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.
Ich/I/moi
Back to the question of translation though this time the text is encumbered by a move from the German original. Freud’s Oedipal trinity is of the “es/it,” the “Ich/I,” and the “Uber-Ich/Over-I.” While his English translators introduced the “id,” “ego,” and “super ego,” their French cousins remained closer to the original with the “ça,” “moi,” and “surmoi.” It is interesting that the translators of Anti-Oedipus chose to comply with the English Freud instead of the French Deleuze and Guattari. “I,” “me,” and “ego” are the choices they alternate for the single word “moi” (often, it seems, without rhyme or reason). Perhaps it was their attempt to bring closer to their audiences a text that sounded strange enough already!
Mine is not simply a linguistic concern since Freud had used the term “Ich” to refer at times to the self in its totality and at others to an agency or a part of that self. While it makes his text difficult to read, Freud’s equivocation also suggests that the two senses are co-dependent, that, in fact, one could not speak of a self, of an I, without that part, an ego, that negotiates between the demands of desire, reality, and the Law, that, in other words, and for Freud at least, to speak of a self is to speak of Oedipus. (To speak of a self, for Lacan, is to speak of and to insist on not only the necessity of the symbolic Law but also the unavoidability of a specular and imaginary “moi” without which the entire structure would also flounder.) Much like his predecessors (Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Binswanger), Freud relied on the “ego,” or its absence, to understand the schizophrenic, or at the very least to understand the schizophrenic as beyond psychoanalytic comprehension, and hence intervention.
To be fair to Freud, in a manner of speaking, and to also be more accurate, conceptually and clinically, it is not on the “ego/moi” that the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis hinges. Rather, it is the capacity for object libido, which is to say for the love of an other, that Freud looked for in his prospective analysands. This is not an insignificant distinction. In classic psychoanalytic terms, the I that is capable of love is an I that has already been Oedipalised; it is an I that has passed from ego libido to object libido, from secondary narcissism to the super ego (via the ego ideal). The narcissist, the masochist, the homosexual, the schizophrenic, the woman, in sum anything that is not “Freud,” these are all quite capable of uttering an “I” but theirs has not been fixed enough by its relationship to the familial axes of Oedipus for it to be curable. It is in its endorsement of this non-Oedipal “I/moi” that Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic process is to be distinguished from both Lacanism and Ego psychology. The only “real” relationship—be it of love, hate, or what not—is a relationship of production, of desiring production, of the production of the unconscious. Though he claimed all the names of history, Nietzsche, obviously, did not fail to utter an “I” whenever he fancied it or it suited his purposes. Similarly, the handyman has rarely hesitated to acknowledge an “I fixed it” even though his primary mode is of fixing things rather than of claiming for himself the things he has fixed.
