Anti-Oedipus explicitly and persistently repels any attempt to make it accountable for a specific code, arrangement, or meaning. It is no wonder that the barrage of concepts, names, code words, and events maintains an excess of speed where one can no longer differentiate between the various components. The recording is played at the rate of a thousand words per minute. All that one can hear is the taut and opaque barrier of a single note.

        Why would a text wish to repel its reader? What are the uses, applications, or political lessons implicit in such repulsion? And what losses and/or recuperations are inherent to such uses and applications? These questions make as little, and as much, sense as they would if they were posed of an electron repelling another.

        One thing is certain though: the text’s initial overarching and forcefully unbending declarations have now given way to a smooth and icy surface on which a traveller, no matter how well trained or properly equipped, cannot but trip and fall. This fall is bound up with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of primary repression as repulsion, in this case the repulsion of the desiring machines by the body without organs—an understanding which, interestingly enough, is perfectly in line with that of Freud’s. “On Repression” is unequivocal on this matter: primary repression is the mechanism by which the unconscious is set up as the system that will subsequently endure repression “proper,” secondary re-pression, pressure again. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan had translated Freud’s point in terms of the subject being founded by an act of primary forgetting. Another version of the question: “why would a text wish to repel its reader?” would then be: “why would the subject, why would the I forget?” The answer is that the I is fundamentally incapable of answering such a question for it is not simply the subject of forgetting but its product, as forgetting.

        Similarly, the body without organs does not choose to repel. It is produced as repelling. In its essence, it is not the planned or hoped for outcome of a project or program. Much like production, it is not a goal of human activity, but one of its constitutive moments as that tense and conflictual set of relations without which such activity would not be possible in the first place. I say conflictual because, and as much as we know it as a conditional relation of repulsion, or paranoia as Deleuze and Guattari prefer to think it, we also know the body without organs as a conditional relation of attraction. This is where the parallel, and hence transversality, between desiring production and social production proves to be quite useful. The body without organs (capital for instance) flows; it does not produce anything; but it does record onto itself the machines (labour) it initially repelled. It is through labour that capital gets to reproduce itself. Attraction and repulsion do not cancel each other out; they coexist. The capitalist is proud of his accomplishments, property, factories, and labourers; but he is also adamant on maintaining most of the ideological and economic lines that separate him from these labourers.