Anti-
In this context, we witness near the closing of the chapter’s first section what might seem like a moment of dialectical abstraction: “desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all” (8).
Deleuze and Guattari seem to be telling us if not the truth of production then at least the truth of its vicissitudes. Supposedly, the linear series of production, recording, and consumption congeals enough to produce its own antithesis: the non-productive dis-organisation that is the body without organs. To some, this may sound distastefully, perhaps even shockingly, Hegelian. Hardly, since the production of the body without organs does not carry with it any evidence of finality; it is qualitatively eruptive and unpredictable. As we shall soon see, and in the face of the borderline’s rigid either/or, one encounters the disjunctive synthesis “either… or… or…” of the schizophrenic.
While there is much in it that tells us what it does, there is nothing in Anti-Oedipus, so far at least, that explains what a body without organs, or a desiring machine for that matter, is. Instead, we are told what this body without organs is not: it is not a projection; it has nothing to do with the body or with an image of the body; it is not a metaphor; and it has no productive quality whatsoever (8). If Anti-Oedipus is a theory of the body without organs, it records and hence produces that which it theorizes; it is also the process by which it becomes what it theorizes. It not only theorizes the impossibility of imaging, producing a copy, whether good or bad, of the body without organs, it is itself a body without organs and as such, it is unavailable for copying. Any attempt at reproducing in its totality a theoretical image of this body is bound to be unproductive, or productive of another extension of the same organ-less body, or of another body altogether.
Furthermore, if one accepts this schema of the connective synthesis then, and in one of its registers at least, Anti-Oedipus is to psychoanalysis what the anti-production of the body without organs is to the desiring machines. The “Anti-“ in the text’s title is a reference to its relationship as a product of, and not simply a reaction to or a rejection of, the rigid over-organization of the machines of psychoanalysis as they constitute a clinical practice and a theoretical enterprise. The “Anti-“ is hence one of neither repudiation nor substitution; its effects are momentary and the final word has not been and, thankfully, never can be spoken; the machines will invariably regroup and desire will circulate once again.
