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Title: On Capitalism and Desire
Author: Guattari & Deleuze
Date: 1973
Language: en
Topics: anti-psychiatry, not-anarchist, interview, Gilles Deleuze, schizoanalysis, psychoanalysis, capitalism, desire, Felix Guattari
Source: Desert Islands and Other Texts by Gilles Deleuze
Notes:  This uses the editor’s title. The original is “Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari” in C’est Demain la veille, ed. Michel-Anroine Burnier (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 139–161. This interview was initially supposed to appear in the magazine Actuel, one of whose directors of publication was M.-A. Burnier.

Guattari & Deleuze

On Capitalism and Desire

Actuel: In your description of capitalism, you say: “There isn’t the

slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism

that fails to manifest the dementia of the capitalist system and the

pathological character of its rationality (not a false rationality at

all, but a true rationality of this pathology, this madness, because the

machine works, there can be no doubt). There is no danger of it going

insane, because through and through it is already insane, from the

get-go, and that’s where its rationality comes from.” Does this mean

that after this “abnormal” society, or outside it, there can be a

“normal” society?

Gilles Deleuze: We don’t use the words “normal” and “abnormal.” Every

society is at once rational and irrational. They are necessarily

rational in their mechanisms, their gears and wheels, their systems of

connection, and even by virtue of the place they assign to the

irrational. All this presupposes, however, codes or axioms which do not

result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either.

It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you

accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is

always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the

irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular

kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason

lies delirium, and drift. Everything about capitalism is rational,

except capital or capitalism. A stock-market is a perfectly rational

mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know

how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s nuts. This is what we mean

when we say that the rational is always the rationality of an

irrational. Something that has not been discussed in Marx’s Capital is

the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely

because, at one and the same time, it is demented and it works. So then

what is rational in a society? Once interests have been defined within

the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people

pursue those interests and attempt to realize them. But underneath that,

you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with

investments of interest, and on which interests depend for their

determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of

libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this

society. In reality, history is the history of desire. Today’s

capitalist or technocrat does not desire in the same way a slave trader

or a bureaucrat from the old Chinese empire would have. When people in a

society desire repression, for others and for themselves; when there are

people who like to harass others, and who have the opportunity to do so,

the “right” to do so, this exhibits the problem of a deep connection

between libidinal desire and the social field. There exists a

“disinterested” love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche has some

beautiful things to say about this permanent triumph of slaves, about

the way the embittered, the depressed, or the weak manage to impose

their way of life on us.

Actuel: What, precisely, is proper to capitalism in what you’ve just

described?

Gilles Deleuze: Perhaps it’s that, in capitalism, desire and interest,

or desire and reason, are distributed in a totally new way, a

particularly “abnormal” way. Capital, or money, has reached such a stage

of delirium that there would be only one equivalent in psychiatry: what

they call the terminal state. It’s too complicated to describe here, but

let me just say this: in other societies, you have exploitation, you

have scandals and secrets, but it’s all part of the “code.” There are

even explicitly secret codes. In capitalism, it’s completely different:

nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code

(that’s why capitalism is “democratic” and “publicizes” itself, even in

the juridical sense of the term). And yet nothing is admissible.

Legality itself is inadmissible. In contrast to other societies, the

regime of capitalism is both public and inadmissible. This very special

delirium is proper to the regime of money. Just look at what they call

scandals today: the newspapers talk about them incessantly, everyone

pretends either to defend themselves or to go on the attack; but the

search for anything illegal comes up empty-handed, given the nature of

the regime of capital. Everything is legal: the prime minister’s tax

returns, real-estate deals, lobbyists, and generally the economic and

financial mechanisms of capital— everything except the little screw-ups;

still more to the point, everything is public but nothing is admissible.

If the left were “reasonable,” it would be satisfied with vulgarizing

economic and financial mechanisms. There’s no need to make the private

public, just admit what is already public. Then a dementia without

precedent would be found in all the hospitals. Instead, they keep

talking about “ideology.” Ideology has no importance here: what matters

is not ideology, and not even the “economic / ideological” distinction

or opposition; what matters is the organization of power. Because the

organization of power, i.e. the way in which desire is already in the

economic, the way libido invests the economic, haunts the economic and

fosters the political forms of repression.

Actuel: Ideology is smoke and mirrors?

Gilles Deleuze: That’s not what I mean. Saying that “ideology is smoke

and mirrors” is still the traditional thesis. On one side you put the

serious stuff, the economy, the infrastructure, and then on the other

side you put the superstructure, to which ideology belongs. And thus you

restrict the phenomena of desire to ideology. It’s a perfect way to

ignore how desire works on the infrastructure, invests it, belongs to

it, and how desire thereby organizes power: it organizes the system of

repression. We’re not saying that ideology is smoke and mirrors (or any

other concept that serves to designate an illusion). We’re saying: there

is no ideology, the concept itself is an illusion. That’s why it suits

the Communist Party and orthodox Marxism so well. Marxism has given such

emphasis to the theme of ideologies precisely to cover up what was going

on in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no

ideology, there are only organizations of power, once you accept that

the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic

infrastructure. Let’s take two examples. Education: the Leftists of May

’68 wasted a lot of time insisting that professors publicly criticize

themselves as agents of bourgeois ideology. It’s stupid, and it fuels

the masochistic impulses of academics. They abandoned the struggle

against the competitive examination and opted instead for polemic, or

the great public anti-ideological confession. During which time, the

most hard-line profs were able to reorganize their power without too

much difficulty. The problem of education is not ideological in nature,

it’s a problem of the organization of power: the specificity of

educational power makes it appear ideological, but that’s a red-herring.

Power in grammar school, now that means something, every child is

subjected to it. The second example: Christianity. The Church is all too

happy to be treated as an ideology. They want to discuss it—it

encourages ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology. It is

a very original, specific organization of power which has taken diverse

forms from the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, and which was able

to invent the idea of an international power. It’s far more important

than ideology.

Felix Guattari: The same goes for traditional political structures. It’s

always the same old trick: a big ideological debate in the general

assembly, and the questions of organization are reserved for special

committees. These look secondary, having been determined by political

options. Whereas, in fact, the real problems are precisely the problems

of organization, never made explicit or rationalized, but recast after

the fact in ideological terms. The real divisions emerge in

organization: a particular way of treating desire and power,

investments, group-Oedipuses, group-super-egos, phenomena of

perversion... Only then are the political oppositions built up: an

individual chooses one position over another, because in the scheme of

the organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his opponent.

Actuel: Your overall analysis of the Soviet Union or capitalism is

convincing, but what about the particulars? If every ideological

opposition by definition masks conflicts of desire, how would you

analyze, for example, the divergence of three Trotskyite

splinter-groups? What conflicts of desire, if any, do you see there? In

spite of their political quarrels, each group seems to fulfil the same

function for its members: it offers them the security of a hierarchy, a

social milieu on a reduced scale, and a definitive explanation of the

world... I don’t see the difference.

Felix Guattari: Provided we recognize that any resemblance to an

existing group is purely fortuitous, we can imagine that one of the

groups initially defines itself by its fidelity to the rigid positions

of the communist left during the creation of the Third International.

Now you adopt a whole axiomatics, down to the phonological level—the

pronunciation of certain words, the gesture that accompanies it, not to

mention the structures of organization, the conception of the

relationships to be maintained with allies on the left, with centrists

and adversaries... This universe can correspond to a particular figure

of Oedipalization, very much like the intangible and reassuring universe

of the obsessive who loses his bearings as soon as you displace a

familiar object. This identification with recurrent images and figures

is meant to achieve a certain kind of efficacy that characterized

Stalinism—except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, they

keep the overall framework of the method, but they’re receptive to

change: “Comrades, we must recognize that if the enemy remains the same,

the conditions have changed.” So the splinter group is more open. It’s a

compromise: the initial image has been crossed out while being

maintained, and other notions have been added. Meetings and training

sessions multiply, but so do external interventions. As Zazie says, the

desiring will has a way of harassing students and militants.

As for the basic problems, all these groups say more or less the same

thing. Where they radically differ is style: a particular definition of

the leader or propaganda, a particular conception of discipline, or the

fidelity, modesty, and asceticism of a militant. How do you propose to

account for these differences if you don’t go rummaging around in the

social machine’s economy of desire? From the anarchists to the Maoists,

the diversity is incredibly wide, analytically as well as politically.

And don’t forget, beyond the shrinking fringe of splinter groups, that

mass of people who don’t know what to choose: the leftist movement, the

attraction of unions, straightforward revolt, indifference... We must

try to explain the role these splinter groups play in crushing desire,

like machines grinding and tamping it down. It’s a dilemma: to be broken

by the social system, or to fall into your preordained place in these

little churches. In this respect, May ’68 was an astonishing revelation.

Desiring power accelerated to a point where it exploded all the splinter

groups. They regrouped later on when they participated in the business

of restoring order with other repressive forces: the CGT [Communist

Workers’ Union], the PC [Communist Party], the CRS [the riot police], or

Edgar Faure. I’m not saying that to be provocative. It goes without

saying that the militants were courageous to fight against the police.

But if we leave the sphere of struggle, the sphere of interests, to

consider instead the function of desire, you must admit that the

recruiters of certain splinter groups approached the youth in a spirit

of repression: they wanted to contain the desire which had been

liberated to re-channel it.

Actuel: Sure, but what is a liberated desire? I see how it could work on

an individual or group level: artistic creation, smashing windows,

burning things, or even simply having an orgy, or letting everything go

to hell through sheer laziness. But then what? What would be a

collectively liberated desire on the scale of a social group? Can you

give any precise examples? And what does that mean for the “totality of

society,” if you don’t reject that term as Foucault does.

Felix Guattari: We chose as our reference a state of desire at its most

critical and acute: the desire of the schizophrenic. And the

schizophrenic who is able to produce something, beyond or beneath the

schizophrenic who has been locked up, beaten down with drugs and social

repression. In our opinion, some schizophrenics directly express a free

deciphering of desire. But how does one conceive of a collective form of

desiring economy? Well, not locally. I have a hard time imagining a

small group which has been liberated staying together as it is traversed

by the flows of a repressive society, as though one liberated individual

after another could just be added on. But if desire constitutes the very

texture of society in its totality, including its mechanisms of

reproduction, a movement of liberation can “crystallize” in that

society. In May ’68, from the first sparks to the local clashes, the

upheaval was brutally transmitted to the whole society—including groups

that had nothing at all to do with the revolutionary movement: doctors,

lawyers, merchants. Vested interest prevailed in the end, but only after

a month of burnings. We’re headed for explosions of this type, yet more

profound.

Actuel: Might there have already occurred in history a vigorous, lasting

liberation of desire, beyond brief periods of celebration, war, and

carnage, or revolutions for a day? Or do you believe in an end to

history: after millennia of alienation, social evolution will one day

turn around in a final revolution to liberate desire forever?

Felix Guattari: Neither. Not in a definitive end to history, and not in

provisional excess. Every civilization and every epoch have had their

ends to history. It’s not necessarily insightful or liberating. The

moments of excess, the celebrations are hardly more reassuring. There

are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say:

excess, celebration, yes—“at the first stage of revolution.” But there

is always a second stage: organization, operation, all the serious

stuff... Nor is desire liberared in simple moments of celebration. Just

look at the discussion between Victor and Foucault, in the issue of Les

Temps Modernes devoted to the Maoists.[1] Victor consents to excess, but

only at “the first stage.” As for the rest, the serious stuff, Victor

calls for a new State apparatus, new norms, popular justice by tribunal,

invoking an authority exterior to the masses, a third party capable of

resolving the contradictions of the masses. We come up against the same

old schema again and again: they detach a pseudo avant-garde able to

bring about syntheses, to form a party as an embryonic State apparatus;

they levy recruits from a well-educated, well-behaved working class; and

the rest, lumpen proletariat, is a residue not to be trusted (always the

old condemnation of desire). These very distinctions only trap desire to

serve a bureaucratic caste-system. Foucault responds by denouncing the

third party, saying that if such a thing as popular justice does exist,

it certainly won’t come from a tribunal. He clearly demonstrates how the

“avant-garde / proletariat / non-proletarian plebs” distinction is

originally a distinction which the bourgeoisie introduces into the

masses, to crush the phenomena of desire and marginalize it. The whole

question turns on a State apparatus. Why would you look to a party or

State apparatus to liberate desires? It’s bizarre. Wanting improved

justice is like wanting good judges, good cops, good bosses, a cleaner

France, etc. And then we are told: how do you propose to unify isolated

struggles without a State apparatus? The revolution clearly needs a

war-machine, but that’s not a State apparatus. It also needs an analytic

force, an analyzer of the desires of the masses, absolutely—but not an

external mechanism of synthesis. What is liberated desire? A desire that

escapes the impasse of individual private fantasy: it’s not about

adapting desire, socializing and disciplining it, but hooking it up in

such a way that its process is uninterrupted in the social body, so its

expression can be collective. The most important thing is not

authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in

the neighborhood, the schools, factories, prisons, nursery schools, etc.

It’s not about a make-over, or totalization, but hooking up on the same

plane at its tipping point. As long as we stick to the alternative

between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchical and

bureaucratic encoding of a party-organization, there can be no

liberation of desire.

Actuel: Do you think that capitalism in its beginnings was able to

subsume social desires?

Gilles Deleuze: Of course. Capitalism has always been, and still is a

remarkable desiring-machine. Flows of money, flows of the means of

production, flows of man-power, flows of new markets: it’s all desire in

flux. You just have to examine the many contingencies that gave birth to

capitalism to realize how inseparable from the phenomena of desire are

its infrastructure and economy, and the extent to which it is a

criss-crossing of desires. And don’t forget fascism. It too “subsumes

social desires,” including the desires of repression and death. Hitler

and the fascist machine gave people hard-ons. But if your question wants

to ask: was capitalism in its beginnings revolutionary, did the

industrial revolution ever coincide with a social revolution? The answer

is no. At least I don’t think so. From its birth capitalism has been

connected with a savage repression. It very quickly acquired its

organization and State apparatus. Did capitalism entail the dissolution

of previous codes and powers? Absolutely. But it had already set up the

gears of its power, including its State power, in the fissures of

previous regimes. It’s always like that: there is very little progress.

Even before a social formation gets going, its instruments of

exploitation and repression are already there, aimlessly spinning their

wheels, but ready to swing into high gear. The first capitalist are

waiting there like birds of prey, waiting to swoop on the worker who has

fallen through the cracks of the previous system. This is what is meant

by primitive accumulation.

Actuel: In my view, the rising bourgeoisie was imagining and preparing

its revolution throughout the Enlightenment. The bourgeoisie in its own

eyes was a revolutionary class “to the bitter end,” since it came to

power by bringing down the Ancient Regime. Whatever the movements that

existed among the peasantry and the working class, the bourgeois

revolution is a revolution carried out by the bourgeoisie—the two terms

are synonymous. So, it is anachronistic to judge the bourgeoisie by the

socialist Utopias of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; it leads

to the introduction of a category that never existed.

Gilles Deleuze: Here again, what you’re saying fits the schema of a

particular kind of Marxism: it supposes that the bourgeoisie is

revolutionary at some point in history, and even that it was or is

necessary to go through a capitalist stage, through a bourgeois

revolutionary stage. That’s a Stalinist point of view, but it’s hard to

take seriously. When a social formation exhausts itself and begins to

leak on every side, all sorts of things come uncoded, all sorts of

unpoliced flows begin circulating: for example, the migrations of

peasants in feudal Europe are phenomena of “deterritorialization.” The

bourgeoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so you

might think it was revolutionary. Not in the least. Daniel Guerin has

said some profound things about the Revolution of 1789.[2] The

bourgeoisie never mistook its real enemy. Its real enemy was not the

previous system, but that which had escaped the control of the previous

system, and the bourgeoisie was resolved to control it in its turn. The

bourgeoisie owed its power to the dissolution of the old system; but it

could exercise this new power only by considering the other

revolutionaries as enemies. The bourgeoisie was never revolutionary. It

had the revolution carried out for it. It manipulated, channeled,

repressed an enormous surge of popular desire. The people marched to

their death at Valmy.

Actuel: They certainly marched to their death at Verdun.

Felix Guattari: Exactly. This is precisely what interests us. Where do

these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from? They

can’t be explained by a social rationality, and the moment they’re born,

they’re rerouted, captured by power. A revolutionary situation cannot be

explained simply by the analysis of interests present at the time. In

1903, the Russian Social-Democratic party is discussing its alliances,

the organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde.

All of the sudden, while the Social-Democrats are “preparing” for

revolution, they’re rocked by the events of 1905 and have to jump aboard

a moving train. A crystallization of desire on a wide social scale had

occured, whose basis lay in still incomprehensible situations. The same

is true of 1917. In this case, the politicians again jumped aboard, and

they gained control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was willing or

able to assume the need for a Soviet organization that would have

allowed the masses to take real charge of their interests and desires.

Machines called political organizations were put in circulation, and

they functioned according to the model Dimitrov had developed at the

Seventh International Congress—alternating between popular fronts and

sectarian retractions—and they always lead to the same repressive

results. We saw it again in 1936, 1945, and 1968. By their axiomat-ics,

these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. Red flag in

hand, this politics in its underhanded way reminds one of the politics

of the President or the clergy. And in our view, this corresponds to a

certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the

ego, the individual, and the family. This raises a simple dilemma:

either we find some new type of structure to facilitate the fusion of

collective desire and revolutionary organization; or we continue on the

present course, heading from one repression to the next, toward a

fascism that will make Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.

Actuel: So then what is the nature of this profound, fundamental desire

that we see constitutes humanity and human beings as social animals, but

which is constantly betrayed? Why is it always ready to be invested in

those machines of the dominant machine, like opposed political parties

which are nonetheless the same? Could this mean that desire is condemned

to a pure explosion without consequence, or to perpetual betrayal? One

last question: can there ever be such a thing as a collective and

lasting expression of liberated desire at some point in history? If so,

how?

Gilles Deleuze: If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn’t be discussing

it, we would just go out and do it. Still, like Felix said,

revolutionary organization must be the organization of a war-machine and

not of a State apparatus, the organization of an analyzer and not of an

external synthesis. In every social system, you will always find lines

of escape, as well as sticking points to cut off these escapes, or else

(which is not the same thing) embryonic apparatuses to recuperate them,

to reroute and stop them, in a new system waiting to strike. I would

like to see the crusades analyzed from this perspective. But in every

respect, capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape

are not just difficulties that arise, they are the very conditions of

its operation. Capitalism is founded on a generalized decoding of every

flow: flows of wealth, flows of labor, flows of language, flows of art,

etc. It did not create any code, it created a kind of accounting, an

axiomatics of decoded flows, as the basis of its economy. It ligatures

the points of escape and moves ahead. It is always expanding its own

borders, and always finds itself in a situation where it must close off

new escape routes at its borders, pushing them back once more. It has

resolved none of its fundamental problems. It can’t even foresee the

monetary increase in a country over a year. It is endlessly crossing its

own limits which keep reappearing farther out. It puts itself in

alarming situations with respect to its own production, its social life,

its demographics, its periphery in the Third World, its interior

regions, etc. The system is leaking all over the place. They spring from

the constantly displaced limits of the system. And certainly, the

revolutionary escape (the active escape, which Jackson invokes when he

says: “I’ve never stopped fleeing, but as I flee, I’m looking for a

weapon”)’[3] is not the same thing as other kinds of escape, the

schizo-escape, the drug-escape. This is precisely the problem facing

marginal groups: to make all the lines of escape connect up on a

revolutionary plane. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on

a new character, and a new kind of revolutionary potential. So, you see,

there is hope.

Actuel: You mentioned the crusades just now. Do you see the crusades as

one of the first manifestations of collective schizophrenia in the West?

Felix Guattari: The crusades were indeed an extraordinary schizophrenic

movement. Suddenly, thousands and thousands of people, during a period

that was already divided and troubled, were totally fed up with their

life; spontaneous preaching rose up everywhere, and whole villages of

men set out. It is only afterwards that a frightened papacy tried to

give this movement direction by leading it off to the Holy Land. This

strategy had two advantages: it gets rid of the wandering gangs, and it

shores up the Christian outposts threatened by the Turks in the

Near-East. It didn’t always work: the Venetian Crusade wound up in

Constantinople, and the Children’s Crusade veered off to the South of

France and quickly lost any sympathy people had for it. Entire villages

were captured and burned by these “crusading” children, whom the regular

armies finally had to round up, either killing them or selling them into

slavery..

Actuel: Do you see any parallel here with contemporary movements, such

as the road, or hippy colonies, fleeing the factory and the office? Is

there a pope to co-opt them? The Jesus-revolution?

Felix Guattari: A recuperation by Christianity is not out of the

question. It’s already a reality, to a certain extent, in the United

States though much less so here in France or Europe. But you can see a

latent recuperation beneath the naturist movement, the idea that we

could withdraw from production and reconstitute a small society out of

the way, as though we weren’t all branded and corralled by the

capitalist system.

Actuel: What role can still be attributed to the Church in a country

like ours? The Church was at the center of power in Western society well

into the eighteenth-century; it bound and structured the social machine

before the nation-State emerged. The technocracy has deprived it today

of its old function, so the Church, too, appears adrift, a rudderless

ship divided against itself. One can ask whether the Church, pressured

by currents of progressive Catholicism, is not becoming less

confessional than certain political organizations.

Felix Guattari: What about ecumenism? Is that not the Church’s way of

landing on its feet? The Church has never been stronger. I don’t see any

reason to oppose the Church to technocracy; the Church has its own

technocracy. Historically speaking, Christianity and positivism have

always gotten along quite well together. There is a Christian motor

behind the development of the positive sciences. And you can’t really

claim that the psychiatrist replaced the priest, nor that the cop

replaced him. Everyone is needed in repression! What has become outdated

in the Church is its ideology, not its organization of power.

Actuel: Let’s address this other aspect of your book: the critique of

psychiatry. Can one say that France is already under surveillance by

psychiatry at the local level? And just how far does this influence

extend?

Felix Guattari: Psychiatric hospitals are essentially structured like a

state bureaucracy, and psychiatrists are bureaucrats. For a long time

the State had been satisfied with a politics of coercion and did nothing

for almost a century. It was only after the Liberation that any signs of

anxiety appeared: the first psychiatric revolution, the opening of the

hospitals, free treatment, institutional psychotherapy, etc. This led to

the great Utopian politics of “localized” care: limiting the number of

internments, and sending teams of psychiatrists out into the population

like missionaries into the bush. But not enough people believed in the

reform, and without the will to carry it out, it got bogged down. Now

you have a few model services for official visits, and a few hospitals

here and there in the more underdeveloped regions. Still, we’re headed

for a major crisis, on the scale of the university crisis, a disaster at

every level: equipment, personnel training, therapy, etc.

The institutional surveillance of children has been, on the whole,

undertaken with greater success. In this case, the initiative escaped

State structure and financing, falling instead under diverse

associations, such as childhood protection agencies or parental

associations... Because they were subsidized by social security, the

establishments proliferated. The child is immediately taken in charge by

a network of psychiatrists, tagged at an early age, and followed for

life. One can expect solutions of this type for adult psychiatry. Faced

with the current impasse, the State will try to denationalize

institutions and replace them with institutions governed by the law of

1901 and most certainly manipulated by political powers and reactionary

family groups. We’re indeed headed toward the psychiatric surveillance

of France, if the present crisis doesn’t liberate its revolutionary

potentials. The most conservative ideology is spreading everywhere, an

insipid transposition of the most Oedipal concepts. In the children’s

wards, they call the director “uncle,” and the nurse “mother.” I have

even heard things like: game groups follow a maternal principle, and

workshops a paternal principle. The psychiatry of surveillance looks

progressive because it opens up the hospital. But if that implies a

surveillance of the neighborhood, we will quickly come to regret the

closed asylums of yesterday. It’s like psychoanalysis: it functions

beyond the confines of walls, but it’s much worse as a repressive force,

it’s much more dangerous.

Gilles Deleuze: Here is a case. A woman comes in for a consultation,

explaining that she’s taking tranquilizers. She asks for a glass of

water. Then she says: “You see, I’m a cultured woman, I’ve done graduate

work, I love to read, and all of a sudden I can’t stop crying. I can’t

stand the subway... And then I start crying as soon as I read

anything... I watch TV, I see those images from Vietnam: I can’t stand

it.” The doctor doesn’t say too much. The woman continues: “I’ve been

working a little for the Resistance: I act as a mail-box.” The doctor

asks her to explain. “Of course, I’m sorry, you don’t understand, do

you? I go into a cafe and ask: is there anything for Rene? Then they

give me a letter to send.” When the doctor hears ‘Rene,’ he wakes up:

“Why did you say ‘Rene’?” This is the first time he has asked a

question. Up to this point, she has been talking about the subway,

Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the effect it has on her, on her body, how it

makes her feel like crying. But the doctor only says: “Well, well,

‘Rene.’ What does ‘Rene’ mean to you?” The name ‘Rene’ implies someone

who is reborn [re-ne]. A renaissance. Resistance?—forget about it, he

passes that over in silence. But renaissance, that fits the universal

schema, the archetype: “You want to be reborn,” he says. The doctor has

found his bearings: at last he’s on track. And he forces her to talk

about her mother and her father. This is an essential aspect of our

book, and it’s totally concrete. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have

never paid attention to delirium. All you have to do is listen to

someone in a state of delirium: the Russians worry him, and the Chinese;

I’ve got no saliva left, I was sodomized in the subway, there are

microbes and spermatozoa everywhere; it’s Franco’s fault, the Jews’

fault, the Maoists’ fault. Their delirium covers the whole social field.

Why couldn’t this be about the sexuality of a subject, the relation it

has to the idea of Chinese, Whites, Blacks? Or to whole civilizations,

the crusades, the subway? Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have never

heard a word of it, and they’re on the defensive because they’re

position is indefensible. They crush the contents of the unconscious

with pre-fabricated statements like: “You keep saying Chinese, but what

about your father? —He’s not Chinese. —So your lover is Chinese?” It’s

like the repressive work by the judge in the Angela Davis case, who

assured us: “Her behavior is explicable only by the fact that she was in

love.” But what if, on the contrary, Angela Davis’s libido was a

revolutionary, social libido? What if she was in love because she was a

revolutionary?

This is what we want to tell psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: you have

no idea what delirium is; you’ve got it all wrong. The sense of our book

is this: we’ve reached a stage where many people feel that the

psychoanalytic machine no longer works, and a whole generation is

beginning to have had it with all-purpose schemas: Oedipus and

castration, the imaginary and the symbolic —they systematically efface

the social, political, and cultural content from every psychic

disturbance.

Actuel: Your association of capitalism with schizophrenia is the very

foundation of your book. Are there cases of schizophrenia in other

societies?

Felix Guattari: Schizophrenia is indissociable from the capitalist

system, which is originally conceived as an escape, a leak: an exclusive

illness. In other societies, escape and marginality exhibit other

aspects. The asocial individual of so-called primitive societies is not

locked up; prisons and asylums are recent notions. They’re chased away

or exiled on the margin of the village and die there, unless they can be

integrated into a neighboring village. Each system, moreover, has its

own particular illness: the hysteria of so-called primitive societies,

the paranoid-depressives of great Empires... The capitalist economy

functions through decoding and deterritorialization: it has its extreme

illnesses, that is, its schizophrenics who come uncoded and become

deterritorialized to the extreme, but it also has its extreme

consequences, its revolutionaries.

[1] Pierre Victor was the pseudonym of Benny Levy, the one-time leader

of rhe Proletarian Left (Gauche proletarienne), which was outlawed. Cf.

Les Temps modernes, “Nouveau Fascisme, Nou-velle democratic” no. 310

bis, juin 1972, pp. 355—366.

[2]

D. Guerin, La Revolution francaise et nous (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976).

Cf. also, Lutte des classes sous la Premiere Republique: 1793—1797

(Vans: Gallimard, 1968).

[3] George Jackson, a militant African-American, was imprisoned in San

Quentin and Soledad, where he was murdered on August 21, 1971. Gilles

Deleuze and members of the GIP collaborated on a special edition:

L’Assassinat de George Jackson (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Intolerable,’

1971).