Energumen Capitalism[1]

 JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD   

  In spite of its title, Anti-Oedipus is not a critical book. Rather, like the Anti-Christ, it is a positive, assertive book, an energetic position inscribed in discourse, the negation of the adversary happening not by Aufhebung, but by forgetting. Just as atheism is religion extended into its negative form—is even the modern form of religion, the only one in which modernity could continue to be religious—so does the critique make itself the object of its object and settle down into the field of the other, accepting the latter's dimensions, directions and space at the very moment that it contests them. In Deleuze and Guattari's book you will see everywhere their utter contempt for  the  category  of  transgression  (implicitly  then  for  the  whole  of Bataille): either you leave immediately  without wasting time  in critique, simply because you find yourself to be elsewhere than in the adversary's domain; or else you critique, keeping one foot in and one out, positivity of  the negative, but in fact nothingness of the positivity. And this is the critical  non-potence one finds in Feuerbach and Adorho. Marx said in l844 that  socialism doesn't need atheism because the question of atheism is positionally  that of religion; it remains a critique. What is important in the  question is not its negativity, but its position (the position of the problem)  From atheism (which Marx considered to be Utopian communism) to socialism, there is no critique, no barrier crossed, no transcrescence; there is a  displacement, desire has wandered into another space, a different mechanism  has begun to operate, it works differently, and what allows it to work is not  the fact that the other, older machine has been criticized. For the same  reason and all things being equal, the lines that follow here will not be a  critique.
      Contrary to all expectations, or in fact because the shattering title is an  illusory effect, what the book subverts most profoundly is what it doesn't  criticize:   Marxism. This does not imply that symmetrically, it does not  subvert psychoanalysis, which it  attacks.  On the  contrary, beneath the  different speeds at which this book/machine runs, whether it works with  Freud or Marx, there remains an evident identity of position. What is  silently buried from Marx is no less serious or important than that from  Freud which is rendered up to the crackling blaze of Anti-Oedipus' counter-  fire.  On  one  hand,  the  machine/book  unplugs  itself  from  the  psychoanalytical network and exposes it, forces it to expose itself just like the man with the tape recorder does, reducing and projecting all the libidinal energy which should have flowed away into the transferential relationship, projecting it onto the paranoiac configuration of the Arch-State which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, underlies the network of psychoanalytical practice;  on the other hand and on the contrary, the book pumps out Marxisms  theoretical and practical flows, cutting them off here and there, dropping  without a word whole parts of the Marxist apparatus. None the less, the two  Elders are in fact put under the same banner: in their works, every way that  the libidinal economy communicates with the political economy is truly a  transforming force and thus a potential departure; on the contrary that by  which the libidinal conceals the political in Freud or the political the  libidinal in Marx must be leaped out of and danced upon. Thus, as the  visible axis of the book, everything that is unconsciously political m psycho-  analysis will be profoundly subverted, Anti-Oedipus being Anti-State rupture  with the despotic configuration unconsciously present in psychoanalysis. But  parallel to that, everything unconsciously libidinal in Marxism will be detached a libido imprisoned in the religious scaffolding of dialectical politics  or economic catastrophism, a libido repressed in the interrupted analyses ot , commodity fetishism or of the naturality of work.

      Yet the book is Anti-Oedipus and not Anti-Party, assuming that the  Party  is on the  socio-political surface,  the  analogue of  Oedipus on the corporal surface. Is this not giving too much importance to psychoanalysis in   the repressive mechanisms that regulate the circulation of Capital? Is this  critical virulence not too clamorous? Is it not precisely through it that leftist  intellectuals will make the book into a gadget, a seasonal fad, and thereby  neutralize it? Is not its true virulence in its silence? By branching the present   short work off the larger work of the book exactly where the latter is silent,  perhaps a few little spurts will be released, flows unexchangeable by the  merchants and/or the politicians. Thus what the book affirms is reaffirmed   showing to be one of the most intense products of the new libidinal configuration that is beginning to gel inside capitalism.

It is of no importance that what we do ends up being melodic. C. Wolff to Stockhausen

Marxism says: there is a frontier, a limit past which the organization of    flows called capital (capitalist relations of production) comes apart, and the    group of correspondences between money and commodities, capital and the    labor force  as well as other parameters, go haywire. And it is the very    growth of production capacities in the most modern capitalism which, i  reaching this limit, will cause the whole system of production and circulation I  to wobble. Furthermore this growth will not fail to allow the passage ot '  even more energy flows, and to unleash and disperse their  regulation    system within capital, that is, within the relations of production.

    What is this limit? The "disproportion between flows of credit and flows of production? That between quantities of commodities and quantities of available currency? That between capital invested and the expected profit rate? The disequilibrium between projected production capacity and effective production? The disproportion between fixed capital and salaries or variable capital? That between surplus value created by the exploitation of the labor force and its realization or reconversion in production? Or is the limit the lowering of the profit rate? Or the rising up of revolutionary criticism within the ranks of a growing proletariat? Or should it on the contrary be bitterly but symmetrically (that is by remaining within the same theoretical and practical  field)  recorded that the impetus to invest, discouraged by the lowering of the profit rate, is reinforced by the State; that workers are less and less open to a revolutionary upheaval in spite of their growing numbers (to the extent that Communist parties are obliged to practically exclude such a perspective from their programs and to present themselves as capable managers of a nearly identical system where there would simply be a few less owners of capital and a few more high-level functionaries)?     

These are not speculative hesitations, but are rather practical and politi- cal.  They  are the legacy of a century of the Communist movement, and from a good half-century of socialist revolution. As if around 1860, one had examined the dynamics of the French society, the contradictions within the society of the Ancien Regime; the direction imposed by Robespierre during the French Revolution; the historical function of Bonaparte; and finally, the fundamental difference between French society under the last kings and under the last emperor, realizing that it is found not in the Age of Enlightenment, where bourgeois ideology places it, but to the side, in the Industrial Revolution. The same goes, all things displaced, for the Russian "socialist"  state.  Its  divergence from bourgeois society is not where its discourse places it: not in the power of the Soviets, that is, not in the greater, theoretically very great proximity of the workers to the decisions taken on the economy and on society, thus in freer flows of production, words, thoughts, and objects. Its difference lies on the contrary in the restraint which is put on these currents just as strongly as it was under  czarism, just as rationally (that is to say, irrationally, and in just as secondary a fashion (in the Freudian sense)) by a sociovorous state that absorbs  civil  economic  and  intellectual  society, that  infiltrates  it  through  all its  circulatory trials  and pours into them the cement of its bureaucratic suspicion no more fluctuating and less representative; on the contrary,   just as centralized, totalizing and paranoiac. Here again things happen elsewhere:  the socialist revolution engenders a new land of despotic state, where  the police-like, paternalistic contempt for the masses and the libido seeks to  combine with the technical efficiency and initiative of (American) capitalism, and does not succeed. To Lenin stating that socialism was the Soviets' power  plus electrification, Kronstadt replied: it is the Party's power plus execution. In no way is capitalism the reign of freedom, for it too is the mapping back of the flows of production onto the socious, and Capital is this mapping- back onto ; but it must happen only in the form of profit, and not at all in that of some gain in sacred power (numen), in what Deleuze and Guattari   call  code  surplus  value,  that  is a gain prestige  which presupposes an emotional attachment. Capitalism offers nothing to believe in cynicism is its morality. The Party, on the contrary, as a despotic configuration, requires a   mapping back onto that which is territorialized, coded and hierarchised in the  religious sense of the term: Russia, Mother Russia, the people, folklore, dances, customs, and costumes: baba and little father, all "savage" Slavic communities is kept up, preserved and referred to the figure   of the Secretary General, to the despot who appropriates all production.

If one examines what effectively destroys bourgeois society then, it is    clear that the answer can be found neither in socialist revolution nor in Marxism. Not only does the dialectics of history belie speculative dialectics,   but it must be admitted that there is no dialectics at all. Configurations and vast networks dispute energies; the way to tap, transform and circulate them is completely different, depending on whether the configuration    is capitalistic or despotic. They may combine, producing no contradictions, no totalization of history leading to other configurations, but ,effects of compromise  on the  social surface, unexpected monsters, the  Stakhanovist worker, the proletarian company head, the Red Marshall, the leftist nuclear bomb, the unionized policeman, the communist labor camp, Socialist Realism… In this economic-libidinal mixing, it is surely the despotic configuration that dominates. But in any case, were the outcome different it cannot    be seen how  and why this machinery would be a dialectical result even less and why and how the libidinal configuration of capitalism ought to or even could "lead to" this kind of arrangement as a "result of its intrinsic organic development. "In fact, it does not lead to it, it leads only to itself: no  transcresence to expect, no limit in its field that it does not pass over. On one hand, capitalism leaps over all the pre-capitalist limitations, on the other it draws along and displaces its own limit in its movement. Uneasiness on the"left," orthodox and unorthodox.

What if this idea of an impassable economic, social, moral, political, technical or whatever  limit were a hollow idea?- This is the region where Deleuze and Guattari begin. If instead of a wall to breach or transgress , it were capitalism's wall itself that always went increasingly farther inside itself  (this kind of set-up was already present in the old idea of the expansion of    the "internal" market)? Not that it would thus suppress. itself ,by simple extension; neither would the question of its overthrow be found to be    obsolete  and necessitate joining the  ranks of revisionists and reformers    expecting everything from development, growth and a little more "democracy," or rather expecting nothing more than a 3% increase, in the GNP and better distribution. But in the sense that there is no exteriority, no Other of Capital—which would be Nature, Socialism, Festival,  whatever - rather in,    the very interior of the system there are regions of contact and war that    never stop multiplying between what is fluidity and almost indifference,    developed by capital itself, and what is "axiomatic," repression, plugging up of flows, "reterritorialization," and mapping back of energy onto a body    supposed to be its origin but that only draws energy from it, whatever the name it assumes: Nation, Civilization, Freedom, Future, and New Society '-  have only one Identity: Capital.

There is no dialectics in the sense that one or several of these conflicts    should one day result in the. breaching of the- wall, that one day the energy    would find itself freed, dispersed, fluid, on the "other side"; rather there is a   kind of overflowing of force inside the same system that liberated it from  - the savage and barbaric  markings; ..any object that can be exchanged can enter into Capital; from the moment that it is exchangeable (according to the law of value}, 'what can be metamorphosed from money jnto machines, from merchandise into merchandise, from work force into work, from work jnto salary, from salary into workforce, is an object for Capital. And thus   nothing is left but an enormous moving around, objects appear and disappear, fins of dolphins, on the surface of the sea, and objectness gives way   to sheer obsolescence, what is important is no longer the object, a concretion inherited from the codes but metamorphosis, fluidity. Not a dolphin, but a trail, an energetic trace inscribed on the surface. It is perhaps in this  liquidity;  in  these  lukewarm  waters,  that  the capitalist production relationships will sink, that is, the simple rule of equality of exchangeable values and the whole set of "axioms" that Capital keeps on creating to make this rule 'compulsory and respectable once again, while it unceasingly derides !   

ENERGUMEN CAPITALISM       

At once very deep and superficial, a subversion of Marxism never stated …. This configuration of Capital, the circulation of flows, is imposed by the predominance of the point of view of circulation over that of   production: in the sense of political economics. (Production for Deleuze and Guattari  is the branching on and breaking off of flows, a gush of milk sucked from the Breast and cut off by the lips, energy extracted and converted, a flow of electrons  converted  in  the  rotation  of a milling   machine, spurts of semen sucked in by the uterus.) This predominance of   the' point of view of circulation will inevitably be attacked. When Deleuze and Guattari write that capitalism must be thought in the category of the  bank rather than that of production, it will be cried that it is Keynesian  ideology, techno-bureaucratic representation of the system by intellectuals  cut off from practice, and that in abandoning the point of view of pro-  duction, it is work, worker, struggle, and class that are ignored. There is not  a word, in fact, on work-value theory; and only an enigmatic word on a  hypothesis of machinic surplus value. In truth, the great river of the book  washes up several major cadavers: proletariat, class struggle, human surplus value .... It spreads the image of a decoded capitalism full of contemporary  circulations or even more intense potential circulations that only a series of  transit, as indifferent concretions themselves exchangeable and anonymous,  dikes ("reterritorializations") can restrain and keep within the banks, only a  whole battery of repressions led by the fundamental State: the Arch-State  and its Oedipus.

Capitalism as metamorphosis without an extrinsic code, having its limit  only within itself, a relative, deferred limit (which is the law of value), there  is in  fact an  "economics"  found already in German Ideology and again in  the manuscripts of 1857-58 (Grundrisse, introduction to the Critique of  Political Economics), and in Capital itself. And the traces of this economies'  concern with the libido can be seen at one end in the Reading Notes of   1843, and at the other in the chapter on fetishism in Capitalism, as  Baudrillard has shown. The critical universality of capitalism is outlined as  well, the hypothesis that with indifference, with the effect of the principle  of equivalence-of decoding-the empty space, the void in which the great  categories of work and value can be constituted arises in labor or in the   capitalist practice of capitalism, and the assumption is made that it will be  possible to apply these categories retroactively to systems ("precapitalist"   forms) in which the modalities had been covered over by codes, by markings   and representations that did not permit a generalized political economics,   that is, that maintained political and libidinal economics exterior to one   another, the latter diverted into religion, customs, rituals of inscription   (tattooing, scarification), cruelty, and terror. With capitalism, all this be-   comes equalized, the modalities of production and inscription are simplified   within the law of value, and thus anything can be produced-inscribed from   the moment that inscription-production energy put into a trace or an object   is reconvertible into energy, into another object or another trace. A portrait of a nearly  schizophrenic capital.  Occasionally  called  perverse, but it is a  normal perversion, the perversion of a libido operating its flows over an   organless body on which it can cling everywhere and nowhere, just as the   flows of material and economic energy can, in the form of production-that  'is,  of  conversion-invest  themselves  on  (to)  any  region  whatsoever  of the   surface of the social body, of the smooth and indifferent socius. Transient   cathexes causing all territories confined and marked by codes to disappear in   their wake-not only on the side of objects (the prohibitions of production   and circulation all collapse, one after another), but as well on the side of   "subjects," whether individual or social, which can only appear in this whose illusion of existence can only be maintained at the price of special expenditures of energy.

     What fascinates Marx is quite recognizable in the configuration ot Capital proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: the capitalist perversion, the subversion of codes, religions, decency, trades, education, cookery, speech, the levelling of all "established" differences into the one and only difference: being worth ..., exchangeable for .... Indifferent difference. Mars'. immortalis, in his words.     

Deleuze and Guattari have brought this fascination to light, freed it from bad conscience, and help us to dislodge it, all the way into today's politics. Bad conscience for Marx himself, increasingly so for Marxists. And thus in proportion, a piety meant to conceal and expiate this appetite for capitalist  liquefaction: this  piety—dialectics—amounts  to  maintaining  the positive perversion of capitalism inside a network of negativity, contradiction and neurosis which will permit a detection and denunciation of the forgetting of the creditor (the proletariat) and of the debt (surplus value), in a freedom declared to be factitious and guilty, in a positivity judged to be a facade. Marxism will then be this repairing and remonstrating enterprise in which one will demonstrate and remonstrate the system to be a faithless debtor and erect all political energy on the project of repairing the wrong— not just any wrong, said Marx in 1843, but a wrong in itself, this living wrong that the proletariat is, the wrong of alienation. A not unfamiliar  device inherited from Christianity, but one that took on paranoiac dimensions with Stalin and Trotsky before it fell into the routine of a wilted belief with today's "communism." 

It  is  of this  system  of negativity  and guilt that  Anti-Oedipus rids Marxism. Cendrars said that "artists are, above all, men who struggle to become inhuman." The book's silence on class struggle, the worker's epic  and the function of his party, such as they encumber political language, lead  one to believe that for the authors, true politicians today are in fact men  who struggle to become inhuman. No debt to localize. Its muteness on  surplus value springs from the same source:   looking for the creditor is  wasted effort, the subject of the credit would always have to be made to  exist, the proletariat to be incarnated on the surface of the socius, that is,  represented in the representative box on the political stage; and that is in  nucleus the reappearance of the Arch-State, it is Lenin and Stalin, it can be  a nameless subject, the Party, a Void, the Signifier—and it is never anything  but that, since a creditor is always the name of something missing. So forget  bad politics, the politics of bad conscience, the processions of bedecked and  bannered wisdom of a simulated piety: capitalism will never croak from bad  conscience, it will not die of a lack or of a failure to render unto the  exploited what is owed them. If it disappears, it is by excess, because its  energetics unceasingly displace its limits; "restitution" comes as an extra and  not as a paranoiac passion to render justice, to give everyone his due, as if it  were not evident that in addition to the market value of his energy expenditure,  a worker's  "salary" in any of the ten wealthiest nations did not  contain a redistributed share of surplus value.

NEITHER STRUCTURES, BE THEY INFRA-,NOR EXCHANGE, BE IT SYMBOLIC

What are the prohibitions capitalism opposes to the incessant wandering iof flows? "Reterritorializations" necessary for the maintenance in place of  the system, say Deleuze and Guattari. These localizations circumscribed on  the surface of the socius, disconnecting whole regions and sheltering them  from schizo-flows, are neo-archaisms, they say: Indian reservations, Fascism,  exchange.  Third  World  bureaucracies,  private  property and  assuredly,  Oedipus and Urstaat.

How superficial it seems to ascribe the same function to reservations and  capital, Stalin and Hitler, Hitler and private property! What do they do with  super- and infra-structures? Not a word, of course, on this subject. There are  only desiring-machines, the organless body, their stormy relationships already  in the molecular order, relationships between the anus making shit, or the  mouth making words, or the eyes making eyes, and a surface, that of the  hypothetical body, where they are to posit, inscribe and compose themselves and then in the order of the conjectural great social body, of the socious again in  the molar  order, the violent disjunction between on one   hand, the blind, machinic repetition of the production-inscription of small  organs and social segments; and on the other hand, the mapping back and   monopolization of these segmentary productions on (to) the surface of the   socius, thanks to the Arch-State in particular. No structure in the linguistic  or semiotic sense; only disponsitions of energy transformations. And among   these dispositions "noreason to privilege (under the name of infrastructure)   that which regulates the production and circulation of goods, the so-called   "economic" apparatus... For there is no less an economy, an energetics in that which will regulate lineages and alliances and thus distribute the flows   of intensity in concretions of roles, persons and goods on the surface of the   socius, finally producing what is called the organization of savage society (an   organism that is in fact never unified, always divided between the thousand   poles of small, multiple organs, partial objects, libidinal segments, and the   vacuum-unifying pole created above, at the summit, at and in the head, by   the signifier)-no less an economy in the laws of kinship, no less an economy   even in the distribution of the libido on the surface of the organless body, in   the hooking-up of small, desiring, energy transforming, and pleasure-seeking   organs, than in the economics and distribution of capital, no less of a   producing-inscribing apparatus there than here. Conversely, the Oedipal formation is no less political-economic than Capital's, and finally, it is no less   eco-libidinal and deviant than the primary process it taps. Thus in considering these dispositions, the problem is not in discerning which would be    subordinating and which subordinated: there is a reciprocal subordination. But the infra/super hypothesis would require that an organic totality of the  social field be presupposedy.that a social.whole be presupposed and perpetuated, that structures be mapped out.in,a.macro-structure, that, the, whole be  the point of departure, thar it be assumed that the whole is given or at least  discernable and analyzable. But the whole problem is. that the whole is not,  given, that society is not ,a unified totality; rather it is displacements and  metamorphoses of energy that. never stop decomposing and recomposing  sub-units and that pull these units along, now towards the organs' perverse-  schizo functioning, now towards the neurotic-paranoiac functioning of the  great absentsignifier. If you speak in terms of super- and infra- you are  ordering dispositives according to high and low, you have already adopted  the point of the signifier, of the whole, and it will not let you go:  when  you want to conduct a revolutionary politics or to imagine a subversive  process, if you don't attack this edifice, you will have at best a dialectics, at  best one  "after" the  negative  moment, "after"  the revolution, that is,  already before (in the form of a party, for example, or a need for effective-  ness or for organization, or the fear of failure), and the same hierarchized  arrangement will be reproduced: the same worker-militant on the bottom  and the same chief-boss on the top, the same confiscation of flows and  partial production for the common good, that is to say, for the good of the  despot.  

What allows us to say this-once again, it is no fantasy—is capitalism  itself.  By  sweeping through"the most forbidden regions" with its influxes "of "work and money—through art, science, trades and festivals, politics and  sports, words and images, air, water, snow and sun, Bolshevik, Maoist and  Castroist revolutions-capitalism makes coded dispositions that governed their  economy appear as libidinal configurations at the very moment that it casts  them into disuse. It thus reveals that infra/superstructural oppositions, or  those of  economic/ideological structures and relationships of production  versus social relationships are themselves pairs of concepts that cannot show  us what happens in  savage, feudal or Oriental, societies or even in capitalist  society jtself. For they are either too much or too little:  too much because  it is unquestionable that in the former, kinship, ritual and practical relationships decisively determine the production and, circulation of goods, that is,  the configuration of the ."economy," and that they cannot be reduced to an  illusory.ideological function; too little because in the latter the term economics covers much more than political economics, much more than production and exchange of goods, since it is no less production and exchange of labor force, images, words, knowledge and power, travel and sex.      

If political, economics is a discourse that founds the phenomena of '  production and circulation by anchoring them in a nature (the Physiocratic  Nature, the interests and needs of Homo Oeconomicus, the creative power of  the workers' expenditure of energy), it is never applicable as such: past the  level of survival given by hypothesis, archaic societies are no less arbitrary  than capitalism, and the latter fits no better than they into the category of  interest and need or work. Nowhere is there a primary economic order (  interest, need or work) followed by ideological, cultural, juridical, religious,   familial,  etc.,  effects. Everywhere  there  are  set-ups aimed  at tapping or  discharging, but in archaic or Oriental societies, energy and its concretions in   "objects"  (sexual  partners,  children,  tools and weapons, food) must be  marked - a seal, an incision, an abstraction - the marking of archaic arts, for   their function is not that of "representation" in the sense of the Quattrocento, but rather to code what is libidinally  invested or  investable, to authorize what may circulate and produce pleasure; these codes are thus   sorters, selectors, brakes-accelerators, dams and canals, mitral valves regulating the inputs and  outputs of energy  in  all its forms (words, dances,   children, delicacies...) in relation to the socius, to the non-existent, postulated Great Social Body; in capitalism however, all is swept away—these   codified functionings, these specific adjustments in their concrete abstractions, this or that inscription on a certain region of the skin to denote   puberty, a distinctive distortion in the neck, the ear, the nostrils, or the confection of a hat of chicken or pig entrails (Leiris in Gondar) to denote a   particular function in a religious or magic ritual, this tattoo for the right to   bear arms, that ornament on the chiefs face, those words and chants and   drum beats inscribed in the ritual scenario of sacrifice, mourning or excision:  all  of  this  is  surpassed  and  dissipated,  capitalism  deculturalizes   peoples, dehistoricizes their inscriptions, repeats them anywhere at all as long   as they are marketable, recognizes no code marked by the libido but only   exchange value: you can produce and consume everything, exchange, work   or inscribe anything anyway you want if it comes through, if it flows, if it is   metamorphozable. The only untouchable axiom bears on the condition of  metamorphosis and  transfer exchange-value.  Axioms and not       code:  energy and its objects are no longer marked with a sign; properly speaking, there are no more signs since there is no more code, no reference to an origin, to a norm, to a "practice," to a supposed nature or surreality or reality, to a paradigm or to a Great Other-there is nothing left but a little price tag, the   index of exchangeability: it is nothing, it is enormous, it is something else. 

The territorial mechanism of savagery or even the great barbaric despotic   machine (as Nietzsche sometimes envisioned it) is not a good perspective for   viewing the machinery of capitalism. After Marx, Deleuze and Guattari say   that capitalism is the good perspective for seeing it all. If you look at capitalism through castration, you think you see it from the despotic Orient   or from savage Africa, but in fact you perpetuate the nihilism of Western   religion,  your position is still inspired by bad  conscience  and piety for   Nature and Exteriority and Transcendence; while capitalism, much more   positive than atheism, the indication of a profound liquidity of economic   flows on the surface of the socius, is for these very reasons what retroactively makes us see the precapitalistic codes and lets us comprehend what   in it and related only to itself, index sui, blocks up and channels this   liquidity in the law of value. The only axiom of this system entirely made   up of indifference and equivalence (Gleichgultigkeit, says Marx again and   again, young  and  old), the law of value, is as well the only limit, an  impassible  limit if you wish, always displaceable and displaced, keeping capitalism from being carried off by the meandering flood of molecular energetics.                       

THE OEDIPAL APPARATUS    

The question to be asked Deleuze and Guattari is evidently that of the origin, finality, condition of possibility, or etc., of this "secondary" order, of this order that contains the void, that separates, orders and subordinates, that terrorizes and causalizes, that is the law (of value and exchange). But before that, why Oedipus? Why Arch-State in an apparatus like capitalism, whose "corresponding effect of meaning" is, repeat Deleuze and Guattari, cynicism? Nothing less cynical than Oedipus, nothing more culpable. Why and how would this circulation of flows regulated by only the law of exchange value need the Oedipal configuration as a supplement, as a pre- mium of repression, that is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, why the configuration of State? Do they not themselves grant that bad conscience comes neither from despotism nor from capitalism, the former generating terror, and the latter, cynicism? What then generates this bad conscience? A two-levelled question: 1) What good is Oedipalization within the system of generalized exchange? and 2)";Is Oedipus really a configuration of Urstaat?. The first level is plugged directly into the politics of capital and anti- capitalistic politics as well; the second into a theory of history and psychoanalytical machinery itself. First level:, if capitalism needs no code whatever, if its only axiom is the law of value, that is, the exchangeability of sections of flows in equal quanta, why Oedlpus? Is not the configuration of the father, the great despotic signifier, nothing more than an archaism—and not a neo-archaism—at the heart of the configuration of exchange? The Oedipal configuration  in  Deleuze  and Guattari's hypothesis is that of Oriental despotism, and we will return to it shortly: does that mean that the capitalist State is the same as that of the Chinese kingdoms, the Great Kings and the Pharaohs? There is certainly in all of them a predominance of the bureaucracy as an apparatus for the channeling of libidinal economic flows. Deleuze and Guattari base their hypothesis to a great extent on Wittfogel, in fact, to too great an extent. Not because Wittfogel is often very imprudent as a historian, which is another problem; but because his whole book is inspired by a political confusion between the system of pre-capitalist domination, called by Marx the Asian mode of production, and the regime that Stalin imposed on Russia and its satellites for twenty years. The absence of private property, the absorption of all economic and social initiative by the bureaucratic apparatus, and the suspension of all activity, of all energetic flows—whatever their order—into the configuration of the despot, traits common indeed to both societies, obviously do not permit their identification. The decisive difference is precisely that Stalin and Mao are post- capitalist, that their regimes are in fact in competition with world capitalism, that they can only survive by accepting the challenge of industrialization without which capitalism would not fail to infiltrate bureaucratic society  flows of money, products, technological, and cynical as well as revolutionary and critical-thought, causing fissures to appear everywhere.     

Let us go further: why should capitalism preserve the institution of the  family  forcing g the adhesion of the child's libido? The parental configurations – teachers, professors, priests-undergo as well the erosion of capitalist  flows. Not really, assuming that psychoanalysis is Oedipalisation, it is  not the deed of capitalism, it goes against the current of the law of value. A  Salaried father is an exchangeable father, an orphaned son. Deleuze and Guattari must be supported against themselves: capitalism is indeed an   orphanage, a celibacy, submitted to the rule of equivalence. What supports it   is not the configuration of the great castrator, but that of equality:  equality   in the sense of the  commutability of men in one place and of places for one   man of men and women, objects, spaces, organs.      

It  will  be  said  that  this  does not stop repression from increasing m   modem societies nor the law of value from dispensing nice and strong forces   of order. But it must be answered that repression never stops becoming more   exteriorized; since it is less in people's heads it is more in the streets.   Cynicism never stops progressing, hence the police and militia contingents. Fewer recognized, "interiorized" fathers, professors, chiefs, moral leaders,    more cops. Freud was completely mistaken in Civilization and its Discontents, He foresaw that the extension of "civilization" in the bourgeois material civilization, and in the League of Nations sense of “perpetual peace," which he equated to the resorption of external expressions of  aggressivity would be accompanied by an aggravation of its internal expression is, ever increasing anguish and guilt. In the regions where civilized peace  reigns - in the center of capitalism - there is nothing of the kind and so much the better. The Great Signifier and Great Castrator are    drawn into the rapid and polluted waters of the reproduction of capitalism '  of the Great Metamorphosis. A modern man believes m nothing, not even in his responsibility -guilt. Repression comes on not as punishment  but as a 'reminder of the axiomatic:      the.  law    of   value,    nothing  for nothing, it can be the PTA exerting it on  children, the union  on  the workers,   The        womans  ,  magazine on the "weaker sex," the writer on discourse, or the museum  curator on paintings, they act not at all as the terrifying or cruel incarnations of a transcendental power, even though they Posess it and all their  operativeness is reducible to the maintenance of the most elementary rule, the last word of Capital: "equitable," exchange, equivalence. They do not     frighten they only hurt.

Then we proceed to the second level: Oedipus is not a configuration of     Urstaat, a despotic one. Here as in guiltiness (and the two institutions are on     a par), Deleuze and Guattari remain too near and too far from Freud. Too     near for it was indeed Freud's hypothesis in Moses and Monotheism that the     Source  of Judaism was  in  the  Oriental,  monotheistic  "despotism   of Akhenaton and thus that the father configuration conveyed by Judaism,  Freud himself and all of psychoanalysis, is the configuration of the castrating and incestuous despot. But very far at the same time, for what for Freud made the difference between Judaism and Egyptian religion, or Catholicism as well—in a sense between Judaism and every religion—what then in Judaism unravelled religiosity or potentially constituted its defeat or its defects was the foreclosure of the wish for the Father's death and its acting out, the carrying out of the original murder (supposed by Freud at the cost of an outrageously novelistic imagination) of a first Moses (he as well supposed) by Israel. Which means that in Judaism Oedipus remains unadmitted, unadmittable, hidden, and thus it is for Freud that guilt and bad conscience are born, contrary to what happens in religions of reconciliation.    

The question here is not of following Freud in the construction of his family or ethnic romance. It is a question of seeking out what he is trying to achieve in conformity with his own libidinal construction and in his own words, to produce the singularity of the Judaic (and psychoanalytical) configuration of desire. And like Nietzsche, he apprehends it in bad con- science and sin. What the origin that Freud exhibits is worth is not questioned here. What assuredly matters is the principle according to which Oedipus and castration—and by the same token, transferral in the psychoanalytic relationship—are only operative in an energetic disposition whose traits  are formed by the most ancient Hebraic law:  the channeling of all libidinal energy into  the  order of language (suppression of the idols); in language, an absolute privilege given to the I/Thou relationship (elimination of myth); and within this relationship, the (Kierkegaardian) paradox of it always being Thou who speaks and never I. The disposition is that of the couch, where Israel is the patient, Moses the analyst, and Yaweh the unconscious: the Great Other. The Great Other is not the great incestuous Pharaoh, Urvater or Urdespot. There was an exodus, and the Jews broke with despotism, crossed the sea, the desert and killed the father (the murder that Freud sought to reconstruct was simply this exodus), and this is why interiorization as sin, as solitude, as neurosis, as well as the whole current of reform—Lutheranism and Freudism—will become possible, will become a fundamental possibility for the Western World.     

We demand nothing of one another, we complain of nothing, but we      both go on, the heart open, through open doors.  ——Zarathustra to his solitude    

But Capital's configuration is not articulated with that of Judaity (of Oedipus) any more than it is with that of despotism or of symbolic savagery, it accords no privileges to discourse as the locus of the libido's inscription, it suppresses all locational privileges: hence its mobility; its principle bears on the inscriptive modality, its machinery obeys only one principle of energetic connection—the law p£, value,. Equivalence, the  principle according to which, all "exchange" is always possible in principle, all plugging or metamorphosis., of a form of Naturstoff into another is always reconvertible in the inverse connection., But, what about surplus value, will it be said? Is it not precisely a belying of the disposition since it means that the relation between force  and what it is supposed to be worth (its equivalent in commodities, its  salary) is not convertible, and their equality is fictitious? This is assuredly  true for every force sucked into capitalist economic networks, including  machines. The apparatus functions by ignoring the inequality of force and  resorbing its potential of disturbance, creation and mutation. Because of the  principle governing energetic connection, the capitalist system privileges repetition without profound difference, duplication, commutation or replication,  and reversibility. Metamorphosis is contained within the moderate limitations  of metaphor. Surplus value and even profit are already denominations and  resorption (exploitation, if you wish); they imply the commensurability of  given and received, of "additional value" after production processes, and of  value  advanced in production. This supposed  commensurability is what  permits the transforming of the second into the first, the reinvestment of  surplus, value, it is the rule or the warrant of the capitalist system. The  capitalist  secret  for  the  mapping back  of desiring production onto the  organless body is found within this rule of immanent commutativity  this forcing back is reinvesting under the law of value. In it consists the very  repression of the system, and it needs no other—or the others (cops, etc.) are  only lemmas or reciprocals of the fundamental theorem of replication. And  this is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they stress the fictitious nature  of the commensurability of credit and payment monies.

 The potential of force is not producing something more, but producing  something different, in different ways. Force is a disorganizing power in the  organism, it is emotional stress, , perverse polymorphism, so-called  psychosomatic illnesses, loss of spatial reference in schizo walking, so dear to  Deleuze and Guattari, a grinning cat and the grin without the cat, work but  always as dream work. Force fuses through the organic weave, perfusing  energy. And it is this virtuality of an alterity that is multiplying in the gut  of the capitalist "organism" and of the value apparatus, it is criticizing  without interfering, forgetting the law of exchange, dodging it and making it  a glaring and obsolete illusion, an unserviceable network. Who can say how  long it will take the new disposition to sweep over the surface of our bodies  and the social body with its unknown, transparent organs, to free them from  their involvement with interests and the worries of saving, spending and  counting? Another configuration is rising, the libido is withdrawing from the  capitalist apparatus, and desire is finding other ways of spreading itself out,  according to another configuration, one that is formless and ramified in a  thousand attempts and (ad)ventures throughout the world, a bastard in rags  of this and that, in words of Marx and Jesus and Mohammed and Nietzsche  and Mao, communal practices and job actions, occupation, boycott, squat-  ting, kidnap and ransom, happenings and demusicalized music and sit-ins and  sit-outs, taking trips and light shows, liberation of gays and lesbians and the  "madmen" and criminals, gratuitous acts unilaterally undertaken .... What  can capitalism possibly do against this unserviceability that is rising from  within it (among others, in the form of unserviceable "young" people), against this thing that is the new libidinal configuration, whose production/      inscription in language is Anti-Oedipus?

Force produces only as channeled, as partially invested. Schizophrenia is called the absolute limit, because if it ever happened, it would be force      undistributed in a libidinal network, pure liquid inflexion. By the  multiplication  of metamorphic principles, the annulment of codes regulating flows,      capitalism brings us closer to this schizophrenic limit. Bringing us closer to      this limit, it already puts us on the other side. Thus the lack of attention      paid by Deleuze and Guattari to Bataille's theme of transgression is understood: every limit is constitutively transgressed, there is nothing to transgress      in a limit, what is important is not the other side of the frontier, since if    there is a frontier, it is that both sides are already posited, composed in one  and the same world. Incest, for example, is but a very shallow stream:  only     in words can the mother be conceived as a mistress; in orgasm, she is no     longer the mother, no longer anything, for the night rules, the night of a     hundred thousand disjointed organs and partial objects. Thus, either there is a      limit—but it boils down to a too-human opposition, and desire is absent from      both sides; or desire actually wanders about the limit's field—and its movement is not that of transgressing the limit, but rather of pulverizing the field     itself into a libidinal surface. If capitalism has such affinities with schizophrenia,  it  follows  that  its  destruction  cannot  come  from  a  deterritorialization (the simple suppression of private property, for example...),  which by definition it will Survive: it is this deterritorialization. Destruction     can only come from an even more liquid liquidation, only from even more     clinamen and less gravity, from more dancing and less piety. What we need is     for the variations of intensity to become more unpredictable, stronger; in "social life," for the highs and lows of desiring-production to be aimlessly     inscribed without justification and without origin, as in the heady moments     of "affective" or "creative" life; for a term to be put to ressentiment and     bad conscience (always equal to themselves, always depressed), terms imputable to the identities of roles engendered by servicing paranoiac machines, by     technology and Capital's bureaucracies.        

What then about the death instinct? Deleuze and Guattari energetically     fight the Freudian hypothesis of guilt and hate turned against themselves,     such as it supports the diagnostic of Civilization and its Discontents: a death  instinct that is without original or experience, a theoretical product of Freud's pessimism destined to maintain the neurotic, dualistic position, whatever     happens. But if the death instinct is the reason why machines can only work    by fits and starts and their cycles cannot be kept harmonious; if it is what  perturbs desiring-production, either by the organless body drawing away and taking over their production, or by rejecting and repressing it; if its model is a haywire machinic functioning, a dysfunctioning; and if it presents itself in the corresponding experience of inarticulation (the loss of every articulus) as the surface without variation in intensity, as catatonia, as the "Ah, to not have been born," then it is not merely admissible, it is a necessary component of desire. Not at all another instinct, another energy, but within the libidinal economy, an inaccessible "principle" of excess and disorder; not a second machinery, but a machine whose velocity can be displaced towards positive infinity, bringing it to a halt. It is this plasticity or viscosity that traces everywhere and nowhere the difference between political economy and libidinal economy, and owing to which in particular, a great savage configuration (a great apparatus)-for example-can be disinvested, pipes and filters can fall into obsolescence and the libido can be distributed differently in another configuration: it is thus in this viscosity that all revolutionary potential lies.                                                      

****** translated by sdv