Page 133 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

Deleuze and Guattari
Lacan’s negativity stands in marked contrast to the radically
positive possibilities for a politics of difference and desire enthu-
siastically elaborated in the two volumes of Deleuze and
Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, both written during the
1970s: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. They also collabo-
rated on Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and on their last work,
What is Philosophy?, first published in 1975 and 1991 respectively.
Their work of the 1970s combined Deleuze’s Nietzschean philos-
ophy of difference with Guattari’s psychoanalytic approach to
micro-politics after the style of Foucault. Theirs was a radical
libertarianism, which read Marxism and psychoanalysis as
aiming to liberate the subject from structures of control, social or
psychic, only in order to re-inscribe it into the equally control-
ling structures of the authoritarian state and psychological
normalcy. Their theoretical vocabulary and concerns clearly
shared the more generally post-structuralist hostility towards
‘totalising’ thought: ‘We no longer believe in a primordial totality
that once existed’, they declared, ‘or in a final totality that awaits
us at some future date’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 42).
Rejecting the Freudian unconscious as ‘classical theatre’ and
the Lacanian subject as ‘an idealist . . . conception’ (p. 25),
Deleuze and Guattari imagined the unconscious as a positive
and productive ‘desiring-machine’, seeking ever new creative
connections in a constant state of becoming. The aim of Anti-
Oedipus was thus to promote the creation of ‘schizo-subjects’,
‘nomadic desiring-machines’, who would be able to ‘unscram-
ble the codes’ of a jaded modernity. The schizophrenic thus
became the model for a psychic condition able to resist the re-
strictive and manipulative control of capitalist mechanisms:
‘What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its
process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic
accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its
vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless con-
tinues to act as capitalism’s limit’ (p. 34). Deleuze and Guattari
also attempted to explain the rise of fascism: not in terms of
repression, nor as a crisis of capitalist accumulation, but rather
as a logical outcome of the deformed channelling of desire into

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