Reading
From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal or “psychic” reality, of a fantasy and a mimic, of a representation of the real, desired, and hence lacked object.
Deleuze and Guattari offer us the linchpin of a critique of the notion of desire as lack and, by extension, of the subject as lacking, as well as the elements of a desire whose three constitutive moments (production, recording, and consumption) are both transitive and reflexive. Paradoxically, the anti-oedipal level of abstraction here opens up the possibility for desire as a machine whose satisfaction is not equivalent to having (consumption) or to being (performance); it is rather a matter of doing, which may include having and being but is limited to neither.
This, I believe, is most evident in the context of the reader’s relationship to the text: does Anti-Oedipus carry with it a measure of either the descriptive or the prescriptive? The former requires an appeal to neutrality that the text has doggedly resisted: indeed, and rather than on entities, its focus has been on events and relations, and, most importantly, on its and its reader’s inevitable implications in them. In the process, the text thwarts that reader’s demand for an ethical or clinical guideline since such a demand can be satisfied only in a context whereby the agency that makes it and the agency that fulfills it are identifiable and discrete.
If anything, the Deleuzo-Guattarian schema reverses the responsibility for satisfaction; the question that is most pressing now is the one that regards not the text’s meaning and application but the reader’s experiences and/of use. Dismantle, rearrange, and reassemble; the status of the anti-oedipal schema is that of a machine that is distinguishable from the wanderings of its meta-psychological counterparts; it is not so much that we have an account of psyche, text, and institution that can better fulfill our analytic, epistemic, or political demands; rather, we are offered and drawn into an understanding that obeys the laws of its own inquiry. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject is conjunctive, provisional, and indeed situational then, as a textual, theoretical, and methodological subject, so are Anti-Oedipus and its readers.
