#anoedipal

[infinitesofnought]

Very few accomplish what Laing calls the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or limit: “quite ordinary people,” nevertheless. But the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. Better to fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. So they displace the limit, they make it pass into the interior of the social formation, between the social production and reproduction that they invest, and the familial reproduction that they fall back on, to which they apply all the investments. They make the limit pass into the interior of the domain thus described by Oedipus, between the two poles of Oedipus. They never stop involuting and evolving between these two poles. Oedipus as the last rock, and castration as the cavern: the ultimate territoriality, although reduced to the analyst’s couch, rather than the decoded flows of desire that flee, slip away, and take us where? Such is neurosis, the displacement of the limit, in order to create a little colonial world of one’s own. But others want virgin lands, more truly exotic, families more artificial, societies more secret that they design and institute along the length of the wall, in the locales of perversion. Still others, sickened by the utensility (l’ustensilité) of Oedipus, but also by the shoddiness and aestheticism of perversions, reach the wall and rebound against it, sometimes with an extreme violence. Then they become immobile, silent, they retreat to the body without organs, still a territoriality, but this time totally desert-like, where all desiring-production is arrested, or where it becomes rigid, feigning stoppage: psychosis.

...The relationships of neurosis, psychosis, and also perversion depend on the situation of each one with regard to the process, and on the manner in which each one represents a mode of interruption of the process, a residual bit of ground to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the deterritorialized flows of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus, perverse territorialities of the artifice, psychotic territoriality of the body without organs: sometimes the process is caught in the trap and made to turn about within the triangle, sometimes it takes itself as an end-in-itself, other times it continues on in the void and substitutes a horrible exasperation for its fulfillment. Each of these forms has schizophrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the only universal. Schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breaking through this wall, and the failures of this breakthrough: “How does one get through this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience, as I see it”. What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a generalized explosion—the schiz and not the signifier.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[molecularhomosexual]

In reality the problem has nothing to do with pre-oedipal stages that would still revolve around an Oedipal axis, but rather with the existence and the nature of an anoedipal sexuality, an anoedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, an anoedipal castration: the breaks-flows of desiring-production do not let themselves be projected onto a mythical locale; the signs of desire do not let themselves be extrapolated from a signifier; transsexuality does not let any qualitative opposition between a local and nonspecific heterosexuality and a local and nonspecific homosexuality arise. Everywhere, in this reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

[cyberneticienne]

Partial objects unquestionably have a sufficient charge in and of themselves to blow up all of Oedipus and totally demolish its ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire. The question that thus arises here is not at all that of the relative importance of what might be called the pre-oedipal in relation to Oedipus itself, since "pre-oedipal" still has a developmental or structural relationship to Oedipus. The question, rather, is that of the absolutely anoedipal nature of the production of desire. But because Melanie Klein insists on considering desire from the point of view of the whole, of global persons, and of complete objects—and also, perhaps, because she is eager to avoid any sort of contretemps with the International Psycho-Analytic Association that bears above its door the inscription "Let no one enter here who does not believe in Oedipus"— she does not make use of partial objects to shatter the iron collar of Oedipus; on the contrary, she uses them—or makes a pretense of using them—to water Oedipus down, to miniaturize it, to find it everywhere, to extend it to the very earliest years of life.

[prgnant]

In reality the problem has nothing to do with pre-oedipal stages that would still revolve around an Oedipal axis, but rather with the existence and the nature of an anoedipal sexuality, an anoedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, an anoedipal castration: the break-flows of desiring-production do not let themselves be projected onto a mythical locale; the signs of desire do not let themselves be extrapolated from a signifier; transsexuality does not let any qualitative opposition between between a local and nonspecific heterosexuality and a local and nonspecific homosexuality arise. Everywhere, in this reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion.

Deleuze and Guattari | Anti-Oedipus ch.2

[infinitesofnought]

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees, The fever sings in mental wires. If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood– Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

– T. S. Eliot, from “East Coker”, Four Quartets

[infinitesofnought]

“I believe my friends cast off in a group at the start of the New Age, with forces for a practical explosion that thrust them into a paternalistic deviation that I find depraved....A second group of loners, of which I am a part, doubtless constituted by centers of collarbones, was deprived of any possibility of individual success at the moment they were engaged in laborious studies in innate science. With regard to them, my rebellion against the paternalism of the first group placed me from the second year in a socially difficult position that was becoming more and more suffocating. So, do you believe these two groups are capable of being joined?���

– Jacques Besse, La grande pâque, as quoted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[on the plane of immanence, they join then disappear in emptiness]...

[infinitesofnought]

Art coaxes out of us emotions we normally do not feel. It is not that art sets out to shock (that is rare), it is rather that art occupies ground unconquered by social niceties. Seeking neither to please nor to displease, art works to enlarge emotional possibility. In a dead society that inevitably puts it on the side of the rebels. Do not mistake me, I am not of the voting party of bohemians and bad boys, and the rebelliousness of art does not make every rebel an artist. The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

– Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

[molecularhomosexual]

We are statistically or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense. That is why Proust, the first to deny all oedipalizing interpretations of his own interpretations, contrasts two kinds of homosexuality, or rather two regions only one of which is Oedipal, exclusive, and depressive, the other being anoedipal schizoid, included, and inclusive...

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus