body of money-capital, depends on a state or degree of intensive development of the productive forces insofar as these define a man-nature independent of all social formations, or rather common to all (what the Marxists call "the givens of useful labor"). The form or quality of the *socius* is therefore itself produced, but as the unengendered, that is, as the natural or divine presupposition of the production corresponding to this or that degree, to which it gives a structural unity and apparent goals, onto which it falls back and whose forces it appropriates, determining the selections, accumulations, 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 gregariousness as *socius* or filled body, under which the molecular formations constitute molar aggregates.

274We can therefore specify the second thesis of schizo-analysis: within social investments one will distinguish the unconscious libidinal investment of group or of desire, and the preconscious investment of class or of interest. The latter passes through the great social goals, and concerns the collective organism and 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 ensemble under consideration. 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 therefore itself refers back to the extractions of flux, to the detachments of code, to the subjective remainders or revenues. And it is quite true, from this point of view, that an ensemble practically comprises only a single class, the one that has an interest in such a régime. The other class can constitute itself only through a counter-investment that creates its own interest as a function of new social goals, of new organs and means, of a new possible state of the social syntheses. Hence the necessity for the other class to be represented by a party apparatus that fixes these goals and these means, and operates in the domain of the preconscious a revolutionary cut (for example, the Legist cut). In this domain of preconscious investments of class or of interest, it is therefore easy to distinguish what is reactionary, or reformist, or what is revolutionary. But those who have an interest, in this sense, are always smaller in number than those whose interest, in a way, "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 contradictions persisting within the dominant class, that is, within the class tout court. This is evident in the capitalist régime where, for example, primitive accumulation can take place only to the profit of a restricted fraction of the whole of the dominant class.{267} But it is no less evident for the Russian Revolution with its formation of a party apparatus.

275This situation, however, 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 revolutionary preconscious 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 recognize, that one wants 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 was posing 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 derived concepts that made him miss the materialist psychiatry of which he dreamed, that prevented him from seeing how desire was part of the infrastructure, and that enclosed him in the duality of the objective and the subjective (from then on, psychoanalysis was referred back 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 within the economic infrastructure itself and its investments. Libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal, although both correspond to two different modes of investment of the same reality as social reality. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and that explains how these latter can be troubled, perverted in "the darkest organization," beneath all ideology.

276Libidinal investment does not bear on the régime of social syntheses, but on the degree of development of the forces or energies on which these syntheses depend. It does not bear on the extractions, detachments, and remainders operated by these syntheses, but on the nature of the fluxes and codes that condition them. It does not bear on social ends and means, but on the filled body as *socius*, on the formation of sovereignty or the form of power for itself, which is devoid of sense and end, since senses and ends derive from it and not the inverse. Doubtless interests predispose us to such or such libidinal investment, but they do not merge with it. Much more, it is unconscious libidinal investment that determines us to seek our interest on one side rather than another, to plant our ends on this path, persuaded that this is where we have all our chances — since love drives us there. The manifest syntheses are only the preconscious gradimeters of a degree of development, the apparent interests and ends are only the preconscious exponents of a social filled body. As Klossowski says in his profound commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power merges with the violence it exercises through its very absurdity, but can only exercise this violence by assigning itself ends and senses in which even the most enslaved elements participate: "Sovereign formations will have no other aim than to mask the absence of end and sense of their sovereignty by the organic end of their creation," and thus to convert absurdity into spirituality.{268} This is why it is so vain to seek to distinguish what is rational and what is irrational in a society. Certainly, the role, the place, the share one has in a society, and which one inherits as a function of the laws of social reproduction, push the libido to invest such *socius* as filled body, such absurd power in which we participate or have chances of participating under cover of ends and interests. Still, there is a disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power and the degree of development for themselves. Even in him who has an interest in them — and who loves them with more than the love of his interest. Even in him who has no interest in them, and who substitutes for this counter-interest the force of a strange love. Fluxes that flow on the porous filled body of a *socius*, there is the object of desire, higher than all ends. It will never flow enough, it will never cut, it will never code enough — and in that way! How beautiful the machine is! The officer of the Penal Colony shows what the intense libidinal investment of a machine that is not only technical but social can be, 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, flowing on the filled body of capital and forming an absurd power. Each one in his class and his person receives something of this power, or is excluded from it, insofar as the great flux is converted into revenues, wage or enterprise revenues, which define ends or spheres of interest, extractions, detachments, shares. But the investment of the flux itself and of its axiomatic, which certainly demands no precise knowledge of political economy, is the affair of the unconscious libido inasmuch as it is presupposed by the ends. We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded, invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and in which they always find an interest, since that is where they seek it and measure it. Interest always follows. Anti-production effuses in the system: anti-production will be loved for itself, 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, there is what makes one hard, and it is not ideology, it is economy. Capitalism collects and possesses the power of end and interest (power), but it feels a disinterested love for the absurd and non-possessed power of the machine. Oh, certainly, it is not for himself or for his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. Violence without end, joy, pure joy of feeling oneself a cog of the machine, traversed by fluxes, cut by schizzes. To put oneself in the position where one is thus traversed, cut, buggered by the *socius*, to seek the right place where, according to the ends and interests assigned to us, one feels something pass that has neither interest nor end. A kind 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.

277Now, not only can the libidinal investment of the social field disturb 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 is so in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious investment bears on new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it may be that at least a part of the unconscious libido continues to invest the old body, the old form of puissance, its codes and its fluxes. This is all the easier, and the contradiction all the better masked, in that no state of forces prevails over the old one without conserving or resuscitating the old filled body as a residual and subordinated territoriality (thus the way in which the capitalist machine resuscitates the despotic Urstaat, or the way in which the socialist machine conserves a State and market monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the libido weds the new body, the new puissance which corresponds to the aims and syntheses effectively revolutionary from the standpoint of the preconscious, it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For these are not the same cuts that pass at the level of unconscious desires and at the level of preconscious interests. The preconscious revolutionary cut is sufficiently defined by the promotion of a *socius* as a filled body bearing new aims, as a form of puissance or formation of sovereignty which subordinates desiring production 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 fact, the unconscious revolutionary cut implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the *socius* to which desiring production in turn subordinates itself, under the condition of an inverted puissance, an inverted subordination. The preconscious revolution refers back to a new régime of social production which creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests; but the unconscious revolution refers not only to the *socius* that conditions this change as a form of puissance, it refers within this *socius* to the régime of desiring production as a puissance inverted upon the body without organs. It is not the same state of fluxes and schizzes: in one case the cut is between two *socius*, the second of which is measured by its capacity to introduce the fluxes of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case, the cut is within the *socius* itself, insofar as it has the capacity to make the fluxes of desire pass along their positive lines of flight, and to re-cut them along productive cuts of cuts. The most general principle of schizo-analysis is that, always, desire is constitutive of a social field. In any case, it belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring production. 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-and-such a form of puissance and gregariousness, or according to whether it enslaves the great ensemble to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms 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 libidinal one belongs to the second level and is defined by the motor role of desiring production and the position of its multiplicities. One therefore conceives that a group may be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so, and may even remain fascist and policelike, from the standpoint of its libidinal investments. Really revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; never does an apparatus of interest take the place of a machine of desire.

278A revolutionary group with respect to the preconscious remains a subjected group, even in conquering power, insofar as this power itself refers back to a form of *puissance* that continues to enslave and to crush desiring production. At the moment when it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjected group: subordination to a *socius* as fixed support which attributes productive forces to itself, extracts and absorbs their surplus-value; the effusion of anti-production and of mortiferous elements in the system, which feels itself and wills itself all the more immortal; the phenomena of "*surmoi*-ization," of narcissism and of group hierarchy, the mechanisms of repression of desire. A group-subject, on the contrary, 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 always mortal formations that conjure away in it the effusion of a death instinct; to the symbolic determinations of subjection, it opposes real coefficients of transversality, without hierarchy or group *surmoi*. What complicates everything, it is true, is that the same men can participate in the two sorts of groups under diverse relations (Saint-Just, Lenin). Or that one and the same group can present both characteristics at once, in diverse but coexisting situations. A revolutionary group may already have rediscovered the form of a subjected group, and yet under certain conditions be determined to play once more the role of a group-subject. One never ceases passing from one type of group to the other. Group-subjects never cease deriving by rupture from subjected groups: they make desire pass through, and they cut into it ever further, crossing the limit, referring social machines back to the elementary forces of desire that form them.{269} But, conversely, they also never cease closing back up, remodeling themselves on the image of subjected groups: re-establishing interior limits, reforming a great cut that the fluxes will not pass, will not cross, subordinating the machines of desire to the repressive ensemble they constitute on a large scale. There is a speed of subjection which is opposed to the coefficients of transversality; and what revolution does not have the temptation to turn against its group-subjects, qualified as anarchist or irresponsible, and to liquidate them? How to conjure away the fatal slope that makes a group pass from its revolutionary libidinal investments to revolutionary investments that are no more than preconscious or of interest, and then to preconscious investments that are no more than reformist? And even, where to situate such or such a group? did it ever have revolutionary unconscious investments? The surrealist group, with its fantastic subjection, its narcissism and its *surmoi*? (It happens that a single man functions as flux-schiz, as group-subject, 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 when things begin to go bad, one must always go further back. Freud as group *surmoi*, oedipianizing grandfather, installing Oedipus as interior limit, with all sorts of little Narcissuses around him, and Reich the marginal, tracing a tangent of deterritorialization, making fluxes of desire pass through, 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 there is no question, as we shall see, of a program.

279The task of schizo-analysis is therefore to attain the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are distinguished from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they can not only thwart the latter, but coexist with them in opposed modes. In the conflict of generations, one hears the old reproach the young, in the most malevolent way, for putting their desires (car, credit, loan, girl-boy relations) before their interest (work, savings, good marriage). But in what appears to others as raw desire, there are still complexes of desire and of interest, and a mixture of precisely reactionary and vaguely revolutionary forms of the one as well as of the other. The situation is altogether tangled. It seems that schizo-analysis can dispose only of indices — machinic indices — to disentangle, at the level of groups or of 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, confer no privilege, so long as sexuality remains enclosed within the frame of the "dirty little secret." One may well publish the secret, demand its right to publicity, one may even disinfect it, treat it in a scientific and psychoanalytic way — one rather risks killing desire, or inventing for it forms of liberation more dismal than the most repressive prison — so long as one has not torn sexuality away from the category of the secret even when public, even when disinfected, that is, from the Oedipal-narcissistic origin imposed upon it as the lie under which it can only become cynical, ashamed, or mortified. It is a lie to claim to liberate sexuality, and to demand rights for it over the object, the aim, and the source, while maintaining the corresponding flux within the limits of an Oedipal code (conflict, regression, solution, sublimation of Oedipus…) and while continuing to impose upon it a familialist and masturbatory form or motivation that renders vain in advance every prospect 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 stock, charged solely with ensuring their differentiation into two non-communicating series, instead of making appear their reciprocal inclusion and their transversal communication in the decoded flux of desire (included disjunctions, local connections, nomadic conjunctions). In short, sexual repression, more vigorous than ever, will survive all publications, demonstrations, emancipations, protestations as to the freedom of objects, of sources, and of 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.

280Lawrence shows profoundly that sexuality, including chastity, is a matter of flux, "an infinity of different and even opposed fluxes." Everything depends on the manner in which these fluxes, whatever their object, source, and aim, are coded and cut according to constant figures, or on the contrary taken up in chains of decoding that cut them again according to mobile and non-figurative points (the flux-schizzes). Lawrence attacks the poverty of immutable identical images, figurative roles which are so many garrotes upon the fluxes of sexuality: "dark, mistress, woman, mother" — one could just as well say "homosexuals, heterosexuals," etc. —, all these roles are distributed by the Oedipal triangle, father-mother-*moi*, a representative *moi* being supposed to define itself in function of the father-mother representations, by fixation, regression, assumption, sublimation, and all this under what rule? The rule of the great Phallus that no one possesses, despotic signifier animating the most miserable struggle, common absence for all the reciprocal exclusions in which the fluxes dry up, desiccated by bad conscience and ressentiment. "To put woman on a pedestal, for example, or on the contrary to render her unworthy of any importance: to make of her a model housewife, a model mother or a model wife, are simply ways of evading any 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 will answer it. Or else it is a painful, discordant vibration, harsh to the ear, that advances wounding all those who find themselves within its reach. It is the same for man."{270} Let us not mock too quickly the pantheism of fluxes present in such texts: it is not easy to de-Oedipianize even nature, even landscapes, to the point at which Lawrence knew how to do it. The fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and schizo-analysis is the following: it is that schizo-analysis attains a non-figurative and non-symbolic unconscious, pure abstract figural in the sense in which one speaks of abstract painting, flux-schizzes or real-desire, taken up beneath the minimal conditions of identity.

281What does psychoanalysis do, and first of all what does Freud do, if not maintain sexuality under the deathly yoke of the little secret, while finding a medicinal means of making it public, of turning it into an open secret, the analytic Oedipus? We are told: come now, this is quite normal, everyone is like this, but one continues to entertain about sexuality the same humiliating and degrading conception, the same figurative conception as that of the censors. Assuredly, psychoanalysis has not carried out its pictorial revolution. There is a thesis to which Freud is much attached: the libido invests the social field as such only on condition of desexualizing itself and sublimating itself. If he is so attached to it, it is because he wants first of all to maintain sexuality within the narrow frame of Narcissus and Oedipus, of *le moi* and the family. Henceforth, any sexual libidinal investment of social dimension appears to him to bear witness to a pathogenic state, "fixation" upon narcissism, or "regression" to Oedipus and the pre-Oedipal stages, by which will be explained both homosexuality as reinforced drive and paranoia as means of defense{271}. We have seen, on the contrary, that what the libido invested, through loves and sexuality, was the social field itself in its economic, political, historical, racial, cultural determinations, etc.: the libido does not cease to delirialize History, continents, kingdoms, races, cultures. Not that it is appropriate to put historical representations in the place of the familial representations of the Freudian unconscious, or even of the archetypes of a collective unconscious. It is only a matter of registering that our amorous choices are at the crossing of "vibrations," that is to say express connections, disjunctions, conjunctions of flux that traverse a society, that enter and leave it, linking it to other societies, ancient or contemporary, distant or vanished, dead or yet to be born, Africas and Orients, always by the subterranean thread of the libido. Not geo-historical figures or statues, even though our apprenticeship takes place more readily with them, with books, with histories, with reproductions, than with our mama. But flux and codes of *socius* which figure nothing, which only designate zones of libidinal intensity on the body without organs, and which find themselves emitted, captured, intercepted by the being whom we are then determined to love, like a sign-point, a singular point in the whole network of the intensive body that responds to History, that vibrates with it. *Gradiva*, never has Freud gone 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 the 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 the 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 among men. Loves and sexuality are the exponents or the gradimeters, this time unconscious, of the libidinal investments of the social field. Every being loved or desired is worth an agent of collective enunciation. And it is certainly not, as Freud believed, the libido that must desexualize itself 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 unsublimated libido and of its sexual investments.

282To those seeking a thesis topic on psychoanalysis, one should not recommend vast considerations on analytic epistemology, but rather modest and rigorous topics such as: the theory of maids and house-servants in Freud's thought. There the real indices lie. Because, on the subject of maids, present everywhere in the cases studied by Freud, an exemplary hesitation is produced in Freudian thought, too quickly resolved in favor of what would become a dogma of psychoanalysis. Philippe Girard, in unpublished remarks that seem to us to be of great import, poses the problem at several levels. In the first place, Freud discovers "his own" Oedipus in a complex social context that brings into play the elder half-brother from the wealthy branch of the family, and the thieving maid as a poor woman. In the second place, the family romance and fantasmatic activity in general will be presented by Freud as a veritable drift through the social field, in which persons of a higher or lower rank are substituted for the parents (the son of a princess kidnapped by gypsies, or the son of a poor man taken in by the bourgeois); Oedipus was already doing this when he claimed a humble birth and domestic parents. In the third place, the rat man not only installs his neurosis in a social field determined from end to end as military, he not only makes it turn around a torture that drifts in from the Orient, but within 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 underscore these themes which suffice to call all of Oedipus into question; and he shows the existence of a "social complex" in which the subject, sometimes tends to assume his own role, but at the price of a doubling of the sexual object into rich woman and poor woman, sometimes secures the unity of the object, but this time at the price of a doubling of "his own social function," at the other end of the chain. In the fourth place, the wolf man manifests a decisive taste for the poor woman, the peasant woman on all fours washing laundry or the maid washing the floor.{272} Now the fundamental problem regarding these texts is as follows: must one see, in all these sexual-social investments of the libido and these choices of objects, mere dependencies of a familial Oedipus? must Oedipus be saved at all costs by interpreting them as defenses against incest (thus the family romance, or Oedipus's own wish to have been born of poor parents who would render him innocent)? must they be understood 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, at work, 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 impregnating Oedipus with a fourth "symbolic" term charged with accounting for the doublings by which the libido invests the social field)? Freud firmly chooses this direction; all the more firmly because, by his own admission, he wants to settle his accounts with Jung and Adler. And, having ascertained in the case of the wolf man the existence of a "tendency to debase" the woman as object of love, he concludes that it is only a matter of a "rationalization," and that "the real and deep determination" leads us back as always to the sister, to mama, considered as the sole "purely erotic motives"! And, taking up the eternal song of Oedipus, the eternal lullaby, he writes: "The child places himself above social differences which, for him, do not mean much, and he classes persons of inferior condition in the series of parents when those persons love him as his parents love him."{273}

283We 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 the libido in favor of an individual and social will to power, or of a prehistoric collective unconscious — or you will recognize Oedipus, will make of it the sexual abode of the libido, and will make of papa-mama "the purely erotic motive." Oedipus, touchstone of the pure psychoanalyst on which to sharpen the sacred knife of successful castration. What then was the other direction, glimpsed for a moment by Freud apropos of the family romance, before the Oedipal trap closed shut? The one Philippe Girard rediscovers, at least hypothetically: there is no family in which vacuoles are not arranged, and through which extra-familial cuts do not pass, by which the libido rushes in to invest sexually the non-familial, that is, the other class determined under the empirical species of the "richer or the poorer," and sometimes of 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 at the heart of the family itself? The other class is in no way grasped by the libido as a magnified or miserabilized image of the mother, but as the stranger, non-mother, non-father, non-family, index of what is non-human in sex, without which the libido would not rise up 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, thereby, of the social field. There is no question of denying the importance of parental coitus, and of the position of the mother; but, when this position makes her resemble a floor-scrubber, or an animal, what authorizes Freud to say that the animal or the maid stands for the mother, independently of social or generic differences, instead of concluding that the mother also functions as something other than mother, and arouses in the child's libido an entire differentiated social investment at the same time as a relation to non-human sex? For whether the mother works or not, whether the mother is of richer or poorer origin than the father, etc., these are cuts and flux that traverse the family, but that exceed it on all sides and are not familial. From the beginning we have been asking whether the libido knows father-mother, or whether it makes the parents function as something altogether other, agents of production in relation with other agents in social-desiring production. From the point of view of libidinal investment, the parents are not only open onto the other, they are themselves cut across and doubled by the other who de-familializes them according to the laws of social production and desiring production: the mother herself functions 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 bursts apart the properly familial determinations. What the orphan libido invests is a social field of desire, a field of production and of anti-production with its cuts and its flux, where the parents are grasped in non-parental functions and roles confronted with other roles and other functions. Is this to say that the parents have no unconscious role as such? Of course they have one, but in two well-determined ways that further deprive them of their supposed autonomy. In conformity with the distinction embryologists make apropos of the egg between stimulus and organizer, the parents are stimuli of any value whatever that trigger the distribution of gradients or zones of intensity on the body without organs: it is in relation to them that wealth and poverty, the relatively richer and poorer, will be situated in each case, as empirical forms of social difference — so that they themselves arise anew, within this difference, distributed in this or that zone, but under a species other 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. In the second place, the parents as parents are terms of application that express the folding-back of the social field invested by the libido onto a finite set of arrival, where the latter finds nothing but impasses and blockages in conformity with the mechanisms of repression-repression at work in the field: Oedipus, such is Oedipus. In each of these senses, the third thesis of schizo-analysis posits the primacy of the libidinal investments of the social field over familial investment, both from the point of view of fact and of right, stimulus of any kind at the departure, 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 dwarfism).

284One often has the impression that families have heard the lesson of psychoanalysis only too well, even from afar or in diffuse fashion, in the air of the times: they play at Oedipus, sublime alibi. But behind this there is an economic situation, the mother reduced to housework, or to difficult and uninteresting work outside, the children whose future state remains uncertain, the father who is fed up with feeding all these people — in short, a fundamental relation with the outside, of which the psychoanalyst washes his hands, too attentive to making sure his clients play their little game properly. Now the economic situation, the relation with the outside, is what the libido invests and counter-invests as sexual libido. One gets a hard-on according to the flux and their cuts. Let us consider for a moment the motivations for which someone undertakes psychoanalysis: it is a matter of 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 wife's analysis. This is not the only time that we encounter the duality of money, as structure of external financing and as means of internal payment, with the objective "dissimulation" it carries, 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 the woman renounce her desire for the penis, and that the man too renounce his male protest… We say that there is not a woman, not a child, in particular, who can as such "assume" her situation in a capitalist society, precisely because this situation has nothing to do with the phallus and castration, but bears strictly on an unbearable economic dependence. And the women and children who succeed in "assuming" do so only through detours, and through determinations entirely 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 of castration, the machine for putting lack into desire, for drying up all the flux, and for making of all the cuts of the outside and the real one and the same cut with the outside, with the real. Of the outside, there always penetrates too much for the analyst's taste, into the analyst's office. Even the closed family scene still seems to him an excessive outside. He promotes the pure analytic scene, office Oedipus and castration, which must be its own reality, its own proof, and which, contrary to motion, proves itself only by not working, and by not ending. Psychoanalysis has become a thoroughly stupefying drug, in which the strangest personal dependence allows clients to forget, for the duration of the sessions on the couch, the economic dependences that push them there (a little as the decoding of flux brings about a reinforcement of serfdom). Do they know what they are doing, these psychoanalysts who oedipianize women, children, negroes, animals? We dream of entering their place, opening the windows, and saying: it smells stuffy in here, a bit of relation with the outside… For desire does not survive, cut off from the outside, cut off from its economic and social investments and counter-investments. And, if there is a "purely erotic motive," to speak like Freud, it is certainly not Oedipus that gathers it up, nor the phallus that moves it, nor castration that transmits it. The erotic motive, purely erotic, traverses the four corners of the social field, everywhere machines of desire agglutinate or disperse within social machines, and where choices of love-object occur at the crossroads, following lines of flight or of integration. Will Aaron leave with his flute, which is not phallus, but machine of desire and process of deterritorialization?

285Suppose everything is conceded to us: it is conceded only afterwards. It is only afterwards that the libido would invest the social field, and would "do" the social and the metaphysical. Which permits saving the basic Freudian position, according to which the libido must desexualize itself in order to operate such investments, but begins with Oedipus, *moi*, father and mother (the preoedipal stages relating structurally or eschatologically to the oedipal organization). We have seen that this conception of the afterwards implied a radical misreading of the nature of the actual factors. For: either the libido is caught up in molecular desiring production, and it ignores persons as much as *le moi*, even the almost undifferentiated *moi* of narcissism, since its investments are already differentiated, but following the prepersonal régime of partial objects, of singularities, of intensities, of cogs and parts of machines of desire in which one would have difficulty recognizing either mother or father, or *moi* (we have seen how contradictory it was to invoke partial objects and to make them the representatives of parental personages or the supports of familial relations). Or else the libido invests persons and a *moi*, but it is already caught up in a social production and social machines that differentiate them not only as familial beings, but as derivatives of the molar ensemble to which they belong under this other régime. It is indeed true that the social and the 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 afterwards. Always Lindner's painting, where the fat little boy has already connected a machine of desire to a social machine, short-circuiting the parents, who can intervene only as agents of production and of anti-production in one case as in the other. There is only the social and the metaphysical. If something supervenes afterwards, it is certainly not the social and metaphysical investments of the 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 infancy: actual does not signify recent as opposed to infantile, but in act, as opposed to what is virtual, and to come under certain conditions. Oedipus, virtual and reactional. Consider in fact the conditions under which Oedipus arrives: a starting ensemble, transfinite, constituted by all the objects, the agents, the relations of social-desiring production, finds itself folded back onto a finite familial ensemble as ensemble of arrival (minimum, three terms, which one can and even must increase, but not to infinity). Such an application supposes in fact a fourth mobile, extrapolated term, the abstract symbolic phallus, charged with effecting the folding or the correspondence; but it operates effectively on the three persons constitutive of the minimum familial ensemble, or on their substitutes — father, mother, child. One does not stop there, since these three terms tend to reduce themselves to two, whether in the scene of castration where the father kills the child, or in the scene of incest 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. That is why we speak of an oedipal-narcissistic machine, at the issue of which *le moi* encounters its own death, as the zero term of a pure abolition that had haunted oedipalized desire from the beginning and that one now identifies, at the end, as being Thanatos. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, Oedipus is a race toward death.

286Since the nineteenth century, the study of mental illnesses and madness has remained prisoner of the familialist postulate and its correlates, the personological postulate and the egoic postulate. We have seen, following Foucault, how nineteenth-century psychiatry had conceived the family as at once the cause and the judge of illness, and the closed asylum as an artificial family charged with interiorizing guilt and bringing forth 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 requirements outside the asylum, and first of all imposed a certain "free," interior, intensive, phantasmatic use of the family, which seemed particularly suited to what was being isolated as neuroses. But, on the one hand, the resistance of the psychoses and, on the other, the necessity of taking into account a social etiology, led psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to redeploy under open conditions the order of an extended family, still supposed to hold the secret of the illness as of the cure. After interiorizing the family into Oedipus, Oedipus is exteriorized into the symbolic order, into the institutional order, into the communitarian order, the sectorial order, etc. Therein lies a constant of all modern attempts. And if this tendency appears most naively in adaptive community psychiatry — "therapeutic return to the family," to the identity of persons and the integrity of the *moi*, the whole being achieved through castration in a holy triangular form —, the same tendency in more hidden forms operates in other currents. It is no accident that Lacan's symbolic order has been detuned, used to install a structural Oedipus applicable to psychosis, and to extend familialist coordinates outside their real and even imaginary domain. It is no accident that institutional analysis has trouble guarding itself against the reconstitution of artificial families, where the symbolic order, incarnated in the institution, reforms group Oedipuses, with all the lethal characteristics of subjected groups. But, still more, anti-psychiatry has sought in redeployed families the secret of a causality at once social and schizogenic. It is perhaps there that the mystification appears most clearly, because anti-psychiatry was the most apt, by certain of its aspects, to shatter the traditional familial reference. For what does one see in the American familialist studies, as taken up and pursued by the anti-psychiatrists? Entirely ordinary families, entirely ordinary familial mechanisms, an ordinary familial logic — that is, hardly even neuroticizing — are baptized as schizogenic. In the so-called schizophrenic family monographs, each person easily recognizes his own papa, his own mama. Take for example Bateson's "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, don't treat me like a buddy"? That isn't enough to make a schizophrenic. We have seen in this sense that the double bind in no way defined a specific schizogenic mechanism, but characterized only Oedipus in the whole of its extension. If there is a real impasse, a real contradiction, it is the one into which the researcher himself falls, when he claims to assign schizogenic social mechanisms, and at the same time to discover them in the order of the family, from which both social production and the schizophrenic process equally escape. Perhaps this contradiction is particularly sensible in Laing, because he is the most revolutionary of the anti-psychiatrists. But, at the very moment when he breaks with psychiatric practice, undertakes to assign a real social genesis of psychosis, and demands as a condition of the cure the necessity of a continuation of the "voyage" as process and of a dissolution of the "normal ego," he falls back into the worst familialist, personological, and egoic postulates, such that the remedies invoked are no more than a "sincere confirmation among relatives," a "recognition of persons," a discovery of the true ego or self à la Martin Buber.{274} Beyond the hostility of the traditional authorities, perhaps therein lies the source of the current failure of the anti-psychiatry attempts, of their recuperation to the profit of adaptive forms of family psychotherapy and sectorial psychiatry, and of Laing's own retreat to the East. And is it not a contradiction on another plane, but analogous, into which one tries to precipitate Lacan's teaching, 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, beneath the conditions of minimal identity, escaping the intersubjective coordinates as well as the world of significations?

287Long live the Ndembu, for, if we follow the ethnologist Turner's detailed account, only the Ndembu doctor has known how to treat Oedipus as an appearance, a décor, and to go back up 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 looking for today, namely schizogenic social production. In the first place, no matter how much one asserts that the family expresses deeper social contradictions, one confers on it the value of a microcosm, one gives it the role of a necessary relay for the transformation of social alienation into mental alienation; what is more, one acts as if libido did not directly invest social contradictions as such, and as if, in order to awaken, it needed them to be translated according to the code of the family. By that very fact, one has already substituted a familial causation or expression for social production, and one finds oneself back in the categories of idealist psychiatry. Whatever one may say, one thereby exonerates society: to accuse it, there remain only vague considerations on the sick character of the family, or, more generally still, on the modern way of life. So the essential has been missed: that society is schizophrenizing at the level of its infrastructure, of its mode of production, of its most precise capitalist economic circuits; and that libido invests this social field, not in a form in which it would be expressed and translated by a family-microcosm, but in the form in which it passes its non-familial cuts and fluxes, invested as such, into the family; therefore, that familial investments are always a result of social-desiring libidinal investments, which alone are primary; finally, that mental alienation refers directly to these investments and is no less social than social alienation, which for its part refers to the preconscious investments of interest.

288Not only does one thus miss every correct evaluation of social production in its pathogenic character, but no less, in the second place, does one miss the schizophrenic process and its relation to the schizophrenic as sick. For one attempts to neuroticize everything. And no doubt one thereby conforms 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 plug up the lines of flight of the fluxes. We need take no account of psychoanalysis's claim 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 under which the subject can swarm, can pass on the ill to his progeny, rather than croak as a bachelor, impotent and masturbator. More still, once again: perhaps one day it will be discovered that the only incurable thing is neurosis (whence interminable psychoanalysis). One congratulates oneself when one manages to transform a schizo into a paranoiac or a neurotic. Perhaps there is much misunderstanding here. For the schizo is the one who escapes every oedipal, familial, and personological reference — I will no longer say *moi*, I will no longer say papa-mama — and it keeps its word. Now the question is first of all whether it is of this that it is sick, or whether on the contrary it is the schizophrenic process, which is not a sickness, not a "breakdown," but a "breakthrough," however anguishing and adventurous: crossing the wall or the limit that separates us from desiring production, making the fluxes of desire pass through. Laing's greatness, starting from certain intuitions that remained ambiguous in Jaspers, is to have been able to mark the incredible scope of this voyage. So much so that there is no schizo-analysis that does not mix into its positive tasks the constant destructive task of dissolving the so-called normal *moi*. Lawrence, Miller, then Laing knew how to show it profoundly: assuredly, neither man nor woman are well-defined personalities — but vibrations, fluxes, schizzes, and "knots." The *moi* refers back to personological coordinates from which it results, persons in turn refer back to familial coordinates, we shall see what the familial ensemble refers back to in order to produce persons in turn. The task of schizo-analysis is to undo tirelessly the *moi*s and their presuppositions, to liberate the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress, to make flow the fluxes they would be capable of emitting, receiving, or intercepting, to establish ever further and finer the schizzes and cuts well below the conditions of identity, to mount the machines of desire that re-cut each one and group it with others. For each one is a tiny group and must live thus, or rather like the zen tea-box broken multiply, each crack of which is repaired with golden cement, or like the church flagstone each fissure of which is underlined with paint or chalk (the contrary of castration, unified, molarized, hidden, cicatrized, unproductive). Schizo-analysis is so called because, throughout its procedure of cure, it schizophrenizes, instead of neuroticizing as psychoanalysis does.

289What is the schizophrenic ill with, since it is not schizophrenia as process? What transforms the breakthrough into collapse? It is on the contrary the forced arrest of the process, or its continuation in the void, or the manner in which it is forced to take itself for an end. We have seen in this sense how social production produced the ill schizo: built on decoded fluxes that constitute its deep tendency or its absolute limit, capitalism never ceases to thwart this tendency, to conjure away this limit by substituting for it relative internal limits that it can reproduce on an ever larger scale, or an axiomatic of fluxes that subjects the tendency to despotism and to the firmest repression. It is in this sense that the contradiction installs itself not only at the level of the fluxes that traverse the social field, but at the level of their libidinal investments which are constituent parts of it — between the paranoid reconstruction of the despotic *Urstaat* and the positive schizophrenic lines of flight. From then on, three eventualities take shape: either the process finds itself arrested, the limit of desiring production is displaced, disguised, and now passes into the Oedipal sub-set. Then the schizo is effectively neuroticized, and it is this neuroticization that constitutes his illness; for, in any case, neuroticization precedes neurosis, the latter is its fruit. Or else the schizo resists neuroticization, Oedipalization. Even the use of modern resources, the pure analytic scene, the symbolic phallus, structural "foreclosure," the name of the father, do not manage to get a hold on him (and there again, in these modern resources, what a strange use of Lacan's discoveries, he who on the contrary was the first to schizophrenize the analytic field…). In this second case, the process confronted with a neuroticization to which it resists, but which suffices to block it on all sides, is led to take itself as end: a psychotic is produced, who escapes properly so-called delegated repression only to take refuge in originary repression, to close the body without organs back upon itself and silence the machines of desire. Rather catatonia than neurosis, rather catatonia than Oedipus and castration — but this is still an effect of neuroticization, a counter-effect of the one and same illness. 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, residual, ridiculously restricted earth, it will form still more artificial earths that arrange themselves as best they can, barring accident, with the established order: the pervert. And, after all, Oedipus was already an artificial earth, O family! And the resistance to Oedipus, the return to the body without organs were still an artificial earth, O asylum. So that everything is perversion. But, just as well, everything is psychosis and paranoia, since everything is triggered by the counter-investment of the social field that produces the psychotic. And, again, everything is neurosis, since the fruit of the neuroticization that opposes itself to the process. Finally, everything is process, schizophrenia as process, since it is by it that everything is measured, its own course, its neurotic arrests, its perverse continuations in the void, its psychotic finalizations.

290Insofar as Oedipus is born of an application of the entire social field to the finite familial figure, it does not imply just any investment of this field by the libido, but a quite particular investment that renders this application possible and necessary. This is why Oedipus has appeared to us as a paranoiac's idea before being a neurotic's feeling. In fact, paranoid investment consists in subordinating molecular desiring production to the molar aggregate that it forms on one face of the filled body without organs, and thereby in enslaving it to a form of *socius* that exercises the function of filled body under determinate conditions. The paranoiac machines masses, and never ceases forming great aggregates, inventing heavy apparatuses for the framing and repression of the machines of desire. Certainly, it is not difficult for him to pass for reasonable, by invoking collective goals and interests, reforms to be made, sometimes even revolutions to be carried out. But madness pierces through, beneath the reformist investments, or the reactionary and fascist investments, which take on a reasonable appearance only in the glimmer of the preconscious and which animate the strange discourse of an organization of society. Even the language of it is demented. Listen to a minister, a general, a head of industry, a technician… Listen to the great paranoid rumor beneath the discourse of reason that speaks for others, in the name of the mute. For, beneath the preconscious goals and interests invoked, there rises an otherwise unconscious investment that bears upon a filled body for itself, independently of any goal, upon a degree of development for itself, independently of any reason: this degree and not another, do not take one step further, this *socius* and not another, 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: the whole libido is at stake. From the point of view of libidinal investment, one sees clearly that there are few differences between a reformist, a fascist, sometimes even certain revolutionaries, who are distinguished only in a preconscious way, 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 restored to President Schreber liberty and responsibility despite the acknowledged maintenance of his delirious ideas.{275} 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 so much competence in the administration of his goods, and had not in his delirium borne witness, for the *socius*, to a libidinal investment already fascizing. Social machines as machines of subjection arouse incomparable loves, which are not explained by interest, since interests on the contrary derive from them. At the foundation of society, delirium, because delirium is the investment of the *socius* as such, beyond goals. And it is not only the body of the despot that the paranoiac aspires to with love, but the body of money-capital, or a new revolutionary body, so long as it is a form of power and gregariousness. To be possessed by it as much as to possess it, to machine the subjected groups of which one is oneself a part and a cog, to introduce oneself into the machine in order at last to know there the *jouissance* of the mechanisms that grind down desire.

291Or else Oedipus has the air of a relatively innocent thing, a private determination treated in the analyst's office. But we are asking precisely what type of unconscious social investment Oedipus presupposes — since it is not psychoanalysis that invents Oedipus; psychoanalysis is content to live off it, to develop it, to confirm it, to give it a medical-market form. Insofar as paranoiac investment subjugates desiring production, it matters greatly to it that the limit of this production be displaced, that it pass inside the *socius*, as a limit between two molar ensembles, the social ensemble of departure and the familial sub-ensemble of arrival that is supposed to correspond to it, in such a way that desire is caught in the trap of a familial repression that comes to double social repression. The paranoiac applies his delirium to the family, and to his own family, but it is first of all a delirium concerning races, ranks, classes, universal history. In short, Oedipus implicates in the unconscious itself a whole reactionary and paranoiac investment of the social field, which acts as an Oedipianizing factor, and which can just as well nourish as thwart the preconscious investments. From the point of view of schizo-analysis, the analysis of Oedipus therefore consists in going back from the entangled sentiments of the son to the delirious ideas or lines of investment of the parents, of their interiorized representatives and their substitutes: not in order to reach the ensemble of a family, which is never anything but a site of application and of reproduction, but the social and political units of libidinal investment. So much so that the whole of familialist psychoanalysis, including the psychoanalyst in the first place, is answerable to a schizo-analysis. A single way of passing the time on the couch, schizo-analyzing the psychoanalyst. We were saying that, by virtue of their difference in nature from the preconscious investments of interest, the unconscious investments of desire, in their social bearing itself, had sexuality for their index. Not, certainly, that it would suffice to invest the poor woman, the maid or the whore, in order to have revolutionary loves. There are no revolutionary or reactionary loves, that is, loves do not define themselves by their objects, any more than by the sources and aims of desires or drives. But there are forms of love that are the indices of the reactionary or revolutionary character of the investment by the libido of a historical or geographical social field, from which the beings loved and desired 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 whore, princess and maid, rich woman and poor woman, are dependencies of Oedipus, even in their reversals and their substitutions. It is the very form of these images, their cutting-out and the ensemble of their possible relations, that is the product of a code, or of a social axiomatic to which the libido addresses itself through them. The persons are the simulacra derived from a social ensemble whose code is unconsciously invested for itself. That is why love, desire present reactionary, or else revolutionary, indices; the latter on the contrary surge up as non-figurative indices, where persons give way to decoded fluxes of desire, to lines of vibration, and where the cuts of images give way to schizzes that constitute singular points, sign-points of several dimensions making the fluxes pass instead of annulling them. 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 anoedipal, and which give the revolutionary the right to say "Oedipus, never heard of it." To undo the form of the persons and of *le moi*, not for the benefit of a pre-Oedipal undifferentiated, but of lines of anoedipal singularities, the machines of desire. For there is indeed a sexual revolution, which concerns neither the objects, nor the aims, nor the sources, but only the machinic form or indices.

292The fourth and final thesis of schizo-analysis is therefore the distinction between two poles of social libidinal investment, the paranoid, reactionary and fascizing pole, the schizoid revolutionary pole. Once again, we see no drawback in characterizing social investments of the unconscious by terms inherited from psychiatry, to the very extent that these terms cease to have a familial connotation that would make them mere projections, and from the moment when delirium is recognized as having an immediately adequate primary social content. The two poles define themselves, the one by the subjection of production and machines of desire to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a grand scale under such-and-such a form of power or selective sovereignty, the other by the inverse subordination and the reversal of power; the one by these molar and structured aggregates, which crush singularities, select them and regularize those they retain in codes or axiomatics, the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities which on the contrary treat the great aggregates as so many materials proper to their elaboration; the one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the fluxes, garrote them, turn them back or recut them according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way that they produce the images that come to fill the field of immanence proper to that system or aggregate, the other by lines of flight that the decoded and deterritorialized fluxes follow, inventing their own non-figurative cuts or schizzes that produce new fluxes, always crossing the coded wall or the territorial limit that separates them from desiring production; and, summing up all the preceding determinations, the one by subjected groups, the other by group-subjects. It is true that we still come up against 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 mere utopia? in what sense are the 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?

293We have seen that the unconscious paranoid investment bore on the *socius* itself as filled body without organs, beyond the preconscious aims and interests it assigns and distributes. It remains that such an investment does not bear being brought to light: it must always conceal itself beneath assignable aims or interests presented as general, even when these represent only those of the dominant class or of its fraction. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determined gregarious ensemble, bear being invested for its brute power, its violence and its absurdity? They would not survive it. Even the most declared fascism speaks the language of aims, of right, of order and of 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 filled body that the order of reasons finds itself inextricably fixed, beneath a code, beneath an axiomatic that decide it. Still more, the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment, turning devoid of aim, would suffice to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, that is, to the schizo-revolutionary pole, since it would not occur without overturning power, without inverting subordination, without rendering production itself to desire; for only desire lives by being without aim. Molecular desiring production would recover its freedom to enslave in its turn the molar ensemble beneath a form of overturned power or sovereignty. That is why Klossowski, who has pushed furthest the theory of the two poles of investment, but always in the category of an active utopia, can write: "Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the desired moment of its disintegration... No formation of sovereignty, in order for it to crystallize, will ever bear this becoming-conscious: for, as soon as it becomes conscious in the individuals who compose it, these latter decompose it... By the detour of science and of 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 knew how to comport itself in the manner of phenomena devoid of intention — for every 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 does not cease to elaborate only reproduce, outside, a play of forces by themselves without aim or end whose combinations obtain such or such result... However, no science can yet develop outside a constituted social grouping. To prevent the calling into question of social groups by science, these latter take it back in hand..., (integrate it) into the various industrial plannings, its autonomy appears properly inconceivable. A conspiracy conjugating art and science presupposes 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 toward no less suspect ends, industrial society would seem to thwart it in advance by the kind of mise en scène it offers of it, under pain of effectively undergoing what this conspiracy holds in store 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 — the ultimate phase in which Nietzsche saw the evolution of societies culminating. In this perspective, art and science would then arise as those sovereign formations of which Nietzsche said they were the object of his counter-sociology — art and science establishing themselves as dominating powers, on the ruins of institutions."{276}

294Why this invocation of art and science, in a world where scientists and technicians, even artists, science and art themselves are so heavily at the service of established sovereignties (if only through funding structures)? It is that art, as soon as it attains its own grandeur, its own genius, creates chains of decoding and deterritorialization that institute, that set machines of desire to functioning. Take the example of the Venetian school in painting: at the same time that Venice develops the most powerful merchant capitalism at the confines of an Urstaat that leaves it a wide autonomy, its painting apparently flows into a Byzantine code, where even colors and lines subordinate themselves to a signifier that determines their hierarchy as a vertical order. But, around the middle of the [century], when Venetian capitalism confronts the first signs of its decline, something bursts forth in this painting: one would say a new world opening up, another art, where lines deterritorialize themselves, colors decode themselves, refer only to the relations they maintain among themselves and with one another. A horizontal, or transversal, organization of the painting is born, with lines of flight or breakthrough. The body of Christ is machined on all sides and in all sorts of ways, pulled from every side, playing the role of filled body without organs, a hooking-point for all the machines of desire, a site of sado-masochistic exercises where the joy of the artist bursts forth. Even queer-Christs. The organs are the direct powers of the body without organs, and emit upon 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 being coded according to hierarchized collective investments; charm, each one stands for itself and runs its own business: the child Jesus looks one way while the Virgin listens the other way, Jesus stands for all desiring children, the Virgin for all desiring women, a joyous activity of profanation spreads beneath this generalized privatization. A Tintoretto paints the creation of the world as a long-distance race, whose start God himself, in the last row, gives from right to left. Suddenly a painting by Lotto springs forth, which could just as well be from the nineteenth century. And of course this decoding of fluxes of painting, these schizoid lines of flight that form on the horizon the machines of desire, are taken up again in shreds of the old code, or else introduced into new codes, and first of all into a properly pictorial axiomatic that puts a tourniquet on the flights, closes the ensemble back upon the transversal relations between lines and colors, and folds it back onto archaic or new territorialities (perspective, for example). So true is it that the movement of deterritorialization can only be grasped as the underside of territorialities, even residual, artificial, or factitious ones. But, at least, something has surged forth, bursting the codes, undoing the signifiers, passing beneath the structures, making the fluxes pass and operating the cuts at the limit of desire: a breakthrough. It is not enough to say that the nineteenth century is already there in the middle of the fifteenth, for one would have to state the analogue of the nineteenth in its turn, and one would have had to state it for the Byzantine code beneath which strange liberated fluxes were already passing. We have seen this for the painter Turner, for his most accomplished paintings which are sometimes called "unfinished" paintings: as soon as there is genius, there is something which is no longer of any school, of any time, operating a breakthrough — art as process without aim, but which accomplishes itself as such.

295Codes and their signifiers, axiomatics and their structures, the imaginary figures that come to fill them as well as the purely symbolic relations that measure them, constitute properly aesthetic molar ensembles characterized by aims, schools and epochs, refer them to the vaster social ensembles that find an application in them, and everywhere subjugate art to a great machine of castrating sovereignty. For, for art too, there is a pole of reactionary investment, a dark paranoid-Oedipal-narcissistic organization. A dirty use 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 neuroticizing painting that makes process into an aim, or a stop, an interruption, or a continuation in the void. This painting that today flourishes, under the usurped name of modern, poisonous flower, and that made a Lawrence hero say: "It is like a sort of pure murder… — And who is being murdered?… — All the bowels of mercy one feels within oneself are being murdered… — Perhaps it is stupidity that is being murdered, sentimental stupidity, sneered the artist. — Do you think so? It seems to me that all those tubes and those vibrations of corrugated iron are stupider than anything, and quite sentimental. They seem to me to show a great deal of self-pity, and a great deal of nervous vanity." The productive cuts projected onto the great unproductive cut of castration, the flux become flux of corrugated iron, the breakthroughs blocked on all sides. And perhaps that is, as we have seen, the market value of art and literature: a form of paranoid expression that no longer even needs to "signify" its reactionary libidinal investments, since on the contrary they serve it as signifier: 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 no longer measured except by the decoded and deterritorialized flux that it makes pass beneath a signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence; a writing with indifferent supports — pneumatic, electronic or gaseous — and which appears all the more difficult and intellectual to intellectuals as it is accessible to the feeble-minded, to illiterates, to schizos, espousing all that flows and all that re-cuts, bowels of mercy ignorant of sense and aim (the Artaud experiment, the Burroughs experiment). It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which consists only in liberating what was present in art at all times, but was hidden beneath aims and objects, even aesthetic ones, beneath recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that accomplishes itself, and that does not cease to be accomplished insofar as it proceeds, art as "experimentation."{277}

296And one will say the same for science: the decoded flux of knowledge are first bound in the properly scientific axiomatics, but these express a bi-polar hesitation. One pole is the great social axiomatic which retains of science what must be retained in function of the needs of the market and of the 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 not only bring the scientists back to "reason," but which prevents any deviance on their part, imposes goals on them, and which makes of science and of scientists an instance perfectly subjected to the formation of sovereignty (example, the way in which indeterminism was tolerated only up to a point, then ordered to make 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 across their own axiomatics, engendering more and more deterritorialized signs, schiz-figures that are no longer figurative nor structured, and reproduce or produce a play of phenomena without goal or 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 paranoid-Oedipianizing element of science, and a schizo-revolutionary element? This very conflict that 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 as far as madness…, and which here could not include itself in Oedipus, unless to put it in question": since, in fact, Oedipus intervenes there neither as familial figure nor even as mental structure, but under the species of an axiomatic as Oedipianizing factor, whence results a specifically scientific Oedipus).{278} And, to the song of Lautréamont that rises around the paranoid-Oedipal-narcissistic pole, O severe mathematics… Arithmetic! algebra! geometry! grandiose trinity! luminous triangle!, another song is opposed, O schizophrenic Mathematics, uncontrollable and mad machines of desire!…

297In the formation of capitalist sovereignty (filled body of capital-money as *socius*), the great social axiomatic has replaced the territorial codes and the despotic overcodings that characterized the preceding formations; thus a gregarious, molar ensemble has formed itself, whose subjection has no equal. We have seen on what bases this ensemble functioned: an entire field of immanence that reproduces itself on an ever larger scale, that does not cease multiplying its axioms as much as it has need of them, that fills itself with images and images of images, through which desire is determined to desire its own repression (imperialism), — an unprecedented decoding and deterritorialization, which institute a conjugation as a system of differential relations between the decoded and deterritorialized fluxes, in such a way that social inscription and repression no longer even need to bear directly on bodies and persons, but on the contrary precede them (axiomatic, regulation and application), — a surplus-value determined as surplus-value of flux, whose extortion is not effected by simple arithmetic difference between two homogeneous quantities of the same code, but precisely by differential relations between heterogeneous magnitudes that are not of 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 of 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 dominant class all the more pitiless in that it does not put the machine in its service, but is the servant of the capitalist machine: a unique class in this sense, content on its own account to draw 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, unpossessed flux, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks at each instant the interior limits of capitalism, their perpetual displacement and their reproduction on an enlarged scale (the 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-influx 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 the economy itself, which directly produces libidinal investments of the repression of desire (anti-production as third aspect of immanence, expressing the double nature of capitalism, to produce for producing, but in the conditions of capital). There is not one of these aspects, not the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism, that does not manifest the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but the true rationality of this pathological, of this dementia, "for the machine functions, be sure of it"). It does not risk becoming madness, from one end to the other it is madness from the start, and it is from there that its rationality issues. Marx's black humor, the source of *Capital*, is his fascination for such a machine: how it could be assembled, 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 fluxes, how it produces the terrible unique class of gray fellows who maintain the machine, how it does not risk dying on its own, but rather risks making us die, by arousing to the end investments of desire that do not even pass through a deceptive and subjective ideology, and that make us cry out to the end Long live capital in its reality, in its objective dissimulation! There has never been, except in ideology, a humane, liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism. Capitalism defines itself by a cruelty without common measure with the primitive system of cruelty, a terror without common measure with the despotic régime of terror. Wage increases, the improvement of the standard of living are realities, but realities that follow from this or that supplementary axiom which capitalism always has the capacity to add to its axiomatic in function of an enlargement of its limits (let us do the New Deal, let us will and recognize strong unions, let us promote participation, the unique class, let us take a step toward Russia which takes so many toward us, etc.). But, in the enlarged reality that conditions these islets, exploitation does not cease hardening itself, lack is arranged in the most cunning manner, final solutions of the "Jewish problem" type are prepared most meticulously, the third world is organized as an integral part of capitalism. The reproduction of the interior limits of capitalism on an ever larger scale has several consequences: to permit at the center the increases and improvements of standard, to displace the harshest forms of exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also to multiply within the center itself the enclaves of overexploitation, to easily tolerate the so-called socialist formations (it is not kibbutz socialism that bothers the Zionist State, any more than Russian socialism bothers world capitalism). It is not by metaphor that one observes: factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they are prisons.

298Everything is demented in the system: it is that the capitalist machine feeds on decoded and deterritorialized fluxes; it decodes and deterritorializes them still further, but by passing them into an axiomatic apparatus that conjugates them, and that, at the points of conjugation, produces pseudo-codes and artificial re-territorializations. It is in this sense that the capitalist axiomatic cannot dispense with always raising up new territorialities and resurrecting new despotic Urstaats. The great mutant flux of capital is pure deterritorialization, but it operates just as much re-territorialization when it converts itself into a reflux of means of payment. The third world is deterritorialized with respect to the center of capitalism, but it belongs to capitalism, it is a pure peripheral territoriality of capitalism. Preconscious investments of class and interest swarm. And first of all, capitalists have an interest in capitalism. Such a flat observation is there for something else: it is that they have an interest in it only through the levy of profits they draw from it, which, however enormous it may be, does not define capitalism. And, as for what defines capitalism, as for what conditions profit, they have an investment of desire, of a wholly other nature, libidinal-unconscious, which is not explained simply by the conditioned profits, but which on the contrary explains how a small capitalist, without great profit or hope, integrally maintains the whole of his investments: the libido for the great non-convertible flux 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's terrific, this machine. From then on, and still starting from the tautological observation just made, 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 that scarcely threatens it. Either they confine, localize their preconscious interest in wage increases and the improvement of the standard of living; powerful organizations represent them, which turn nasty as soon as the nature of the goals is put in question ("One can see clearly you are not workers, you have no idea of the real struggles, let us attack profits for a better management of the system, vote for a clean Paris, Welcome Mr. Brezhnev"). And, in fact, how would one not find one's interest in the hole one has dug for oneself, within the capitalist system? Or, second case: there really is an investment of new interest, of new goals, which suppose a body other than that of capital-money, the exploited become conscious of their preconscious interest, and this is truly revolutionary, a great cut from the point of view of the preconscious. But it is not enough that the libido invest a new social body corresponding to these new goals, 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 filled body by the libido may very well function as an autonomous territoriality, but caught and enclaved in 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 in the mobile frame of its enlarged limits. There can be a preconscious revolutionary cut, without a real libidinal and unconscious revolutionary cut. Or rather the order of things is the following: there is first a real libidinal revolutionary cut, then it slides into a simple revolutionary cut of goals and of interest, finally, it reforms a re-territoriality only specific, a specific body on the filled body of capital. Subjected groups never cease to derive from revolutionary group-subjects. One more axiom. It is no more complicated than for abstract painting. Everything begins with Marx, continues with Lenin, and ends on "Welcome, Mr. Brezhnev." Are these still revolutionaries speaking to a revolutionary, or a village demanding the arrival of a new prefect? And if one asks when it starts to go wrong, how far must one go back, to Lenin, to Marx? So much can the diverse and opposed investments coexist in complexes that are not those of Oedipus, but that concern the historical social field, its conflicts and its preconscious and unconscious contradictions, and of which one can only say that they fold back upon Oedipus, Marx-father, Lenin-father, Brezhnev-father. Fewer and fewer people believe in it, but that has no importance, since capitalism is like the Christian religion, it lives precisely on the lack of belief, it has no need of it — a motley painting of everything that has been believed.

299But here the inverse is true as well, capitalism does not cease at any of its ends. Its productions, its art, its science form decoded and deterritorialized fluxes that not only submit themselves to the corresponding axiomatic, but make some of their currents pass through the meshes of the axiomatic, beneath the recodings and reterritorializations. In their turn, group-subjects derive by rupture from subjected groups. Capitalism does not cease to put a tourniquet on the fluxes, to cut them and to push back the cut, but these do not cease to effuse themselves, and to cut themselves according to schizzes that turn back against capitalism, and that gash it. Always ready to enlarge its interior limits, capitalism remains threatened by an exterior limit which risks coming to it and splitting it from within all the more as the interior limits enlarge. That 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 paranoid investment and the schizoid investment are like two opposed poles of the unconscious libidinal investment, of which the one subordinates desiring production to the formation of sovereignty and to the gregarious ensemble that follows from it, and the other carries out the inverse subordination, overturns 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 schizoid investment coincide with blocks of reactionary paranoid investment. The oscillation between the two poles is even constitutive of delirium. However, it appears that the oscillation is not equal, and that the schizoid pole is rather potential in relation to the actual paranoid pole (how to count on art and science otherwise than as potentialities, since their actuality itself is easily controlled by the formations of sovereignty?). It is because the two poles of unconscious libidinal investment do not have the same relation, nor the same form of relation, with the preconscious investments of interest. On one side, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally hides the paranoid investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it hides it: it covers over its irrational character beneath an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of ends and reasons; or else it itself raises and creates these interests that rationalize the paranoid investment; or, even further, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment integrally maintains a paranoid investment at the level of the libido, insofar as the new *socius* continues to subordinate to itself all of desiring production in the name of the superior interests of the revolution and the inevitable concatenations of causality. In the other case, on the contrary, the preconscious interest must discover the necessity of an investment of another species, and must operate a kind of rupture of causality as a putting into question of ends and interests. It is because the problem is not the same: it is not enough to construct a new *socius* as filled body, but to pass over to the other face of this social filled body where the molecular formations of desire are exercised and inscribed, formations which must enslave the new molar ensemble. It is there alone that one attains the unconscious revolutionary cut and investment of the libido. Now this can only be done at the price and by the 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 evident that the fate of the revolution is uniquely tied to the interest of the exploited and dominated masses. But the problem is the nature of this tie, as a determined causal link or as a liaison of another sort. It is a matter of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relation with the exploited masses or the "weakest links" of a given system. Do these act in their place, in the order of causes and ends that promote a new *socius*, or on the contrary are they the site and the agent of a sudden unexpected eruption, eruption of desire that breaks with causes and ends, and that turns the *socius* over onto its other face? In subjected groups, desire still defines itself by an order of causes and ends, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determine the great ensembles under a formation of sovereignty. Group-subjects on the contrary have as their 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 rendered such a rupture possible, such as the most fragile links, only that which is of the order of desire and its eruption gives an account of the reality it takes on at such a moment, in such a place.{279} One sees clearly how everything can coexist and mix together: 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 the relations of forces, but would singularly hasten things by plunging into a breach (flight or "revolutionary defeatism"), everything coexists in truth: preconscious investments still hesitating 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 within 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 a moment, the two types of groups can interpenetrate. It is because the two groups are like determinism and freedom in Kant: they do indeed have the same "object," and never is social production anything other than desiring production, 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, schiz whose sole cause is desire, that is to say the rupture of causality that forces history to be rewritten in the real itself and produces this strangely polyvocal moment where everything is possible. Of course, the schiz has been prepared by a subterranean work of causes, ends and interests; of course, this order of causes risks closing back up, and sealing the breach in the name of the new *socius* and its interests. Of course, one can always say afterward that history has never ceased to be governed by the same laws of ensemble and large numbers. It remains that the schiz only came into existence through a desire without end and without cause that traced it and espoused it. Impossible without the order of causes, it only becomes real through something of another order: Desire, desert-desire, the revolutionary investment of desire. And it is precisely this that undermines capitalism: from where will the revolution come, and under what form in the exploited masses? It is like death: where, when? A decoded, deterritorialized flux, 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 atop a factory chimney? Always add an axiom to seal the previous breach, the fascist colonels start to read Mao, we will no longer be caught out, Castro has become impossible, even in relation to himself, the vacuoles are isolated, ghettos are made, the unions are called to the rescue, the most sinister forms of "deterrence" are invented, the repression of interest is reinforced — but from where will the new eruption of desire come?{280}

300Those who will have read us up to this point will perhaps have many reproaches to address to us: believing too much in the pure potentialities of art and even of science; denying or minimizing the role of classes and of class struggle; militating for an irrationalism of desire; identifying the revolutionary with the schizo; falling into all those known, too-well-known traps. This would be a bad reading, and we do not know which is worth more, a bad reading or no reading at all. And surely there are other reproaches, far graver, that 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 pass through the *socius* fluxes that are more and more decoded and deterritorialized, perceptible 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 that is essentially incompetent and above all castrating (for the State imposes a properly artistic Oedipus, a properly scientific Oedipus). In the second place, we have in no way minimized the importance of preconscious investments of class and of interest, which are grounded in the infrastructure itself; but we attach all the more importance to them insofar as, in the infrastructure, they are 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 start (maintenance of unconscious paranoid investments in revolutionary groups). And if we invoke desire as a revolutionary instance, it is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations of interest, but no manifestation of desire, which would suffice to blow up its base structures, even at the level of nursery school. We believe in desire as the irrational of every rationality, and not because it is lack, thirst or aspiration, but because it is production of desire and desire that produces, real-desire or the real in itself. Finally, we in no way 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; the former defines itself only in relation to the arrests, the continuations in the void or the finalist illusions that repression imposes on the process itself. This is why we have only spoken of a schizoid pole in the libidinal investment of the social field, in order to avoid as much as possible the confusion of the schizophrenic process with the production of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic process (schizoid pole) is revolutionary, in the very sense in which the paranoiac procedure is reactionary and fascist; and, divested of all familialism, it is not these psychiatric categories that must make us understand the economico-political determinations, but exactly the contrary.

301And then, above all, we are not seeking any evasion by saying that schizo-analysis as such has strictly no political program to propose. If it had one, it would be at once grotesque and disquieting. 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. At last something that does not claim to speak in the name of whatever it might be, not even and above all not in the name of psychoanalysis: nothing but impressions, the impression that things are going badly in psychoanalysis, and that they have been going badly from the start. 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 are not speaking 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 the machines of desire and the production of desire. Schizo-analysis as such does not pose the problem of the nature of the *socius* that is to issue from the revolution; it in no way claims to be valid for the revolution itself. A *socius* being given, it asks only what place it reserves for desiring production, what motor role desire has therein, under what forms the conciliation of the régime of desiring production and the régime of social production is made therein, since it is the same production in any case, but under two different régimes — whether therefore there is, on this *socius* as filled body, the possibility of passing from one face to another, that is to say from the face where the molar ensembles of social production are organized, to this other no less collective face where the molecular multiplicities of desiring production are formed, — whether such a *socius* can, and up to what point, sustain the reversal of power by which desiring production subjects social production to itself, and yet does not destroy it, since it is the same production under the difference of régime, — whether there is, and how, the formation of group-subjects, etc. And if it is replied to us that we are demanding the famous rights to laziness, or to unproductivity, or to the production of dream and phantasy, once more we are quite content, since we have not stopped saying the opposite, and that desiring production produced the real, and that desire had little to do with phantasy and dream. Contrary to Reich, schizo-analysis makes no distinction in nature between political economy and libidinal economy. It asks only what are, on a *socius*, the machinic, social, and technical indices that open onto machines of desire, that enter into the parts, gears, and motors of the latter, as much as they make the latter enter into their own parts, gears, and motors. Everyone knows that a schizo is a machine; all schizos say so, and not only little Joey. The question is to know whether schizophrenics are the living machines of a dead labor, which are then opposed to the dead machines of living labor as it is organized in capitalism. Or rather on the contrary whether machines of desire, technical and social, wed each other in a process of schizophrenic production which, from then on, no longer has schizophrenics to produce. When Maud Mannoni in her *Letter to the Ministers* writes: "One of these adolescents, declared unfit for studies, is following a *3e* class quite honorably, on condition that he do mechanics. Mechanics impassions him. The garage owner has been his best caretaker. If we take mechanics away from him he will become schizophrenic again," her intention is not to extol ergotherapy, nor the virtues of social adaptation. She marks the point where the social machine, the technical machine, the machine of desire wed each other closely and bring their régimes into communication. She asks whether this society is capable of that, and what it is worth if it is not capable of it. And this 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 as machines of desire form them, in the régime which is theirs and as a position of desire.

302What, finally, is the opposition of schizo-analysis to psychoanalysis, in the totality 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, just as much, 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 had to be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing, de-Oedipalizing, decastrating, dephallicizing, undoing theater, dream, and phantasy, decoding, deterritorializing — a frightful curettage, a malevolent activity. But everything is done at the same time. For, at the same time, the process liberates itself, process of desiring production following its molecular lines of flight which already define the mechanic's task of the schizo-analyst. And further the lines of flight are full molar or social investments, which bite into the entire social field: so 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 the machines of desire and of the repression of desire. To accomplish the process, not to halt it, not to make it spin in the void, not to give it a goal. Never will one go far enough in deterritorialization, in 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 halt the process or fix goals for it, it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the accomplishment of the process of desiring production, this process which finds itself always already accomplished insofar as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It remains for us therefore to see how these diverse tasks of schizo-analysis effectively, simultaneously, proceed.