THE PRODUCTION OF DESIRE IN SCHIZOANALYSIS: CONCEPTUAL FORMULATIONS AND DELIMITATIONSABSTRACT
This article aimed to present the formulation of the concept of desire in schizoanalysis, especially in “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, establishing a counterpoint to its constitution in psychoanalysis, as well as to the representational matrix, hegemonic in the Western philosophical field, and supporting several theories. Therefore, we initially present how the production of the concept of desire in Deleuze and Guattari occurred as an argumentative effort to sustain its productive dimension, in opposition to its constitution as a lack in psychoanalytic tradition. Furthermore, the concept of desire is another cog in the machinic-desiring-rhizomatic gear that is anti-Oedipal writing, as a way of confronting the transcendentalism present in the representational matrix of modern Western tradition. Next, we clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s original use of the notions of machine and production to describe the incessant flows that operate through the unconscious and its processes, whose foundations are connections with exteriority. This contrasts with both representationalism and idealism derived from the Platonic-Kantian tradition and the symbolic operations of identity in psychoanalytic structuralism. Finally, the conceptualization of the Freudian unconscious is presented to help us understand the dimension of lack in the constitution of desire in this theoretical framework. We conclude that schizoanalysis developed a creative and original understanding of desire as production through the literaryphilosophical enterprise of rhizomatic writing.
Keywords:
schizoanalysis; psychoanalysis; desire
RESUMO
O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar a formulação do conceito de desejo na esquizoanálise, especialmente, na obra O Anti-Édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia, estabelecendo um contraponto à sua constituição na psicanálise, bem como à matriz representacional, hegemônica no Ocidente no campo filosófico, sendo suporte de diversas teorias. Para tanto, apresentamos inicialmente como a produção do conceito de desejo em Deleuze e Guattari se deu como um esforço argumentativo para sustentar sua dimensão produtiva, em oposição à sua constituição como falta na tradição psicanalítica. Além disso, o conceito de desejo é mais uma peça da engrenagem maquínico-desejante-rizomática que é a escrita antiedipiana, como modo de enfrentamento ao transcendentalismo presente na matriz representacional própria da tradição moderna ocidental. Em seguida, esclarecemos os usos originais de Deleuze e Guattari fazem das noções de máquina e produção, para dizer dos fluxos incessantes que operam através do inconsciente e de seus processos, cujo sustentáculo são as conexões com a exterioridade, contrariamente tanto ao representacionismo e idealismo derivados da tradição platônico-kantiana, quanto às operações simbólicas identitárias no estruturalismo psicanalítico. Por fim, a conceitualização do inconsciente freudiano é apresentada para compreendermos a dimensão da falta na constituição do desejo nesse sistema teórico. Concluímos que a esquizoanálise elaborou uma compreensão criativa e original do desejo como produção, através do empreendimento literário-filosófico pela escrita rizomática.
Palavras-chave:
Esquizoanálise; psicanálise; desejo
RESUMEN
Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar la formulación del concepto de deseo en el esquizoanálisis, especialmente en “O Anti-Édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia”, estableciendo un contrapunto a su constitución en el psicoanálisis, así como a la matriz representacional, hegemónica en occidente en lo filosófico campo, apoyando varias teorías. Por tanto, presentamos inicialmente cómo la producción del concepto de deseo en Deleuze y Guattari tuvo lugar como un esfuerzo argumentativo para sostener su dimensión productiva, en oposición a su constitución como carencia en la tradición psicoanalítica. Además, el concepto de deseo es una pieza más del engranaje maquínico-deseante-rizomático que es la escritura antiedípica, como forma de confrontar el trascendentalismo presentes en la matriz representacional de la tradición occidental moderna. A continuación, aclaramos los usos originales de Deleuze y Guattari de las nociones de máquina y producción, para decir los flujos incesantes que operan a través del inconsciente y sus procesos, cuyo pilar son las conexiones con la exterioridad, contrario tanto al representacionalismo como al idealismo derivado del tradición platónica-kantiana, en cuanto a las operaciones simbólicas de la identidad en el estructuralismo psicoanalítico. Finalmente, se presenta la conceptualización del inconsciente freudiano para comprender la dimensión de carencia en la constitución del deseo en este sistema teórico. Concluimos que el esquizoanálisis desarrolló una comprensión creativa y original del deseo como producción, a través del emprendimiento literario-filosófico por la escritura rizomática.
Palabras-clave:
Esquizoanálisis; psicoanálisis; deseo
Introduction
The relationship between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis is fraught with tension, particularly regarding the notion of desire. Preteseille & Rosanvallon (2009) identify in AntiOedipus an immanentist philosophical stance that takes being and thought, nature and the artificial, as indiscernible elements, juxtaposed on the same plane of immanence. In this literary-philosophical endeavor, desire functions as a strategic concept, allowing Deleuze and Guattari (2010) to articulate heterogeneous notions on a single theoretical plane, moving away from the interpretation of desire as lack, propagated by Lacanian psychoanalysis in vogue at the time.
Desire thus emerges as a positive power in opposition to desire as negativity, linked to impossible jouissance, inherent lack, and the necessary discharge that transforms the subject into a being-of-lack. Treating desire as a machinic process of production immanent to socio-historical becoming, the authors attribute a positive value to the concept. That is, it ceases to be related to psychic or phantasmatic attributes and, unlike what occurs in a certain psychoanalytic tradition, designates a process inherent in the construction of the real, productive, and desiring. A process that is a political force, a transformative and productive power, a pulsating becoming capable of revolutionary acts, which is exercised through intensity. In a dialogue with Claire Parnet, Deleuze argues, “Desire is not [...] interior to a subject, nor does it tend towards an object: it is, strictly speaking, immanent to a plane in which it does not pre-exist, to a plane that needs to be constructed, where particles are emitted, flows are conjugated” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1998, pp. 72-73).
In this fragment, we identify an effort to demarcate the conception of desire through schizoanalysis. The anti-Oedipus machine leads us down paths that are, if not unprecedented, at least strange and rebellious to the dominant matrices of subjectivation in the West. Deleuze and Guattari (2010) invite us to transit through territories whose contours lie outside the ontologies that, explicitly or implicitly, sustain the dichotomies between subject and object, interiority and exteriority, and representation and reality. They do so by emphasizing the dimension of relations, affirming reality as produced amidst intensive flows and becomings in a permanent self-creation driven by desire. In this way, reality is, in itself, a desiring production (production désirante).
According to Holland (1999), the lexical device ‘desiring production’ functions as a composite of elements originating from distinct theoretical spheres. In his view, it is a conceptual coupling that produces a dual effect: it psychoanalyzes a concept traditionally linked to Marxism-production-while simultaneously historicizing a term strongly influenced by psychoanalytic interpretation-desire. For Sibertin-Blanc (2011), the concept of desiring production is used to characterize an ‘autopoietic’ process that integrates human life into the inseparable unity of nature and history, of the human and the nonhuman. Thus, the idea of production is evoked to escape approaches that, respectively, approximate desire to the notions of object, lack, and conflicts arising from the subject’s inner life (psychoanalysis) and socio-historical reality (the Freudo-Marxism of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse). Therefore, it consists of a conceptual coupling set up to dissolve the ways of thinking about desire in representational and/or oppositional terms. For Dumouliè (2005, p. 145), this displacement of desire carried out by the authors “[...] supposes a work of demystification […] of hegemonic discourses and of any pretension of making desire an object of knowledge or power.”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari attribute to thinkers René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Sigmund Freud a decisive role in the constitution, reproduction, and reformulation of the assumptions that underlie modern man’s understanding of the structure of reality. However, the connection between them is not absolute; that is, the specificities of these theories are irrelevant to a supposedly common underlying formal structure. Throughout the anti-Oedipus text, the machinations constructed by these authors have different nuances. They are part of argumentative strategies often tied to connections built from heterogeneous domains, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature, and many others. Because of this, understanding what is being read occurs, to a certain extent, when we reach the conclusion of the argument in a section or even the end of a chapter, or not even then. The text is a ‘rhizoform’ multiplicity that develops according to the principles of connection and heterogeneity, and its ‘materials’ cannot be captured by linear axiomatization schemes (Andoka, 2012). In this direction, Lee (2014) points out that these connections between different elements that have their own dimensions and preserve their differences represent a strategy that consists of bringing together fragments and diversifying intensities and affects to construct a plane of immanence, of coexistence of these dimensions rather than dichotomies.
Given this observation, we focus on one of the connections in Anti-Oedipus, specifically the problem of desire for psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. To this end, we follow the contours of the problematization of this concept in a fragment of the dialogue that Deleuze and Guattari—working on the concepts of the desiring machine and the machinic unconscious—establish with Freud around the representational matrix of thought and the Oedipalized unconscious.
The machinic as a critique of the representational and the structural
Sibertin-Blanc (2010) suggests that anti-Oedipus critiques of idealist interpretations, whether disguised as philosophy, psychoanalysis, or Freudian-Marxism, are part of the argumentative tactic that demonstrates that desiring and social productions are interconnected and possess an identity of nature that differs only according to the types of regimes. For the author, both processes, desire and the social, impact on a plane of immanence in order to constitute a machinic agency.
The concept of machine, then, fulfills a strategic function in the analysis of desiring production and should not be seen as a mere metaphorical resource. Deleuze and Guattari (2010) defend this prerogative at the beginning of the work: “There are only machines everywhere, and without any metaphor: machines of machines, with their couplings, their connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 11). Later, they reinforce: “[...] desiring machines represent nothing, mean nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what is made of them, what is done with them, what they do in themselves” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 380). It is worth highlighting that this concept of machine opposes structuralism, dominant at the time, which was guided by the discursive order and the transcendence of the symbolic. Faced with the structure, a system of interdependent places whose transformations only occur within them, they propose the machine, emphasizing its functioning through gears, parts that articulate as they are created. The machinic operator is procedural, productive, and a producer of singularities and irreversibilities. If the structure transcends the individual and presents itself as immutable, universal, and invariant, whose explanations refer to itself, the machine summons exteriority, realizing itself in the way they connect, in which they engender one another, in the forces that exist ‘outside’ of it.
However, it is very difficult, even for the most benevolent reader, to judge whether the term is not actually a metaphor. According to Zourabichvili (2005), this interpretative bias is justifiable, since understanding the concept requires the reader to transpose a certain number of meanings alluded to by the word “machine” —that is, everything involving the mastery of technology—to another semantic field governed by the meaning of desire. Things become even more confusing when we consider expressions like “solar anus,” which the authors use in italics. How can we read these syntagms other than metaphorically?
Zourabichvili (2005) attempts to overcome this apparent contradiction through an original analysis. The author invites us to understand each Deleuze-Guattari concept as a device that holds the theory of its own literality. From this perspective, the concept of machine operates at three levels. First, we have Anti-Oedipus as a theory of desiring machines. This definition refers to another level, which, in turn, leads the reader to connect with the book and produce the reader-Anti-Oedipus machine. At the third level, we have the book itself as an illustration of a desiring machine that emerges freely.
Let us consider the concept of machine in its textual form. It is associated with the ideas of assembly lines, production, and gears in motion. Now, the point is not to explain the unconscious functioning ‘as’ that of a machine, nor to treat it ‘as’ a technical-instrumental mechanism that replaces, prolongs, or projects human action in nature. For Deleuze and Guattari (2010), the unconscious is a production machine connected to other machines that emit, cut, and record flows. The unconscious operates by connecting to things (animals, sexuality, politics, etc.) in an immanent and nonlinear machinic becoming devoid of prior origin and orientation. The desiring machine is, therefore, everything that can connect to infinity in every sense and direction (Antonioli, 2003).
The concept of machine functions, above all, is a critical-analytical device used to dismantle certain operations linked to the rationalist-representational apparatus and, most importantly, to confront the structural paradigm, as noted above. Desire as production operates through a machinic unconscious, which opposes certain aspects of the matrix of thought that created the epistemological conditions necessary for the constitution of human sciences. We refer to Descartes, or rather, to the notions of dualism and interiority arising from his philosophical system. It is worth remembering that the Cartesian revolution inaugurated an inadequacy between the certainty and truth of the cogito and the certainty and truth of the world—that is, a dichotomy that contrasts res cogitans (the subjectivity of the spirit) with res extensa (the exteriority of the body) (Vaz, 2004).
In this dualistic scheme, rationality becomes an internal property of subjective thought, which, as a result, acquires the status of a representation of reality. Consequently, knowledge “from the outside” becomes mediated by the ideas we hold within us; that is, we have here the supremacy of interiority, to which exteriority bows. The order of representations must then develop in such a way as to generate certainty, through the concatenation of clear and distinct ideas that follow an order from least to most complex (Taylor, 1997).
According to Sibertin-Blanc (2010), Deleuze and Guattari associate psychoanalysis with a tradition whose principles are updated by the Cartesian cogito, although not limited to it. The authors ironically see the model of the oedipalized, expressive, tragic-mythical unconscious—which establishes a parallel between the unconscious and its derivatives and links desire to the notion of lack— as a kind of revamped idealist philosophy. In this context, Freud is treated as the heir to a philosophical tradition inaugurated by Plato and criticized but not surpassed by Kant. In section I.4.2, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) support this thesis through a series of arguments consisting of three sets of problematizations of the nature of desire. First, they explain to what extent desire in Plato can be considered an idealist conception, as can be seen in the following excerpt:
[...] the logic of desire does not hit its object from the first step, that of the Platonic division that makes us choose between production and acquisition. As soon as we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make of it an idealist (dialectical, nihilistic) conception that determines it, first of all, as lack: a lack of object, a lack of the real object (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 41).
They then refer to Kant—or rather, to his approach to the limits of knowledge in Crítica da faculdade do juízo (Kant, 1993) —and conclude that the Kantian conception of desire “[...] does not question the classical conception of desire as lack, but relies on it, is supported by it, contenting itself with deepening it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, pp. 41-42). Finally, they address Freudian psychoanalysis, making it representative of the idealist avant-garde. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) identify a dualism that prolongs the Platonic-Kantian formula in their explanation of the principle of causality of the unconscious. They create a bricolage that superimposes, in a single theoretical-critical figure, the aporias of the Kantian transcendental subject and Freudian theorizations about the institution of the reality principle and representational unconscious.
Criticisms made in this context primarily target the role that the concept of lack plays in defining desire. In Section I.4.2, they are formulated as follows:
Conceived […] as a production, but a production of phantasms, desire has been perfectly exposed by psychoanalysis. At the lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object that desire lacks refers […] to an extrinsic natural or social production, while desire intrinsically produces an imaginary that duplicates reality, as if there were ‘a dreamed object behind every real object’ or a mental production behind real productions […] From this derives the presentation of desire as ‘supported’ by needs, maintaining the productivity of desire against the backdrop of needs and their relationship of lack with the object […] In short, when desiring production is reduced to a production of phantasms, we content ourselves with drawing all the consequences of the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, and not as production, ‘industrial’ production (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, pp. 42-43, author’s emphasis).
In this excerpt, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) allude to the theme of original satisfaction and explore the theoretical and epistemological implications of this narrative for conceptualizing the unconscious. To understand the nature of these implications, we must consider the role that the experience of satisfaction plays in the constitution of the Freudian psychic apparatus. We believe that characterizing this process is crucial because the ontology that underpins it serves, for Deleuze and Guattari (2010), as a counterpoint to the formulation of the machinic unconscious. Let us examine what such satisfaction is all about.
In search of satisfaction: desire-as-lack
Freud (1969, 1976, 2004) explained that the subject, in the early stages of existence, is unable to distinguish external reality from its internal processes. This achievement stems from the successive experiments the infant undertakes in an attempt to free itself from discomfort, the source of which it cannot discern. At this stage of development (“reality-ego”), there is no separation between subject and object. This is an archaic moment in the constitution of the subject, in which the self seeks instinctual satisfaction through autoeroticism.
However, the rudiments of the processes that allow individuals to delimit their boundaries with the external world are already present at this early stage. They are related to the muscular actions that children perform to free themselves from whatever causes them discomfort. Gradually, the “reality-ego” begins to distinguish which stimuli it can and cannot avoid. From a certain point onward, it adopts a new logic of functioning governed by the pleasure principle. In short, when this occurs, the “reality-ego” transforms into the “purified pleasure-ego.”
The individual’s ability to distinguish between the internal and external worlds continues with the establishment of the “purified pleasure-ego.” In this state, the infant relates to the world through the mechanisms of introjection and projection. The infant tends to internalize everything it experiences as pleasurable and expels what is not convenient. One type of experience plays a crucial role in this division. We refer here to the experience of original satisfaction, whose marks are decisive in the dynamics of desire’s functioning. In ‘Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning,’ Freud describes it as follows:
[...] from the beginning, imperious demands arising from the organism’s internal needs disturbed the state of psychic rest. In this state, in a way analogous to what still occurs every night with our dream thoughts, what was thought (what was desired) simply presents itself in a hallucinatory form. The expected satisfaction had to fail to occur; there had to be frustration for this attempt at satisfaction through hallucinatory means to be abandoned. Instead of hallucinating, the psychic apparatus then had to decide to conceive [vorzustellen] the real circumstances present in the external world and began to yearn for a real modification of it (Freud, 2004, p. 66).
Freud (2007) suggested that infants tend to invest in memories (images of the object and the action associated with the discharge of arousal) of what once provided satisfaction due to sudden discomfort. These memories are formed from discomfort, from internal physical needs, in which a first response, an image linked to the memory trace of the satisfaction of the need, functions as a link to other traces, thus establishing a psychic apparatus (Freud, 1995). This reactivation occurs through the image of the object, which, in turn, for the subject, has a status identical to that of the original perception. However, it acquires a hallucinatory character, incapable of satisfying the organism’s current demand. The infant then ‘realizes’ that a mental representation elicited by hunger, for example, does not produce the same effects on the organism as food does. Initially, the infant hallucinates but must adjust its expectations to reality to be able to perform an effective action to some extent in meeting its needs.
Therefore, the experience of satisfaction is linked to the human condition of helplessness, as we cannot induce a specific action to suppress discomfort. This means that the organism does not, by nature, possess the cognitive-biological apparatus that would enable it, on its own, to elicit an action capable of attenuating the tensions arising from endogenous excitations. Reality testing plays a decisive role in this context, as it allows the child to end procrastination due to thinking and perform an action that will or will not provide satisfaction (Freud, 1969).
According to Laplanche and Pontalis (1991), Freud used the experience of satisfaction to explain, among other things, the origin of the lost object and, consequently, the function of lack in the constitution of desire. It is important to emphasize that the search for the lost object is not completely suppressed, since, as Laplanche and Pontalis (1991, p. 530) explain, “[...] the image of the satisfying object then assumes an elective value in the constitution of the subject’s desire. It can be reinvested in the absence of the real object (hallucinatory satisfaction of desire) and will always guide the subsequent search for the satisfying object.”
According to Garcia-Roza (2009), Freud used the term Vorstellung to designate a type of drive representation produced by the inscription of an object in the psychic apparatus. He draws our attention to the fact that Freud’s use of the notion of representation is distinct from that of the German philosophical tradition, especially Hegel. However, although their uses are different, for both Kant and Freud, the notion of representation, central to the dominant discourses on desire, is inserted into theories that aim to explain the constitution of a subject for whom reality always occurs through processing. While for Kant, the data of sensory experience (“thing-in-itself”) are organized by a priori categories of apperception, for Freud, objects, also inaccessible through direct means, are over-coded and inscribed as representations in the psychic apparatus. Therefore, it is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari (2010) consider Freud the heir to a tradition of thought that, rooted in the logic of representation, makes lack the causal principle of desire. The authors thus make a rhizomatic association between the two authors, who are surrounded by negativity and hardened homogenizations, separating desire from its potency.
However, not content with treating Freudian psychoanalysis as idealist, they go further in their critique. As suggested in the second part of the text, the concept of the machinic unconscious is proposed as a critical device directed at theoretical models inspired by French structuralism, another hegemonic approach at the time. Deleuze and Guattari (2010) used it to criticize Freudian and, surprisingly, Lacanian idealism. This is not about problematizing or denouncing a supposed representational logic reproduced by Lacan, since the linguistic-structural formalism that inspired him to develop the first part of his teaching does not derive from the matrix of representational thinking. With Lacanian teaching, they engage in a confrontation, above all, with the interlocutions that the French psychoanalyst makes with the Hegelian theory of desire, as transmitted by Kojève (2002)5. This interface serves as a model for Lacan to creatively return to Freud and develop his own theory of unconscious desire, which Deleuze and Guattari (2010) identify as the facet of idealism.
This theme, from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari (2010), is at the heart of psychoanalytic idealism, which places representation at the center of the psyche and is associated with phantasms, enactments of the realization of unconscious desire correlated with primary satisfaction, and imaginary scenes in which this desire appears to be realized. Far from breaking with the idealist principle of representation, psychoanalysis becomes even more entangled in it, since it conceives of desire “[…] as that which produces the phantasm and produces itself by separating itself from the object, but also by reduplicating the lack, taking it to the absolute, making it an incurable insufficiency of being” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 42).
In response to this representational-idealist model, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) proposed the concept of a real unconscious connected to socio-historical processes. While they recognize the merits of the psychoanalytic invention of desire and the innovation of theory, they criticize the closure in representation and Oedipus. The authors of Anti-Oedipus attempt to break through the cleavage created in desire by the action of lack, thereby inaugurating a new conceptual field. This task should not be understood as a creative game that replaces psychic processes with metaphors inspired by political, economic, and industrial concepts. Critiques of psychoanalytic idealism aim to affirm a pragmatics of desire, which has the concept of the desiring machine at the core of its originality. In this sense, desire becomes a political force, a transformative and productive power, a pulsating becoming capable of revolutionary acts, as it always seeks new connections, functioning externally rather than internally. In other words, they throw desire into the social realm, detaching it from representation and universal structures, a desire that is produced by agencies and heterogeneous mechanisms. Thus, all production is desiring because it operates according to a process that was originally discovered in the psychic realm of the unconscious, but is not limited to it. This process emphasizes that desire is not the patrimony of the psychic, but rather a mode of functioning of reality, affirming it as productive rather than restorative.
It is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari’s (2010) use of Freud is not limited to problematization and/or theoretical refutation. The dialogue with the founder of psychoanalysis is prolific and functions in different ways, thus serving various purposes. The caustic effect of the critique directed at Freud is produced primarily in the interfaces established with an Oedipalized unconscious. This is something we do not feel when the authors examine other aspects of Freudian theory, such as the notion of the primary process and the way in which reality functions. In this case, dialogue with Freud assumes a positive-creative value and is an important piece for understanding the functioning of desiring machines, elementary units that realize desire as a productive process.
The plots of desire between connections and conclusions
Throughout this text, we analyze some aspects involved in a fragment of the dialogue that Deleuze and Guattari (2010) establish with psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, aiming to problematize desire in this context. In the excerpt selected to analyze the conceptions of desire in schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, the authors use the “[...] idealist principle that defines desire as a lack” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 43) as the motto that serves as a counterpoint to discuss the concept of the machinic unconscious. They defend the thesis that Freud’s notion of desire is nothing more than the updating of an idealist tradition that has Plato and Kant as precursors.
However, it is noteworthy that the way Deleuze and Guattari (2010) used the term idealism seems, at first glance, extremely generic and, at the same time, simplistic. This is because treating Plato, Kant, and Freud as members of idealism would be an interpretation that is not only incorrect but also extremely reductionist. Do the authors treat different systems of thought as being similar? We believe they do not, and we have reasons to believe so, especially because the authors treat concepts as possibilities, affirming that they have textual coordinates defined according to the types of problems each author seeks to answer and insisting on their associative and inventive character, an important lesson they teach us about conceptual creation in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1992).
To support desire as an affirmative power rather than a lack, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) use a rhizomatic writing style to develop themes and concepts within an open system aimed at countering hegemonic discourses. In conclusion, we know that when we analyze a text, if we attribute an absolute value to what we read, we run the risk of identifying simplifications that do not apply when we consider the text in its entirety. This is the risk we take when we decide to analyze the notion of desire in psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis based on a single fragment from Anti-Oedipus.
The analysis undertaken here has allowed us to understand that the conception of desire is the desire of the other—reintroduced within the theorization of the unconscious structured with language—which, in the view of Deleuze and Guattari (2010), links Lacan’s idealisms to those of Plato, Kant, and Freud. Ultimately, despite so many theoretical shifts, psychoanalysis is nothing more than an idealist conception of desire as lack, as deficiency, as the primacy of negativity. These thoughts diverge from the proposal of authors who defend desire as a vital force that does not admit any limitation or representation.
Unlike the Oedipalized unconscious and the unconscious structured like a language, the Deleuze-Guattarian machine connects man and nature in an attempt to form a unity devoid of any residue of transcendent subjectivity, dichotomy, or disconnection. The man-machine couples with other machines to form horizontal, superficial agencies that represent nothing, metaphorize, and merely function. Desire is not a lack, nor is it caused by lack, and must be freed from this premise, for its only law is to always produce the producing, that is, to insert the producing into the product in such a way that there is no longer any difference between these terms. It becomes clear, then, which assumptions Guattari (1988) attacks when he asserts that the unconscious is constituted by a web that:
[...] it would be nothing other than the possible itself, the possible at the flower of language, but also the possible at the flower of the skin, at the flower of the socius, at the flower of the cosmos [...]. Why stick this label of machinic unconscious on it? Simply to emphasize that it is populated not only by images and words, but also by all kinds of machinery that lead it to produce and reproduce these images and words (Guattari, 1988, p. 10).
Evoking the machinic emphasizes that production, whether desiring or social, “[...] is the same production, but under two different regimes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 504), repositioning the real as something produced between molecular flows and molar strata, unrelated to an idealistic plane produced by a primordial lack. This thought has the potential to turn us toward the processes, not the objects, that mutually engender one another through desiring, social, technical, artistic machines, etc., and to divert us from their fixations on the molar strata that subjugate modes of existing, living, and relating. It is about returning to the productive coextensiveness between desire and the social.
[…] social production is only the production of desire itself under determined conditions. We say that the social field is immediately traversed by desire, which is its historically determined product, and that libido does not need any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, or any transformation to invest in the productive forces and relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 46).
Thus, the machinic unconscious leads us through intensities and into transformational universes rather than reproductive ones stratified into Oedipal functions and representations. It is a process of machinic enunciation that traverses heterogeneous dimensions—not just psychic ones—and opens itself to varied and inventive mechanisms.
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The concept of Desire (Begierde) plays a crucial role in the philosophical system Hegel develops to explain the process of identity of consciousness in its struggle for recognition. For Hegel, desire is an anthropogenic factor linked to a dialectical process by which the individual can constitute themselves as a free human self, conscious of themselves and their historicity. Desire is always mediated by another desire, since, “[...] for there to be self-consciousness, desire must be directed towards a non-natural object, something that goes beyond the given reality. Now, the only thing that goes beyond the given reality is desire itself” (Kojève, 2002, p. 12).
