Fetish-2
The two syntheses of production are subject to fetishistic manipulation: reversal in the case of connection, and exclusivity in the case of disjunction.
The fetish is specific to a social delirium (an “I think”) of an apparent movement of, for instance, the body without organs as cause of all production (the logic of “without me you are nothing“) or of a decisive choice between two immutable alternatives (either conscious or unconscious, either inside or outside, either analyst or analysand).
In schizophrenic delirium, the two syntheses overlap; fluidity is the order of the day.
It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate. (15)
The echo here is to Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, his presentation of von Sacher Masoch from a few years prior to Anti-Oedipus, specifically to the contract the masochist draws up and proposes to the other, a contract that takes the form of the Law but is indeed designed to generate all that that Law prohibits. The scrambling of codes in this instance operates on at least two levels: at the level of the author of the contract who gets to prescribe the limits of the scene (stereotypically the active “top” but in this case the supposedly passive “bottom”); and at the level of the content and intent of the contract (impropriety, un-pleasure).
If we are in a position to qualify Anti-Oedipus itself as masochistic/schizophrenic then we should expect that everything that has been said so far to be subject to the same shifts and scramblings. What we are offered is an ever growing and ever confusing set of syntheses and much of what follows will depend on our responses to it, on what we make of it.
