Guattari's Oedipus

Reblogged from Deterritorial Investigations Unit:

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Noir Realism has put up a thought-provoking post on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, describing the work as a “Black Book of Riddles,” a “dreamwork” that doesn't so much offer a strict revolutionary praxis, but opts instead for an extended poetic science-fiction of a world existing only moments away where death's pale figure hovers, a chilled wind in the air. And it is a book of riddles indeed!

Read more… 2,511 more words

I don’t really agree with Steven as to assert with him [here] that Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is somehow a book of ‘riddles’ or a kind of ‘dreamwork’ of sorts, because this is like reproducing the idea that the book’s stylistic aim is mysterious, that it has ‘secrets’ to discover, that there is a lot to ‘reveal’ about its content, that it is just revolting and provocative, just as if what Deleuze and Guattari wrote would not really be speaking by itself and with enough clarity and loudness. Of course, it is not but in reason of what I do understand about the book that I certainly don’t take it in this superfluous way, so there is no excuse for me to fill this lack by creating any asylum for my word to make it playfully resonate with it. While it is difficult to read what they say with the same degree of literalness that they apply to the text, which precisely is what the reader is invited to do through it, another thing is to give the text some obscure properties that it does not have, just as to read only whatever our own intimate word wants to get from it. Anyhow, I would admit that the book contains a good lot of conceptual syncretisms that are not quite meant to please any poetic science fiction of a world-after-death, but all the contrary: for those who can track them right from Deleuze’s previous philosophical work, these syncretisms really mean the reader to think desire as a full intensive experience of life in a reborn-materialized-world. However, as Deleuze and Guattari say in their book: a bad reading is better than not reading anything at all, and to my mind, the word of who might be behind Deterritorial Investigations seems to have a clearer idea of the book despite of being also agreeable with Steven’s:

“Its celebration of the schizophrenic experience is certainly controversial, but people overlook the fact that at the bottom of schizophrenia is a rejection of any system that promotes a master signifier... Schiz, as in schizophrenia, schizo-analysis, means to “break,” “separate,” or divide; the schizo-analytic practice is to locate find these breaks, wherein the potential for bifurcation resides, and use them to jump in a new production of subjectivity, a new place full of beings and becomings.”

So I find this entry at Deterritorial investigations worth to repost because it brings the question of how Guattari finally broke with Lacan and got rid of his very own attached lacanian subjections.

“Guattari’s contributions to Anti-Oedipus, his conjoining with Deleuze on the level of desiring-machines, then would be, as he puts it, a procedural disengagement leading to the final schiz, the break from Lacan – the exiting of this mini Oedipal triangle and becoming-schizophrenic.”

[Speaking of Reterritorialization]: The Scheme of Significant Regime

Scheme of Significant Regime

Scheme of Significant Regime

This is the famous ‘scheme of significant regime’ that Deleuze and Guattari expose in A Thousand Plateaus specifically in the chapter On several regimes of signs. For them, the regime of signs of a ‘significant semiotic’ is characterized by the fact that a sign always remits to another sign, making a signifying chain which net is not only infinite and circular, but it also expands in a spiral which ensures the feedback of the significant centre, the Signifier in person, the despotic face, but always in relation to the circles of entropic attraction that constantly overcode it. The scheme shows this point of significance that generates a field of priestly interpretosis which circles form a radiating body reterritorialized through a blocked line of flight, cancelling every point of individuation and singularization. Any point ‘more significant’ than the centre is taken as a scapegoat to be immediately thrown by the tangent and expelled from the system. Continue reading

Lost in translation? A footnote to ‘The Zero Intensity’ quote previously posted…

…which is one of my favourites in Anti-Oedipus [here]. The thing is that, in the 1977 English translation of Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, precisely in this very passage of the first chapter, there seems to be NOT an errata but a sort of misinterpretation somehow unexplainable. In the French original version this passage starts as follows:

french quote schizo

But in the English version, the same passage starts like this:

Continue reading

‘Zero Intensity’ & The New Celibate Machine [quoted in Anti-Oedipus]

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“There is an actual consumption of the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces. The question becomes: what does the celibate machine produce? what is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive quantities. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable –a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form. These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think…) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content –an “I feel that I am becoming a woman,” “that I am becoming a god,” and so on, which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory, but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions. Continue reading

‘Close though-still-misguided’: three schizosophical impressions about Joshua Ramey’s introduction to The Hermetic Deleuze

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Nietzsche: ‘All the Names in History’ [quoted in Anti-Oedipus]

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“There is no Nietzsche­ the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: “every name in history is I…” It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: “They’re me! So it’s me!” No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He consumes all of universal history in one fell swoop. We began by defining him as Homo natura, and low and behold, he has become Homo historia.”

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari