The Psychoanalytic Field

        As Foucault had indicated in his introduction to the English translation of the text, as Deleuze had reiterated in “Intellectuals and Power,” and as Guattari had stressed on many occasions, Anti-Oedipus demonstrates not the transmission of information but the communication of a conflictual and undomesticated desire through what Guattari terms a “richly expressive situation in which a whole series of semiotic components are involved” (“Desire is Power”, 16). The desire that is mine in this context is hence, and among other things, a desire to listen, to read, to think, and, indeed, to analyse.

        In response to the crypto-Deleuzo-Guattarians’ declaration (or, more accurately, expression of a wish) that Anti-Oedipus function as the Medusa into whose face psychoanalysis, and Freud in particular, cannot but stare and subsequently suffer the most abominable of deaths, I insist on the text’s inherently analytic dimension. To do otherwise would be to wrest it from its theoretical and practical matrix and reduce to the banal, reify, its authors’ richly ambivalent response to a tradition in which they rarely ceased to participate.

        Deleuze deemed Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” a “masterpiece” whose author had engaged “penetratingly” in philosophical reflection (Coldness and Cruelty, 111). Guattari’s own appraisal of the situation from a lecture delivered long after the publication of Anti-Oedipus hardly needs any elaboration: “After years of training and practice I have come to the conclusion that if psychoanalysis does not radically reform its methods and its theoretical references it will lose all credibility, which I would find regrettable on several counts. In fact, it would hardly matter to me if psychoanalytic societies, schools, or even the profession itself were to disappear, so long as the analysis of the unconscious reaffirms its legitimacy and renews its theoretical and practical modalities” (“Beyond the Psychoanalytical”, 193, emphasis added).

        Ultimately, the Freudian presence in the anti-oedipal project cannot be subsumed in its entirety under the register of neurotic stasis. Alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s mostly justifiable critique of the cynically essentialist and normalizing vein in the history of psychoanalysis, there also lies their tremendously active disavowal of some of the principal elements of Freudian thought, a disavowal that invites, even begs, to be distorted, reproduced, and ultimately disavowed. Deleuze himself had praised the practice as “nothing less than the foundation of imagination” (Coldness and Cruelty, 128) and, along with Guattari, had gone on to trace its passages and vicissitudes via Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, culminating with the anti-oedipal rubric of desiring production.

        For those of us familiar with the rhetoric surrounding Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is quite familiar: the text is but a tool box; it offers itself as an opening onto new spaces of action, of thought, of thought as action.

        However, and though we have supposedly learned our lessons well, we repeatedly find ourselves under the sway of one of two radically opposed tendencies.

        The first is to trace theoretical genealogies leading the text back to such figures as Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, genealogies that highlight the ingenuity of the text’s authors, and, in so doing, subordinate the entire schema (texts, authors, and readers) to the hierarchy that we have come to recognise as the History of Ideas.

        The second tendency veers in an anti-theoretical direction, fiercely denouncing the so-called earnestness of any attempt at understanding as ostensibly castrating since to understand is to supposedly excise the radical impetus, the laughter, and the momentum they generate.

        The former tendency forces the text into that sphere of the public domain that is subjugated to the standards of clarity and authority. The text is a Nietzschean reordering of Marx and Freud. No, the text is a Nietzschean redemption of a Marxism polluted, crippled even, by the degeneration of the time’s Sino-Soviet socialism, a redemption that has abandoned any allegiance to the dominant Freudianism of the day. No, no, no; the text is actually an implicit engagement with and repudiation of Lacan through Freud; after all, it is a radical materialist psychiatry that remains the central concern here. The theories, and the interpretations, abound as they jostle for first place in that academic pantheon appropriately known as secondary literature.

        The latter tendency forces the text into a private domain of so-called nomadic manipulations and appropriations, a domain where communication and collaboration are, unfortunately, rendered quasi-impossible.

        One is stuck between, on the one hand, the “royal” Law that dictates how the text ought to be read and where best it might be placed in the Grand History of Thought and, on the other, the threat of a dis-integration into the realm of a crippled and crippling atomism.

        It would be convenient at this point to map such tendencies onto the very processes that Deleuze and Guattari have diagnosed elsewhere, especially in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus, to argue, for instance, that the tension one experiences is none other than the one operating between the two limits of the royally totalizing and the nomadically dispersive, the very same tension through which history is said to unfold and action to emerge.