Abstract
This paper gives a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia from an ethical point of view. The main question that I’m targeting here refers to a claim that Michel Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipus makes: “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics” (1). Foucault elaborates briefly on his suggestion, focusing on the way Deleuze and Guattari’s book can be considered an ethical manual against fascism, “an introduction to non-fascist life” as Foucault describes it. I try rather to elaborate on this suggestion (Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics) in a conversation with Jacque Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis in his 1959-1960 seminar which is published under the same title. This leads me to an interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as an account of an ontological ethics in terms of the exteriority of the unconscious desire. In this regard, I take the notion of socius as an account of this exterior desire and therefore as the true site of ethics.
 
Introduction
Anti-Oedipus is a radical critique of psychoanalysis along with introducing an alternative for it which is called by Deleuze and Guattari schizoanalysis. I would like to construe Deleuze and Guattari’s alternative in Anti-Oedipus in light of Lacan’s formulation of ethics of psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the figure of the schizophrenic as a basis for formulating their alternative for psychoanalysis. The figure of the schizophrenic takes the place of Freud and Lacan’s the neurotic and renders in psychoanalysis a radical transformation which makes Deleuze and Guattari to invent the new title of schizoanalysis. This replacement underlies a disavowal of the role of oedipal family from psychoanalysis. I will argue that this change underlies rendering the alternative to entail an ontological ethics. In other words, the move from the ethics of psychoanalysis to the ethics of schizoanalysis entails a move from a subjective or intersubjective morality towards a really ontological ethics.
 
I. The Transcendental Synthesis of Unconscious
This makes me discuss the nature of desire, the unconscious desire, in Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. First of all, desire is the notion that links ethics and psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis sheds a new light on ethical thought by introducing the unconscious desire. Before Freud, ethical problems were basically considered in terms of conscious will. With Freud, ethics required to be redefined on the basis of the unconscious desire. Now, if Anti-Oedipus provides an alternative for psychoanalysis and at the same time, as Foucault suggests, is a work of ethics, it is because it gives a reformulation of the notion of the unconscious desire. This reformulation entails defining desire first of all as non-familial, non-personal and non-structural but rather machinic, and second of all in terms of production as legitimate synthesis. The outcome of this account is that the unconscious is exterior to persons and familial structures, prior to them, and constitutive of personal and familial entities. The machinic and productive desire then would result in the exteriority of the unconscious.
This is the main task of Deleuze and Guattari’s project: to reformulate the nature of the psychoanalytical desire by giving an account of the unconscious desire which underlies pure exteriority. They criticize the existing psychoanalysis for its taking of the unconscious in the image of conscious structures and entities. According to them, psychoanalysis, in Freud and his heirs including Lacan, fails to liberate itself from the bounds of consciousness and therefore it cannot provide the real unconscious because it remains familial and dependent on personal roles and structures (the roles of the father, the mother and the child). Deleuze and Guattari summarize this psychoanalytical familialism under the title of oedipus. They claim that the real unconscious must be transcendental and not transcendent, which is to say that, it must condition the production of conscious entities without being itself based on conscious products. In other words, psychoanalysis must underlie the real synthesis of consciousness or psyche instead of analyzing its pre-existing structure. Family, and particularly oedipal family, is a derivative and produced structure and the involved persons are just products. Therefore, the familial structure and the oedipal unconscious cannot satisfy the requirements of the real transcendental unconscious.
Unlike Freud, whose favorite patients are neurotics, Deleuze and Guattari formulate the unconscious in terms of psychosis, and particularly, schizophrenia. It is in the figure of the schizophrenic that we should search for the nature of the unconscious desire. As Deleuze and Guattari indicate through the schizophrenic figures such as Adolf Wölfli or judge Schreber, schizophrenic desire is initially desire as production (a pure and primary production which is not for the sake of consumption) (2). The unconscious is the field of production (and consciousness the field of consumption). And it is in the figure of the schizophrenic that the nature of the unconscious comes to the surface. This is why, they replace the traditional Freudian metaphor of theater with that of factory: the unconscious is not like a theater, but rather a factory. It does not represent things, it produces them. And desire, the unconscious desire, would be machinic. Therefore, if the unconscious is primary and transcendental, desire cannot be considered in terms of produced representational entities. Desiring is essentially different from willing or needing. Despite the psychoanalytical account, the schizoanalytical desire is not negative or on the basis of lack; desiring here means producing. And Deleuze and Guattari insist that desiring production is not imaginary or fantastic; it is rather real (3).
The transcendental unconscious must be impersonal and exterior to personal minds. It marks a transcendental exteriority. Hence, the conscious will is the product of a real transcendental desire. Therefore, the real immanent synthesis amounts to the productive unconscious desire. Production here is indeed synthesis but not the transcendent synthesis of complete objects by a full subject; it is the immanent synthesis of partial objects. This constitutes the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desiring-production. If the relation of the psyche with outside is called experience, it is experience in terms of production; the unconscious experience is what through which the subject and the object of experience are under production. On the one hand, experiencing and the construction of the subject are one and the same process. On the other, the process through which the subject is under production is the same process through which the outside world is under production. This view underlies the central role of the unconscious. The unconscious is not the site of cognition or the possible experience of a fully produced subject but rather the site of the real experiences of a subject which is permanently under production in the course of its experience. And more importantly and more radically, the unconscious marks the productive register of the outside world.
In this sense, experience underlies a practice and this links speculative reason to practical reason. Ethics then would belong to the transcendental exteriority which is formulated by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of the unconscious desire. In short, ethics is not the matter of psychology (or any oedipal psychoanalysis) but rather ontology.
 
II. Desiring the Event
Now, we have a double formula in defining desire: it is desiring-production as immanent synthesis and it entails exteriority (the ontological register). This relation between desire as immanent synthesis or production and its exteriority is at the center of my reading and constitutes the ethics of schizoanalysis. It is what refers us to Lacan and to Deleuze’s Stoicism.
Jacques Lacan in the concluding part of his 1959-60 seminar with the title Ethics of Psychoanalysis formulates his view of ethics around the following question: “have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” (4). In my reading, what Lacan is formulating in this question is the exteriority of desire: “the desire that is in you” is different from “your desire”, and you should regulate your acts, which are normally based on “your desire”, with the exterior desire which is in you as the unconscious. Lacan considers ethics in terms of “the relationship between action and the desire that inhabits it” (5). I translate this into the relationship between the unconscious desire and the conscious will. The conscious will must be regulated in conformity with the unconscious desire. The latter is prior to the former. You should act in conformity with the desire which already is in you and constitutes you. In this way, Lacan’s formula would be compatible with the Stoic formula of ethics which can be summarized as “living in accordance with nature”. As the Stoic formula implies, nature here signifies what is exterior to the living subject and is beyond his conscious control. Such an exteriority is exemplified in the Stoic thought with miseries, sufferings, and specifically death. Stoic ethics is a method to learn how to live in conformity with your miseries and, at the limit, with your death, with the inevitable factuality of your death. These are things that happen from without, and are not reducible to conscious categories. Deleuze’s specific term for this irreducible exteriority in Logic of Sense is the event or fate. In “Twenty-First Series of the Event” in Logic of Sense, he introduces Joe Bousquet as a true Stoic who takes his “inclination for death” as the truth of his desire. In reference to Bousquet’s Stoicism, Deleuze writes,
It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle of free man. My misfortune is present in all events, but also a splendor and brightness which dry up misfortune and which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation (Deleuze 2015, 154).
Deleuze translates the Stoic passivity in relation with the exterior event into what constitutes the interior of free man. This entails of course a tension within will or desire, which is indeed the tension between conscious will and unconscious desire. It is when I will what happens to me, whatever it is, even my misfortune, my miseries, and my death. Thus, the Lacanian formula of acting in conformity with the desire that is in you can be construed in the Deleuzian terminology of Logic of Sense as making a passive synthesis with the event, incorporating the exterior event within yourself, and in short, loving the fate (Amor fati).
As mentioned, in Anti-Oedipus, this exteriority receives a more ontological register in terms of machines: everything is a machine and a machine is composed of the flows of desire and interruptions of these flows. My desire is what in me which is exterior, which is to say, is the same as what flows in nature. What Deleuze and Guattari take as machines are natural machines, and nature is composed of machines as what interrupt, break and connect the flows of desire. Ethics is the practical affirmation of the flows of desire as my nature; an affirmation which is evental. Desiring-production as the immanent synthesis is the processual synthesis or the flow itself. This renders the synthesis with the event in me as the practical affirmation of the exteriority of the event (my death) as my essence and my nature. Human nature must essentially be the exterior nature itself. The Stoic living in accordance with nature implies a whole, a conflagrant fire, which synthesizes immanently and my consciousness is just one of its ephemeral products. But the fire burns in me (or walks with me) as well as in any entity. The fire is the unconscious desire.
 
III. Ethics of the Real
In this way, we can link Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, Deleuze’s reading of Stoic ethics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics. What connects these three is a similar approach to the unconscious desire. But as mentioned, Anti-Oedipus at least is critical against Lacan as remaining within Freudian oedipalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship with Lacan is indeed very controversial. Let us discuss this relationship in more details.
Lacan’s formula seems well compatible with Deleuze's ethical view in Logic of Sense and Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the unconscious desire in Anti-Oedipus. But this is just one side of the picture. There are indeed two tendencies in Lacan’s work regarding desire. Deleuze and Guattari summarize these two tendencies or two poles in a footnote in reference to Serge Leclaire:
Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to have two poles: one related to ‘the object small a’ as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the ‘great other’ as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 27; footnote).
According to the first tendency, Lacan defines desire in terms of lack. This indicates Lacan’s structuralism of the symbolic order which is organized in terms of the big Other. This tendency is harshly criticized in Anti-Oedipus. According to this criticism, Lacan’s account of the symbolic order is not successful in breaking with the imaginary order. For Lacan, the subject emerges within a linguistic structure. This symbolic structural emergence is far from what Deleuze and Guattari take as real production. Therefore, his account of the unconscious remains in the image of consciousness; the structural unity reflects the imaginary ego, despite Lacan’s efforts to distinguish them. The real, in this account, remains impossible, which is far from Deleuze and Guattari’s approach in which the real is necessary. For Deleuze and Guattari, who stand against the structuralist moments of Lacan, the unconscious is not a symbolic structure, but a real process. It is machinic, has to do with natural and vital machines, not structural ones. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desiring-production is indeed a positive counterpart of what Lacan calls the real and renders impossible.
 But it would be a simplification to reduce Lacan’s work into this tendency. Deleuze and Guattari, in the quoted remark, summarize the other tendency in Lacan’s thought under his notion of ‘objet petit a’ and identify it with their own ‘desiring-machine’ and desiring-production. Let us review the moments in Lacan’s seminar on Ethics of Psychoanalysis where this tendency comes to the surface.
In the second section of chapter 22, Lacan discusses an inherent relation between life and death and puts forward the idea of the intrusion of death onto life and life onto death (6). Apparently, death here signifies the impersonal processes which are beyond the symbolic order. So the intrusion of death onto life is indeed the injection (synthesis) of desire in me. Lacan also refers to it by the German term Das Ding and devotes two chapters of his seminar to this notion: here, according to Lacan, the object of desire is not merely a lack but a real thingness, a dead thingness, a plenitude. This is well comparable with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of body without organs as anti-production (death) which in synthesis with production of production of partial objects (life) grounds desiring-production. Now, in 1957-58 seminar Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan introduces the object of desire as objet petit a in reference to the Kleinian partial objects which are the main ground of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desiring-production (7).
Furthermore, the distinction Lacan makes between analysis and suggestion and his position against the therapeutic desire of analyst indicates well his awareness of the exteriority of real unconscious desire. Suggestion is when the analyst applies his own image of reality onto the patient. Lacan here rejects any presupposition of the good human nature or being well adapted with the representational reality as the definition of health. He makes a similar claim on the therapeutic desire of analyst to cure:
We have to deal with that as if it were something that is likely to lead us astray, and in many cases to do so instantly. I will even add that one might be paradoxical or trenchant and designate our desire as a non-desire to cure (Lacan 1997, 219).
The analyst does not possess a better human nature in comparison with the patient, he is not better adapted with reality, and therefore he does not have a therapeutic task. The ethics of psychoanalysis rejects any therapeutic relationship between the analyst and the patient. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis goes exactly in this direction of Lacan’s thought, by taking the schizophrenic, not as the subject of therapy, but rather as the productive idea.
Let us summarize these two poles of Lacan’s thought in terms of two poles of structuralism that Deleuze unpacks in his early text “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” One the structural fixation and systematicity and the other the structural permanent circulation which is only possible with the paradoxical element or aleatory point, an element which is moving by nature and circulates the structure and constitutes its life and existence. The first results in the designation of desire in terms of lack and the second its designation in terms of production. Obviously, it is the second that is the site of freedom and defines the ethics of schizoanalysis. In this regard, the figure of schizo must be considered in terms of the circulative element of structure, the element of freedom.
 
IV. A Machinic Socialism
The ontological nature of ethics receives a social register in Anti-Oedipus. Ethics as the glue of societies, what connects people together through generating them, is described in Anti-Oedipus in terms of the pre-individual socius. Or in other words, socius marks the pre-individual sociality of desire. Here, Deleuze and Guattari provide an account of ethics which is beyond the intersubjective register of the symbolic order. Socius marks the source of ethics in the real.
In the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari provide a social-historical account of the ontological nature of ethics in terms of the three registers of territorialism, despotism and capitalism, where socius evolves and takes different forms along with different formulations of freedom (natural freedom or contingency, determination, individual freedom or free will). In this account, desire as the element of ethics is discovered primitively in the materiality of the earth and then Deleuze and Guattari explain how the territorialization of this material desire results in the formation of persons and oedipal structures. This account aims to disavow understanding the essence of societies as the common needs of established individuals. It rather describes how these individuals are historically produced and there is a material sociality prior to their emergence. It would then be wrong to understand ethics in terms of the relationship between conscious individuals and their needs or wills. There must be an a priori and ontological ethics in terms of the flows of desire, or material socius, in nature. This underlies the way the natural freedom or contingency generates the conscious and subjective freedom, and transcendental material ethics leads to empirical morality.
Hence, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the primitive existence of socius in terms of the earth, the very materiality of the earth, which leads to the emergence of territories and group-identities. Socius is a name for the flows of desire in nature at the point where human persons and other persons are under construction. Thus, the primitive societies, as the first appearances of such constructions, are not familial in the sense of oedipal families. It is only later, under despotism, and through the mediation of the imperial state that the role of the father appears as mirroring the task of the despot. And then, under capitalism, this role receives an independence and generates the nuclear families. This is indeed the history of the emergence of persons, conscious persons.
Hence, society is a machine that produces the individuals, not a primary structure that determines them. In other words, the exteriority of the transcendental unconscious renders it a primary sociality which is not structural but machinic: “Our definition of schizoanalysis focused on two aspects: the destruction of the expressive pseudo forms of the unconscious, and the discovery of desire’s unconscious investments of social field” (8). The expressive and structural forms of unconscious must be destructed to clear the space for true sociality of unconscious which is machinic and productive. In Lacanian terms, there are two accounts of exteriority, one in terms of the real and the other in terms of the symbolic. Structuralism takes only the latter as the site of sociality, but Deleuze and Guattari introduce a sociality which is in terms of the real, a machinic sociality or socius.
Thus, at the heart of the primary socius stands the notion of desire. The established posterior society is based on individual needs, whereas the notion of desire marks a primary sociality which is not composed of fully-formed individuals. In the same manner that in “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Precursor of Kafka, Celine and Ponge”, Deleuze rejects the idea of common needs as the raison d’etre of societies, declaring that “one of Rousseau’s constant themes is that need is not a factor which brings people together: it does not unite, it isolates each of us” (9), he and Guattari claim in Anti-Oedipus that, “society is not exchangist, the socius is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth” (10). First of all, it is desire that unites. But it does not unite isolated individuals; it is social desiring-machines that are primarily linked on the body of earth. Second of all, this view regarding sociality entails a related view regarding economy which is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, primarily based on desire and production, rather than need and exchange.
Conclusion:
Ethics of schizoanalysis deals with the natural flows of desire which is exterior and prior to any conscious interiority and any oedipal (familial) or structural (symbolic) unconscious. The critique of oedipus mirrors the critique of structuralism and results in a machinic account of desire. If ethics is the site of desire, it is of the true unconscious desire which is not reducible to conscious needs; if ethics is the element of any sociality, it is so in terms of socius. It is the productive element of any sociality and this is why it must be defined on the basis of desiring-production. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus repeat that desiring-production and social production are one and the same thing (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 28-29). In so far as it is the matter of persons, which is to say, the connection between ethics and morality, ethics of schizoanalysis discovers the exteriority of my unconscious desire which appears as living in (discordant) accordance with nature or loving the fate. The unconscious desire is the alien in me, the exterior which is inside, the death within life.
 
 
References:
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, xiii.
2. Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 15-16, 19.
3. Ibid, 26.
4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. Norton Paperback. 1997, 314.
5. Lacan 1997, 313.
6. Lacan, Jacques. Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. Norton and Company, 1997, 294.
7. Lacan, Jacques. Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V. Translated by Russell Grigg, Polity, 2017, 148-9, 213-216, 363.
8. Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 167.
9. Deleuze 2004, 52.
10. Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 185.
 
Bibliography:
- Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
- Logiques du Sens. Paris: Les Edition de Minuit, 1969.
- ----, Desert Islands and Other Texts. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
- ----, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
- Lacan, Jacques. Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. Norton and Company, 1997.
- ----, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V. Translated by Russell Grigg. Polity, 2017.
 
 

Ethics of Schizoanalysis
​​​​​​​Mehdi Parsa