Ethical Aporias of the Philosophy of Desire:
The Case of Anti-Oedipus

Statement of the Problem: The Importance ofAnti-Oedipus

In his 1977 introduction to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault called the book a work of ethics, perhaps the first such reflection on ethics in a generation. Foucault went on to say that in his judgment Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the most insidious dimension of fascism: the way in which men and women willingly enslave themselves to fascist modes of being. Setting aside the fact that the 1977 introduction said much about the direction Foucault's work had taken since the 1976 publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, and despite the fact that La Boétie's classic work On Voluntary Servitude was enjoying newfound attention in 1976 and 1977-Foucault's suggestion that Anti-Oedipus was a work of ethics stands as an interpretive challenge to students of Deleuze and Guattari and of the broader context of 1970s French theory.

When it was published in the spring of 1972, Anti-Oedipus was not recognized as a contribution to moral philosophy by any stretch of the imagination. Begun as early as August 1969, the work, of course, reflected the collaborative effort of Gilles Deleuze, until then author of a number of respected if idiosyncratic studies in the history of philosophy, and Félix Guattari, psychologist, collaborator with Jean Oury at the La Borde psychiatric clinic since the mid-1950s), and then founder (1966) of the Centre d'Etudes, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle (CERFI). (The recently opened Guattari archives at the Institut de Mémoire et d'Edition Contemporaire in Paris suggest that Deleuze's role in writing the original drafts of large portions of Anti-Oedipus might have been until now overestimated.) Anti-Oedipus became the core text of reference in what became known as the "philosophy of desire." An instant classic of the French far-Left, it was seen as a bold effort at superceding Freudo-Marxism, going beyond earlier efforts that had merely updated Marx with Freudian insights and launching a deep critique of many of the foundations of psychoanalysis. It was very much a book of the early 1970s, when revolutionary anticipations following the revolts of 1968 had not yet diminished and when the slogan "taking one's desires for reality" still had considerable play.

The "philosophy of desire" was a current in 1970s French thought and cultural politics that fused the anti-authoritarian sensibilities of the May 1968, first with the language of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, then with the more specifically French traditions of surrealism and crypto-Catholic eroticism. Between 1968 and around 1975, the influence of the désirants was felt from the sexual counter-culture and the women and gay liberation movements to literary criticism and the pages of in-crowd Parisian academic journals. Desire was at once the problem and the solution worth thinking about by the Left-though what it promised and what it supposedly delivered was the subject of contentious debate. Notable texts of this "school" included: Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire; Jean-Paul Dollé, Desire for Revolution; Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, and above all Anti-Oedipus.

Anti-Oedipus'Argument

Anti-Oedipus makes at least the three following arguments: desire is productive, Freud made a mistake by trapping desire in the family, and, consequently, psychoanalysis should be replaced by "schizo-analysis" in order to truly grasp the nature of "desiring machines." The notion of "desiring machines" is, of course, the concept by which Anti-Oedipus has been most easily identified. Desire works like this. It runs in a "flow" [flux] [1-2]; a continuous, nonpersonal, and uninterrupted "hylé" [36 & 46]. This is the Bergsonian first principle of the philosophy of desire. Into the flow come "machines." They interrupt the flow. Those "interruptions" [coupures] "condition" the flow, and are thus in fact part of the flow itself. [36] The point of the machine is, like the point of any machine, to "produce." [1-4] "Materialist psychiatry" will look at the function of "desire in machines" and of "production in desire." [22] The difficulty is to discuss the "process of production" as process and not reduce it to something else. Oedipus is precisely this reduction. [3 & 24]
Deleuze and Guattari describe machines variously. In general, the machines refer to the process of production and consumption in the colorful image of a primal body that eats, fucks, and shits in a pure continuum, which in fact are just various machines hooked up to one another. At this level, machines act according to a "leg bone's connected to the knee bone" kind of reasoning. More specifically, the machines refer to various stages in the formation or imprinting of the unconscious. (Here, for example, is where Deleuze and Guattari show their ambivalence to Freudianism, when they suggest, a) that the unconscious is the right concept, but that Freud just phrased it wrong, and b) Oedipus is "correct" on a certain playing field and therefore deserves all the more to be subverted.) The formation of the unconscious helps show the relations among production, consumption, the product, and man / nature.
Deleuze and Guattari isolate what they call the three syntheses which shape those relations. The first synthesis-the connective-concerns desire as it has been described above: flows and interruptions linked together in a productive process. [5-8, 36-37, 41, 110-111] The disjunctive synthesis describes the reproduction of those interruptions and detachments that are necessary for the productive process. The "body without organs" is that field where production's distribution and exchange, or "recording", take place. "Schizzes" are those continual detachments, the "building blocks" of either the Oedipal code or, alternately, the schizoid code. The social body without organs is called the "socius"; capital is the body without organs of capitalist being [7-16, 38-41, 110-111] Capitalism simultaneously "de-territorializes" and "re-territorializes" desire. Finally, the conjunctive synthesis covers "consumption," of that "residium" which is the subject's share of production and distribution. A subject is produced on top of or after prior processes of production and recording. [16-22, 40-41, 110-111] Whether that subject is "nomadic," that is, co-extensive with the "partial objects" of desire, or whether it is Oedipal (those objects having been channeled into certain codes) depends on breaking open the familial stranglehold on desire, of which psychoanalysis is both a diagnostic tool and a negatively reinforcing mechanism. Both historical and natural, desire is productive and ought to be left alone to realize itself.

The Ethical Problematic

Despite Deleuze and Guattari's continual efforts in the 1970s to explain that they were not merely advocating a free-for-all celebration of unfettered desire, it was not merely by chance that their work received that charge. Amidst the by-now-familiar (and boring) talk of difference and the politics of subjectivity, Anti-Oedipus' attack on psychoanalysis was classically antinomian. In other words, it relentlessly attacked normative criteria, especially the bourgeois family and its psychoanalytic props. To take one example, the notion of law was unambiguously dispensed with, up to the point that even transgression was seen as merely the flip side of a juridical game in which all moves had been already played out. [50, 62-63, 110-111, 115] (Psychoanalysis, especially the Lacanian version prevalent in France at the time, had a very different relation to the category of law.) Though the prescriptive dimensions of Anti-Oedipus were wrapped up in the promotion of the somewhat vague schizo-analysis, it is safe to say that the normative in a positive register-in other words, the criteria in the name of which Deleuze and Guattari's critique was launched-was generally elided in the book. To be sure, there were the appeals to "revolution," which needed no justification in early 1970s France. But no real reflection was brought to bear on that assumption. In the end, it seemed difficult for Deleuze and Guattari to defend themselves against the charge that they weren't doing much more than valorizing desire's rebellion against normative constraints in general. Again in contrast to Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire was not seen by the désirants as "empty," but rather as full and productive. Transgression was a dead end because the "nomadic" subject would not even recognize enough law to feel dirty pleasure in breaking it. Desire knew no law, they said; desiring machines knew only eating, fucking, and shitting; pure immanence-no transcendence. In what sense was this an ethical philosophy? Accepting for now that Foucault's claim for Anti-Oedipus as a work of ethics was not immediately self-evident, one way to approach this question is to turn to the intellectual sources and the historical context of Deleuze and Guattari's project.

Two Places to Look: La Borde & Rousseau

One need to be careful in any critical reconstruction the "ethics" of les machines désirants. It might be easy to chide Deleuze and Guattari for the excesses of the post-1968 "fun ethic" (Bourdieu). But they were up to something more subtle than mere "paganism" or "hedonism." Even if in the end their ethics do not satisfy (and I don't think they do, not as much as those possible within a psychoanalysis they decried), they should not be blamed with the fact that they have often been misread, if not as provocative champions of transgression or then as anti-ethical relativists (?!?). Anti-Oedipus is often read as a call to "pagan" immanence, to limitless and expansive desire, to titillating and "subversive" pleasures (particularly resonant among American academics who are sometimes more negatively Puritan than they can admit). This reading-which is piss-poor as an ethics, since fascists also are "transgressive" and have their own kinds of jouissance-needs to be set against a dialectical other half: the non-fascist ethics that Anti-Oedipus advocates and also the ethics that is missing from that work. Two places to look for this hidden / missing ethics is the Rouseauean character of the philosophy of desire ("The unconscious if Rousseaistic, being man-nature. And how much malice and ruse there are in Rousseau!" [112]) and in Guattari's experiences with "institutional psychotherapy" at the La Borde clinic. I will discuss these two fields in my presentation at the conference and make two arguments:

1) the treatment of the normative in Anti-Oedipus is not unambiguously antinomian;

2) where it seems that way, Deleuze and Guattari are on a dead end road.