The Schizoanalysis Project, Part I
The Origins of Anti-Oedipus
It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated this blog. While I’ve been busy working on my podcast, Moral Minority, we’ve also begun a multi-podcast reading group on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in collaboration with Acid Horizon and Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour. Since the themes of Anti-Oedipus relate closely to the topics I’ve previously discussed on this Substack, I thought it would be worthwhile for me to post the text summaries I’m distributing to the reading group for each session for my subscribers here.
In our first session, we covered some biographical and historical background for the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For anyone interested in joining the group or reading along, hopefully my critical engagements with Anti-Oedipus will help serve as an Ariadne’s thread for working your way through a rich but difficult work. Below, I discuss the origins of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration, the psychiatric approach of the La Borde clinic, and the political upheaval of May 1968 in France that contributed to inspiring Anti-Oedipus.
“Aside from a variety of circumstances, there was a whole political context that led up to it. Initially, it was less a question of pooling our knowledge than piling up our uncertainties; we were baffled, confused, by the turn of events around May ’68.”
-Félix Guattari
Writing as a Machinic Assemblage
When Félix Guattari approached Gilles Deleuze in 1969 with a proposal to collaborate on a critique of psychoanalysis, the two thinkers occupied very different positions in the French intellectual scene. Guattari was a radical psychoanalyst and political militant who practiced a revolutionary form of group therapy for psychosis alongside Jean Oury as director of the La Borde clinic, and he struggled to write while juggling his manifold political and clinical commitments. Bringing vital energy and exuberance to all of his work, Guattari was always in motion, his hyperactively creative imagination generating a profusion of new ideas to which he struggled to give clear form. By contrast, Deleuze lived a sedentary existence anchored in the French academy and had developed a reputation for impressive erudition in a “renegade” philosophical canon that included Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson, publishing several monographs before his major thesis, Difference and Repetition, appeared in 1968. He would live in Paris from his birth in 1925 to his death in 1995, a nomad in mind rather than body who in his early life remained mostly aloof from politics. Nonetheless, the political upheaval in Paris during the month of May, 1968 would prove the decisive impetus that brought the two men together.
Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative writing process dramatizes the concept of the “desiring-machine” that they introduce in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus. Rather than a conversation or exchange of ideas, the two thinkers constructed a machinic writing assemblage, an impersonal process for producing a flow of writing that would depersonalize and decenter the text itself. At first, one would talk, and the other would listen. “This is not just a rule for understanding, for agreeing with each other,” they would later explain, reflecting back upon their process, “it signifies that one of us is constantly in the other’s one’s service.” Or as Deleuze puts it: “During our meetings, we didn’t dialogue…I refused to let Félix stop, even when he had had enough, and Félix would push me in turn, even when I was exhausted.”
In the terminology of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari established a relation between organs: a speaking-machine that produces a flow of speech that connects to a listening machine, paired with the organ of the hand that translates the speech-flow into a writing-flow (the connective synthesis of “and…and…and…”). In between sessions, Guattari would write furiously, sending his fragmented drafts to Deleuze via Gilles’ wife, Fanny, who in proofreading and correcting Guattari’s text functioned as another node in the machinic assemblage. Hence when writing, they did not relate to one another as Deleuze and Guattari, individual personalities and distinguishable authors, but as relay points in a series of subjectless communications. Though it would be up to Deleuze to compose the final draft, their machinic process resulted in an effectively authorless text. “Each of us functions like an incrustation or a citation in the other one’s text and then, after a while, we’re not sure who is citing whom anymore…It’s the same thing to say: we’re always alone, and: we’re always many.”
In his interview with Claire Parnet, released in 1994 as “L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze,” Deleuze describes his relationship with Guattari in terms of the process of becoming initiated between an orchid and a wasp, an image taken from the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The orchid and the wasp are engaged in a process of mutual becoming in which each maps its “territory” onto the other, plunging both flower and insect into a creative exchange of desire and affect. The orchid becomes-wasp by reflecting its image, seducing the wasp to become-orchid and join in its process of reproduction. “How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, perpetually branching onto one another and caught up in each other? The orchid is deterritorialized by forming an image, an exact tracing of the wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes itself on this image. The wasp is deterritorialized all the same, by becoming part of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus, but it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. The wasp and the orchid make a rhizome, insofar as they are heterogeneous.” We can understand Deleuze and Guattari’s process of writing as designed to institute precisely this heterogeneity, to form a rhizome and spark a process of becoming in the back and forth movement between deterritorialization and reterritorialization. As they write in the “Introduction” to A Thousand Plateaus: “Be the pink panther, and let your loves be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon.”
Here are some of Deleuze and Guattari’s other illuminating comments on their writing process:
Deleuze: “Guattari’s ideas are like drawings, or even diagrams. Concepts are what interest me…Between Félix with his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how.” ("Letter to Uno: How Félix and I Worked Together", in Two Regimes of Madness, p. 238)
Deleuze: “Félix sees writing as a schizoid flow drawing in all sorts of things. I’m interested in the way a page of writing flies off in all directions and at the same time closes right up on itself like an egg. And also in the reticences, the resonances, the lurches, and all the larvae you can find in a book. Then we were really writing together, it wasn’t a problem. We made successive versions.” ("Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus", in Negotiations, p. 14)
Guattari: “There is a real politics of dissent between us, not so much a cult as a culture of heterogeneity, such that each recognizes and accepts the other’s singularity…Gilles is my friend, not my buddy.” ("Love Story between an Orchid and a Wasp", in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, p. 14)
Guattari: “We are very different. As a result, our rhythms for agreeing on a theme or on an idea are different. But we are complementary, of course. I’m more attracted to adventurous things; let’s call it a conceptual commando who likes to visit foreign lands. Gilles, on the other hand, is a philosophical heavyweight, he has a whole bibliographic administration.” ("Love Story between an Orchid and a Wasp", in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, p. 21)
Life at La Borde
Anti-Oedipus is a book about madness, but neither Deleuze nor Guattari were schizophrenics or psychotics themselves. On the one hand, Guattari would use Anti-Oedipus to give theoretical expression to ideas he had first developed in the practical context of treating psychiatric patients. One the other, Deleuze approached madness as a total outsider. Jean-Pierre Muyard, who was responsible for introducing Guattari to Deleuze, relates Gilles’ ambivalent attitude towards the mad: “[Deleuze] said, I discuss psychosis and madness, but I don’t know anything about it from the inside. But he was also phobic about deranged people and couldn’t have spent even an hour at La Borde.” One day, when the three men and Guattari’s partner Arlette Donati were eating lunch, they would be interrupted by a call from La Borde reporting that a patient had set fire to the chateau chapel and escaped into the surrounding woods. “Gilles blanched, I [Muyard] froze, and Félix called for help to find the guy. At that point, Gilles said to me, ‘How can you stand those schizos’? He couldn’t bear the sight of crazy people.”
What was it about the La Borde clinic that made Deleuze so anxious? At one level, the answer is simple: at La Borde, psychotics were not treated as patients, but as equals. The boundaries within La Borde and between the clinic and the outside world were deliberately porous. Patients and staff intermingled organically, participated in all activities together, and patients were free to leave the clinic to stroll around Paris. Psychiatric specializations were disrupted or cast aside, and everyone participated alike in both manual and intellectual labor, from housekeeping to running seminars or preparing theater performances. Jean Oury, who reopened the clinic as director in 1953, affirmed an irreducible connection between madness and artistic creativity: “Delirium is productive…I talked about an aesthetic impulse.” Though cautious not to fetishize mad experiences, Oury insisted that there be “a real effort to seek out the creative element, to have the clinical observer be attentive to what we called the madman’s transcendental dimension.” La Borde fulfilled this mission by merging a radically egalitarian, group therapy approach with political militancy. When the events of May ‘68 erupted in Paris, psychotics from La Borde would join students in occupying the famous Odéon Theater.
This synthesis of politics and radical psychiatry would emerge as the Working Group for Institutional Psychotherapy and Sociotherapy (GTPSI) in 1960, which would later become the Society for Institutional Psychotherapy (SIP) in 1965. In Intersecting Lives, François Dosse outlines the core principles that guided the group:
One of its major tenets was that mentally ill patients could only be treated in an institution that had reflected on how it operated itself. The second principle was that psychosis could not be treated by any supposedly direct access to a strictly individual, socially disconnected pathology, an approach that reduced treatment to a simple interaction between two patients: the patient and the doctor. Institutional psychotherapy, by contrast, saw treatment as the introduction of new arrangements and social connections…The GTPSI wanted to see a group-subject emerge and deconstruct subjected groups ‘whose law is imposed from the outside, unlike other groups claiming to establish themselves by assuming an internal law.’
This group subject was distinctively artistic and theatrical. In addition to the proliferating, always shifting therapy groups that both patients and doctors freely moved among, life at La Borde was frequently punctuated by galas, celebrations, and performances. The clinic would even engage the surrounding town to organize a culture month during which the clinic became a hothouse of artistic activity that did not shy away from politics: “The Blois town hall echoed with calls to ‘hang all the bourgeois.’” When the May ‘68 uprising arrived, there was no doubt where the doctors at La Borde would stand.
Many of Guattari’s signature concepts, such as group fantasy and transversality, would develop in this context. With its openness and egalitarianism, the constant shifting of roles designed to break down specializations and barriers of expertise, and its emphasis on the fully social nature of mad experiences, La Borde served as a practical model of the schizophrenic process that Deleuze and Guattari discuss in Anti-Oedipus. In contrast with individual therapy, where the patient becomes an individual subject that the analyst then triangulates in relation to family figures (“mommy-daddy-me,” as Deleuze and Guattari often call it), La Borde’s group therapy approach encouraged frequent circulation among a range of subject positions that would bring patients into different modes of sociability and creative, artistic activity. Though an outsider to psychotic experiences himself, Guattari would draw upon the example of La Borde in creating his and Deleuze’s own collective assemblage of enunciation. As they will say in Anti-Oedipus: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.”
The Events of May
“WHEN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY BECOMES A BOURGEOIS THEATER, ALL BOURGEOIS THEATERS MUST BECOME NATIONAL ASSEMBLIES.”
-Anonymous graffiti on the door of the Odéon Theater
What happened in France during the month of May, 1968? In many ways, this is the question that Anti-Oedipus sets out to answer. The revolution that seized the streets of Paris that month is a study in paradoxes. For a brief moment, the entire country was paralyzed by the largest mass strike of the 20th century in the capitalist core, as students joined workers and farmers in occupying factories and universities to turn Paris and its surroundings into a laboratory for the creation of new political subjectivities. Yet it would seem to end abruptly on May 30, with President Charles de Gaulle’s return from meeting with the military in Baden-Baden, Germany and a mass counterdemonstration down the Champs-Élysées.
Foucault’s preface begins by commenting on the academic context in which Anti-Oedipus was written, but he is also making a thinly veiled political comment that alludes to the events of May. The “three requirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one’s time acceptable” during the period between 1945 and 1965 were fidelities to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the structuralist analysis originating in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. These latter two in particular are merged in Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis, one of Guattari’s most significant influences. This intellectual triangle, however, is also reference to the state of left wing politics in France during this period, centered around the anti-colonial struggles against the French war in Algeria on the one hand, and the officially Stalinist orientation of the Parti communiste français (PCF). In particular, the “official” Marxism of the PCF had refused to join in protests against the war in Algeria, leading Trotskyist-leaning dissidents such as Guattari to jump ship and help found La Voie Communiste, whose third issue emphasized “Algeria First” as the central point of left politics in France during the period. Throughout this time, Guattari would help smuggle money from Algerian immigrants living on the outskirts of Paris across the Mediterranean into Algeria, providing a financial lifeline for the Algerian resistance.
Similarly, the PCF and the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), France’s largest labor union, would hesitate to support what began in early May as a student uprising at Nanterre and Vincennes. As a result, the successes and failures of May ‘68 would raise vexing questions for the French left. Did the official communist forces in France doom an otherwise promising revolutionary moment by refusing to back the student-led March 22 Movement and by acceding to the end of factory occupations after May 30? Or was the student revolt a lesson in the perils of political spontaneity, one that led to the left’s devastating defeat in the June elections that followed? Anti-Oedipus would try to make sense of the desiring-revolution that erupted that May, one that established transversal connections between students and workers to forge new political subjectivities. To understand their initial puzzlement and their theoretical intervention, a broad grasp of how events unfolded that month is helpful.
May 1968 Timeline
January 26 - Police are called on a counterdemonstration against the fascist organization Occident on the campus of the University of Nanterre in Paris. Police establish a regular prese
nce at the university in the days afterward.
March 22 - Five hundred Nanterre students occupy the faculty lounge to protest the arrest of four Vietnam War protesters, leading to the birth of the March 22 Movement. The movement begins to build momentum.
May 2 - Disorder reigns at Nanterre after Daniel Cohn-Bendit, symbolic leader of the March 22 Movement, is called to appear before a disciplinary council in Paris. Minister of Education Alain Peyrefitte gives the Dean permission to close the university.
May 3 - Nanterre students gather in the Sorbonne courtyard to protest the closing of the university. Unexpectedly, police order the protest to disperse and begin to arrest students. The Sorbonne is ordered to close.
May 6 - When students arrive at the Sorbonne to protest the arrests on Monday morning, they are met with a massive police presence. Clashes between police and students escalate throughout the day, and when a Security Police Force (CRS) attack on Rue St. Jacques leaves twenty students injured, the protestors begin to tear up cobblestones and erect barricades. Fighting would leave around 600 demonstrators and 350 cops injured before the end of the day.
May 7 - With the escalation of violence, crowds the subsequent day reach 50,000 strong.
May 10-11 - As negotiations with the government continue to stall and Peyrefitte fails to follow through on a promise to reopen the Sorbonne, demonstrators occupy the Latin Quarter. Around 2:15 in the morning, the most violent night of the month begins as the police viciously assault the occupiers in the Latin Quarter. Parisians leave their homes to join in the fighting and help students fortify barricades. Left parties and labor organizations call for a general strike.
May 13 - Over a million demonstrators, including students and workers, march relatively unimpeded through Paris as the general strike begins. Students occupy the Sorbonne and transform it into a free university.
May 15 - Students occupy the Odéon Theater.
May 20 - As the uprising escalates throughout the week, the total of striking workers exceeds 10 million, approximately 2/3rds of the French workforce. Workers begin to occupy factories around the country without waiting for CGT permission or PCF approval.
May 24 - Massive protests continue, now in response to the government’s order preventing Cohn-Bendit’s re-entry into the country. The Paris Stock Exchange is set on fire. Two hundred thousand farmers surround Paris with their tractors in solidarity. De Gaulle finally addresses the nation and calls for a referendum on his leadership.
May 29 - As left and liberal parties and unions negotiate a post-Gaullist resolution to the crisis, De Gaulle mysteriously leaves the country. In fact, he is traveling to military bases in Germany to confirm the military’s support for his continued rule. The Communist Party finally joins a rally of 500,000 in Paris and calls for a popular front government.
May 30 - De Gaulle returns to Paris and calls for a counterdemonstration that also draws hundreds of thousands. As De Gaulle announces his plan to dissolve the National Assembly but retain his own hold on power, the movement is left in a lurch.
The demonstrations and strikes would continue into the first two weeks of June, but De Gaulle’s move to center the crisis on his person and to consolidate the support of military factions against whom he had once fought in the Resistance halted the uprising abruptly. For a fleeting moment, all of France had been paralyzed, and it seemed that anything was possible. Then, within a span just as brief, everything seemed to return to normal. In truth, the political and cultural ramifications of the May events would be manifold and widespread, but its paradoxes would leave Deleuze and Guattari with critical questions for the future of revolutionary politics. How could the immense creative energies of May be harnessed and prevented from dissolving away? Would any such revolutionary event end in state reconsolidation, and would the subsequent institutionalization of the movement in Mitterand’s presidency amount to its betrayal? At the heart of the May ‘68 events was a process of becoming enacted between students and workers that dissolved the division between intellectual and labor, theory and practice. Yet it seemed the same untrammelled release of desire had been assimilated by the forces of the state and the capitalist status quo all too easily. In a sense, it is this political circle that Anti-Oedipus will set out to square, and it is up to us to assess its success and relevance for the politics of our own time.