5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Broadly speaking, the aim of postmodern psychoanalysis is to rethink the relationship
between desire and politics in a way which opens possibilities for social transformation.
In this respect, Lacanian psychoanalysis has been sharply criticized by postmodernists
as having politically reactionary implications. In their celebrated postmodern treatise
Anti-Oedipus (1977), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari contend that the Lacanian
account of desire, insofar as it binds the subject to the social order, works in the service
of repression. Psychoanalysis, in this sense, functions in the service of capitalism, as a
kind of vortex around which the unconscious becomes bent out of shape. As Deleuze
and Guattari see it, the Lacanian underwriting of lack is almost the opposite of desire,
lack being for them just a capitalist ploy by which consumerism can plug the alleged
hungers of desire. They argue that psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Lacanian,
functions to personalize desire, referring all unconscious productions to the incestuous
sexual realm of the nuclear family. Oedipal prohibitions, on this reckoning, are just the
signifiers which chain desire to normative representations—the point at which we come
to desire what capitalism wants us to desire. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari seek to
critique this psychoanalytic privileging of desire rooted in lack as a product of Law. They
argue that desire in fact precedes representation: there is nothing at all personal to the
flows of libido, which continually burst out anew. Perhaps the most striking feature
here of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of psychoanalytic concepts lies in their attempt to
give full throttle to the flows of libidinous energy: a social theory in which the absolute
positivity of unconscious productions is underscored, and in which schizophrenia is
taken as a potentially emancipatory mode.
Deleuze was one of France’s most celebrated philosophers of the late twentieth
century, and his co-author Guattari was a radical psychoanalyst, opposed to orthodox
(both Freudian and Lacanian) theory. Anti-Oedipus was a courageous, poetic attempt
to explode the normative power of categories like Oedipus and castration in
psychoanalysis from the inside out, using psychoanalytic concepts against the
colonizing conceptual logic of psychoanalysis itself. Deleuze and Guattari trace the
‘free lines’ of schizophrenic desire as affirmative force, pure positivity, a series of
enabling rhythms and intensities as well as transforming possibilities. From this angle,
the schizoid process is what enables libidinal pulsations to be uncoupled from systems,
structures or cultural objects, which may in turn transform the production of the
political network, making it no longer unfold according to the repressive functioning of
Law. Rejecting the rigid and closed worlds of Oedipus and capitalism, Deleuze and
Guattari wish to speak up for schizophrenia over neurosis, the flows of desire over lack,
fragments over totalities, differences over uniformity. ‘Schizophrenia’, they write, ‘is
desiring production at the limit of social production’ (1977:35). Against the Oedipalizing