A reactive force is not weak in itself, but rather separated from what it can do, and can therefore never lead to a real expression of substance. Active force, on the other hand, always goes to the end (jusqu'au bout)--the limit being its eventual manifestation. The master thereby becomes a villain in the eyes of Hegel, who thinks that the master's power (desire, consumption, etc.) will lead to the death of the slave. This fear is based in his conception of negation, which finds its origin in Kant's partial critique and is consequently also partial. In the dialectic, negation must necessarily be partial because its basic operation involves no destruction but conservation: it involves a negation 'which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded.' Thus, master negation and desire are too thorough for the dialectic: it would totally destroy the other, in casu the slave, and stop the historical determination toward the realisation of the Absolute Spirit.

Hegel then stages the slave as hero, because slave negation is the model of restraint; it is force and desire held in check by means of labour and interiorisation of force. This slave labour serves in a complicated partial negation of the master which allows master-desire to survive, but also causes the slave to survive this unrestrained desire, and thus perpetuates the movement of the dialectic. What follows after this limitation of the force of the slave (its labour, we see here the political implications of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche), a partial pars destruens, is not a new creative and affirmative productive moment, but rather a partial pars construens, that is, a self-realisation: the slave 'becomes conscious of what he (sic) truly is.'

It is in this interiority of the slave that Hegel locates the universal essence of being, because self-consciousness 'emerges victoriously from the dialectic'. Nietzsche also seeks to locate essence in the movement of being, but he proceeds in precisely the opposite direction. Self-consciousness, asserts Deleuze, is force 'turned back inside, turned back against itself.' Nietzsche proposes a force that emerges outside itself: from essence to manifestation, always to the limit of its powers, always in exteriority--being, thus, as actual productivity. The concepts which makes this coordinated movement of forces jusqu'au bout possible are the will to power and the eternal return.

The will to power is defined by Deleuze as the genealogical element of force. It is internal to force, but not reducible to it: 'La force est ce qui peut, la volonté de puissance est ce qui veut.' The will, however, cannot be separated from forces; it is not a 'conscious agency of decision separable from the actions it motivates.' Hence, it is as if the will to power is both immanent and transcendent in relation to forces.

The same goes for the qualities of the will to power. These qualities are not simply active or reactive but rather affirmative--that is becoming active--and negative--that is becoming reactive: 'It is as if affirmation and negation were both immanent and transcendent in relation to action and reaction; out of the web of forces they make up a chain of becoming.' The will to power, writes Bogue, can thus be seen as 'the power of becoming that plays through forces, differentiating them and linking them both spatially and temporally.'--differentiating, because it is the element from which derives multiplicity, and linking, because it is the principle of the synthesis of forces.

It is here that Deleuze's final attack on Hegel is effected. 'Pluralism', he writes, 'sometimes appears to be dialectical--but it is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy.' A concept of difference as difference, true multiplicity, is the end of the dialectic because it is irreducible to unity. However, the attack on dialectical order 'creates both the space for and the need for an organizational dynamic: the organization (...) of the multiplicity'. Bergson does not provide Deleuze with an adequate notion of a synthesis of multiplicity, a flaw which makes him vulnerable for a Hegelian counterattack. Nietzsche's concepts of the will to power and the eternal return, however, enables him to smooth away this deficiency and to create a post-Hegelian philosophy of historical movement.

The eternal return is the synthesis of multiplicity which has the will to power as its principle. It is the 'expression' of the principle 'which serves as an explanation of diversity and its reproduction, of difference and its repetition.' It is not a cyclical conception of return, a return of the same, but rather a return of becoming and difference: '[t]he will to power is the differential element which puts forces in relation, and the eternal return is the affirmation of difference in the guise of multiplicity, becoming, and chance.'

The eternal return could be explicated by means of the example Nietzsche uses in his exposition of the concept in Also Sprach Zarathustra: the game of the dice. The dicethrow, he says, has two moments: the moment when the dice are thrown and the moment they fall back, that is, the moment they land and form a specific combination. The first moment is the affirmation of chance and multiplicity; nothing is preformed in the possibility of this moment--it is the becoming of being: pure multiplicity. The second moment is more obscure: 'The dice that are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination that they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the same sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity.' This second moment is the moment of synthesis, not a passive moment of revelation of necessity--that would be plain determinism--but the active creation of unity and being. 'The eternal return,' writes Deleuze, 'is the second moment, the result of the dicethrow, the affirmation of necessity, the number that brings together all the parts of chance. But it is also the return of the first moment, the repetition of the dicethrow, the reproduction and reaffirmation of chance itself.'

Michael Hardt comments as follows:

The will to power is inextricably entangled with the eternal return. The will is the principle of the eternal return in that it plays the role of primary cause, but the will cannot be separated from what it can do; the eternal return is internal to it. Hence, the will to power could be seen as the first moment of the dicethrow; it is the principle of the synthesis that marks the necessity of chance; it is the concept from which derives multiplicity, and it is as such indeterminate and unforeseeable which relationships between forces it will establish. It needs the second moment, the eternal return, to synthesise the ubiquitous becoming of forces.

This conception of the eternal return as the synthesis of forces which affirms becoming, multiplicity, and chance is the physical doctrine of the concept. In this physical/(onto)logical tenet the will provides a foundation of being in that it plays the role of primary cause. The being of Nietzsche, however, does not merely have an ontological foundation, but also an ethical one. The eternal return of the will is an ethical principle inasmuch as it is a selective ontology, that is, a selective principle that could be formulated as a practical rule: 'Whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return.' However, we cannot possibly separate the will from the eternal return, so the rule leads to the selection of those forces which are not separated from what they can do, ergo active forces. The so-called thought of the eternal return eliminates all 'half-desires and hesitant yearnings (...) of a cautious and calculating will.' Being must also be willed, and this suspends the being of Hegel, which is prevented from going to its limit, therefore from returning, and is hence doomed to roam the transcendental realm. The eternal return is thus the 'ethical pillar of a Nietzschean philosophy of being': it affirms a being of becoming which always goes to the limit, which goes from essence to manifestation and consequently provides for the 'necessity, substantiality, singularity, and univocity of being'--hence founding being firmly within the world of flux and becoming.

But being is not a stable state; its essence is the actual power of being, and this power is being affirmed eternally: 'a spiralling, infinite affirmation--affirmation being raised to the nth power.' Nietzschean being is revealed as actual productivity; it could be seen as the pars construens that follows the pars destruens of Hegelian being. This destructive moment of dialectical being is not effected by Nietzsche's total critique, says Deleuze, but is achieved by this Hegelian being itself. He exposes the nihilism of the slave as the 'motor' of reactive forces: for Nietzsche, he argues, 'nihilism is not an event in history but the motor of the history of man [sic].' In nihilism the negative will to power is a will to nothingness, and this will to power is everywhere triumphant over its affirmative counterpart. Human history, as a becoming reactive of forces, could be described as a progressive movement of nihilism. At first instance, nihilism creates a transcendental theological system and the 'will to nothingness is expressed in higher values that depreciate and devalue life.' In a successive stage, reactive forces break their alliance with the negative will and rule alone: the reactive wo/man 'takes the place of God' and advances progress and happiness for all and 'the good of the community'. Pity, the love of the weak, sick, reactive life, becomes the reigning principle of value and so life remains depreciated and devalued. In a final stage of nihilism, reactive forces deny the negative will because it is, albeit negative, nevertheless a stimulus: a becoming reactive. The slave prefers 'not to will, [but rather] to fade away passively.' However, the progression of nihilism towards passive fading away is stopped because the negative will, once separated from the reactive forces, 'inspires in man (sic) a new inclination: for destroying himself actively.' The negative will to power, the becoming reactive, is separated from the reactive forces and consequently turns to active forces to continue its becoming reactive, thus its negative will to nothingness becomes an active will to nothingness; it becomes an act of active self-destruction, hence the being of Hegel effects its own active self-destruction. This active self-destruction, which causes the defeat of nihilism and the end of human being as a 'constructed interiority', functions simultaneously as the pars destruens of dialectical being and as the foundation of Nietzschean being. This being, then, is an active production, a creative moment which returns eternally: an infinite affirmation of the creation of new values and new ways of life, of new forms for the expression of thought.

Like the will to power and the eternal return, interpretation and evaluation are essentially creative. This conclusion, along with the erasure of the boundaries between the different manifestations of thought, puts art and literary criticism at the heart of the creative activity of thinking. It is therefore no surprise that Deleuze repeatedly turns to various artists and art forms in his subsequent writings, starting with Proust in his Marcel Proust et les signes from 1964.

The synthesis of the eternal return, which suggests coexistence of past, present, and future, thus returns as the time of imagination. This first synthesis implies a second synthesis, that is to say, an in-itself of time which grounds the passage of time of the first synthesis. Deleuze claims that it is this pure time that the Recherche tries to regain. He links this a priori element of all time to Bergson's conception of a pure past. The question that Deleuze raises regarding this pure past is how we can save it for ourselves: 'how can we penetrate that in-itself without reducing it to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past?' This, he says, is where Proust intervenes.

Proust offers a lucid, albeit fleeting, revelation of the pure past in the famous passage in which Marcel is seized by a mémoire involuntaire while eating the 'petite madeleine' which is offered to him by Aunt Léonie. This little madeleine cake compels him to think of the madeleine he received from his mother in Combray. The passage, however, only offers a momentary glimpse of the realm of essences and pure time, because it involves a sense experience. Whereas the signs of art are immaterial signs which transform the substance of art (words, paint, sounds) until they become so 'ductile, so kneaded and refined that they become entirely spiritual', the signs of sensations, love, and the world are incarnated in increasingly intractable and contingent matter, thus revealing essences and their time in an increasingly general and obscure way. The signs of sense experience are the closest to the signs of art: they are linked to intransigent matter (like the madeleine or the cobblestones of the Guermantes courtyard and those at St Mark's, Venice), but they evoke an involuntary memory which is virtually intangible. This involuntary memory is referred to as the passive synthesis of memory, that is to say, it is prior to the active synthesis of memory because it occurs in the mind that contemplates rather than carried out by it, that is, actively retrieved by the voluntary memory and its reflective function. The essence that arises is not the essence of a madeleine, but the essence of the involuntary memory, since, as Deleuze notices, perceptual syntheses (sense experiences) essentially refer back to the passive synthesis of memory. Ergo, the generative internal difference which incarnates itself in past and present madeleine experiences is the essence of Combray:

The truth of the signs of love also ultimately resides in essences, says Deleuze. The difference that is enveloped in this essence emanates a series of loves, the first of which is, of course, the mother. This primary love is not, however, as in psychoanalytic theory the original love which initiates a desire for intimacy, but merely the first actualisation of the essence that informs the series. Later incarnations are, in the case of Proust's narrator, the mysterious Gilberte and the ever so enigmatic Albertine. However, these loves in themselves are incarnations of absolute difference and thus mere pluralities:

In other words, being in love hinders common sense experiences, eventually enabling Marcel to see, through the series of loves, that they are informed by an essence. Nevertheless, the signs of love do not provide a stable revelation of the essence, nor even an evanescent intimation, because they are indispensably connected to contingent 'matter', that is to say Gilberte or Albertine; it is only through the most intensive love for a person (l'amour le plus exclusif pour une personne) that one can attain the enveloped worlds of love.

'Aimer, c'est chercher à expliquer, à développer ces mondes inconnus qui restent enveloppés dans l'aimé,' writes Deleuze. The search for these enveloped worlds and their time is, according to Proust, the reason why we love:

Here, however, we stumble upon a complication because the signs of love, as we have seen, can never fully unfold the enveloped 'unknown existence'. Every series of relationships inevitably tends towards suffering and jealousy--exemplified by Swann's love for Odette and Saint-Loup's for Rachel--because, as George Poulet writes, 'each creature is exterior to all others, and nevertheless enclosed within himself [sic], without possibility of communication.' This is the paradox of love: on the one hand one desires to 'get out of oneself', to open the 'communicating doors' between the self and the loved one, but on the other hand 'man [sic] is a creature that cannot emerge from himself'. We cannot ultimately know the other person, s/he will remain a mystery, as Proust also observes:

Deleuze, now, claims that the signs of love are inherently deceptive because they lead one to desire something which is impossible: to know the 'unknown existence', to unroll the worlds enveloped within the loved one, while these complicated worlds inevitably exclude the lover. This is the first level of reading the signs of love as deceptive. It is what Marcel experiences when he is confronted with the petite bande of adolescent girls during his first stay at Balbec, and especially with Albertine's glance: 'I caught her smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world.'

The second level of reading the signs of love is connected to the first. Deleuze offers an explanation for the fact why the worlds enveloped within women will remain largely unknown to men and vice versa: 'les amours intersexuelles sont moins profondes que l'homosexualité, elles trouvent leur vérite dans l'homosexualité.' The separate worlds of Sodome and Gomorrah underlie the separation of the sexes. This is what Marcel discovers when Albertine tells him about her aquaintance with both Mlle Vinteuil and her best friend who are like 'two big sisters' to her. This revelation causes Marcel to experience another involuntary memory, that is, of the homosexual and sadistic acts he saw performed by Mlle Vinteuil and her friend one afternoon when he found himself before a window of the Vinteuil mansion in Combray. It invigorates his jealousy, but this time it has a different character:

Deleuze then introduces a third level of the signs of love. He asserts that there is an even more profound reality underlying the worlds of Sodom and Gomorrah:

In other words, the signs of love envelop an original sexuality, says Deleuze: a hermaphroditic one, which is the essence of human subjectivity. Every individual is a hermaphrodite enveloping the separated, partitioned sexes. This absolute internal difference emanates the two divergent series of Sodom and Gomorrah which in their turn underlie a series of deceptions and jealousy. This ties in with the poststructuralist aversion to binary oppositions; both men and women stem from one original sexuality.

The notion of value is important here. Saussure is aware of the absolute individuality of the parole: it has a unique 'psychological' content (my example of cola as beverage or pep-drink is only the most basic exposition of Saussure's term) and has a similarly unique concrete pronunciation. Each parole is, nevertheless, assigned a place within the underlying langue. This procedure is in contradiction to the etymological meaning of the 'individual' which is 'impartable' and thus 'unimpartable', as Manfred Frank observes:

This would have serious consequences for the relationship between the signifier and the signified because it is by nature unstable: every repetition of a signifier would necessarily change the signified because of the indivisible character of the signifier. Every repetition of a truly individual sign would axiomatically involve difference of meaning because the individual sign has no equals.

To ground individual phonic distributions and concept mentaux in an underlying linguistic framework and to prevent a perpetual loss of meaning, Saussure turns, as we have seen, to the notion of value, which implies a possibility of equivalent exchange. Here the parallel with political economy is very appropriate: the value of every object (and in neo-liberal thought also the value of subjects) is expressed in money--Marx's 'universal equivalent'. The unique individual character of the object is thus reduced via abstraction to an 'exchange commodity'; the individual object turns out to have a common feature after all: value. The object is thus not truly 'indivisible': through a process of infinite graduation we can always ground the individual in the general--the individual product in the economical system of the free market, the parole in the langue. In one stroke it also prevents the recurrent loss of meaning: a repetition of an individual case which corresponds with (or conforms to) the general rules of an underlying system--in other words, can be abstracted to a common, universal ground--does not necessarily (as is the case with true individuality) have to be a repetition of difference. On the contrary, as Frank remarks, if (to remain in the field of linguistics) neither the phonic chains nor the significations of a word would remain identical from one linguistic utterance to the next, the scientifically masterable system of language would collapse.

Freud, now, uses similar techniques to catch the irrational rationally. He devises a model of human subjectivity in which individual conscious actions can always be grounded in the unconscious. Freud claims that the unconscious is individual, but he also acknowledges, as we have seen before, that it is marked in an indelible way by the structural relations of social groups and their diverse modes of communication. In fact--and Jung understood this correctly--the unconscious is universal: through a process of infinite graduation (psychoanalysis) we can always ground the individual in the general--we can abstract all human actions to general laws like the law of Oedipus. In this way true individuality is crushed by psychoanalysis: it is precisely not the individuality of the subject of which it takes account, but rather the feature they all have in common, the central concern, which gathers an infinite number of individually different elements in the unity of one single viewpoint.

This is where I should link the previous exposition to the conceptualisations of Deleuze. Reading carefully, one might already have guessed that much of the foregoing theory has a close affinity with the thought Deleuze unfolds in Différence et répétition. Similarly, one could have imagined that the instability of meaning as a consequence of the impossibility of repetition of the same can be linked to the concerns of Logique du sens. One could even have surmised that the similitude between the concerns of linguistics, psychoanalysis and political economy that was exposed by Saussure, foreshadows the turn to politics in Capitalism et Schizophrénie. At this very point, however, Deleuze highlights another affiliation: the categorical image of thought as repressive system of reactive forces.

What we have hitherto called individuality (as opposed to true individuality) is according to Deleuze in fact particularity. The particular is, he claims, an element which can be conceived as an applied instance of the general system; it necessarily refers to the common aspect of what can be thought and what can be experienced; it obliterates any regard for the (true) individual (or singular) which is, as we saw before, indivisible. Although there have been more attempts which tried to differentiate both concepts, classical philosophy (the dialectical 'other' of Christianity) has insisted that every particularity of the individual can be grounded in the universal. Obviously, Plato's theory of ideas subscribes to this view, and so do his ideas on the citizen, as we will see later. The same goes for many doctrines, for instance, the one of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which says that the individual is centred on God and can communicate with one another by means of God. Here he corresponds to Leibnitz who claims that the universal and the singular are of the same species and that God--as the highest genus--has a priori the concept of all individuals at his disposal.

But God is, as we have seen, not the only transcendental system underlying categorical thought. The idea of a self-enclosed system which underlies all 'individuality' (particularity) is just as binding for the theories of Darwin, Hegel, Saussure, Freud, or, for that matter, for the rationality of our modern sciences. Is it not true that a scientist (whether physicist, biologist, or anthropologist) would never maintain about a result s/he has arrived at over the course of his or her work that it has the status of 'knowledge' if it were not capable of also laying claim to generalisability? Real individuality does not attain the right to existence in the logic of research; it should always refer to the common aspect of what can be thought. When it does not, it endangers the scientifically masterable, the specific ethics of rationality. That is why individuality is under thought prohibition. Plato and Aristotle already distinguished the true citizen--who immediately recognises his or her private matter as a public issue, i.e. as a fact that is subject to regularities--from the private person, the idiótäs. Foucault sketches the same proscription in 'Theatrum Philosophicum', his magnificent reading of Différence et répétition and Logique du sens:

It is this ethics of rationality which Deleuze attacks, first in Différence et répétition with his conceptualisation of acategorical thought, and later in Anti-Oedipus through his conceptualisation of schizophrenia. Both works show convincingly that the subjectivity which surfaces from psychoanalysis is the new trick from the slave which maintains the subjection of the subject throught the forging of an unconscious that works as the general law which prevents the affirmative will to power to go jusqu'au bout. The 'desire for more' forces us cumulatively to project satisfaction into a future which ever more corresponds with the world of TV-commercials. Meanwhile, the Western middle-class capitalist no longer feels much pity for the unfortunate, but bathes, instead, in self-pity.

Plato is said to have distinguished between the idea and its physical embodiment, between the sun of truth and the shadows of the cave. Deleuze, however, finds another distinction in the Statesman which he claims to be antecedent to the discovery of essences, videlicet, the passage in which Plato distinguishes 'the true statesman or the well-founded aspirer, then relatives, auxiliaries, and slaves, down to simulacra and counterfeits.' 'The simulacrum and the good representation--the copy or [particularity]--may then be seen as constituting a series with one another,' writes Hassan Melehy. Is it possible then, we could ask, following Melehy, that the 'original' (the essence, the idea) is instituted through a ruse on the part of those in 'second' place to maintain their place in hierarchy, and that they designate the false pretenders (the simulacra, the phantasms) as dangerous because in principle the latter are the same as they are and their nature as simulacrum threatens the stable order. Plato and his disciples did not separate the false from the authentic by discovering a law of the true and false, but by looking beyond these manifestations to a model, a metaphysical essence. This is the trick: propose an essence that approximates the good representation so that this good copy inevitably measures itself against it. Then propose this essence so forcefully that the false copy crumbles in its presence. In Foucault's words: 'With the appearance of Ulysses, the eternal husband, the false suitors disappear. Exeunt simulacra.' But Deleuze sees through the wool:

The ruse by which the value of the simulacrum is hidden lies at the foundation of Western philosophy. Reinstating the rights of the simulacrum, affirming its anarchical character--defying hierarchy, possessing irreducible individuality, having no internal or specular double, being contradictory, revealing a dimension of unlimited and illogical becoming--in other words, overturning Platonism, is thus to free philosophy from the restrictions it has placed on itself from the outset.

The false now becomes the mode of exploration of the truth. This directs our study to concern not the level of answers and solutions but rather the level of problems and questions because the play of the true and false occurs in the very space of its essential disguise or its fundamental displacement, that is, as we have seen, in the realm of the virtual. This realm, as we will see, corresponds to the unconscious (even Oedipus's conflicts depend upon the Sphinx's question). Problems and questions thus belong to the unconscious, but a reconsidered unconscious: one which is differential and iterative by nature (because the insistence, the transcendence, and the ontological bearing of questions and problems is expressed not in the form of the finality of a sufficient reason but in the discrete form of difference and repetition); an unconscious which is serial, problematic and questioning.

Deleuze turns to Freud in order to explore the virtual realm. 'Biopsychical life,' he writes, 'implies a field of individuation in which differences in intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations. The quantitative and qualitative process of the resolution of such differences is what we call pleasure.' It is in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud seeks an answer to the question how pleasure ceases to be a process in order to become a principle. His conclusion is that the excitation in the form of free difference must, in some sense, be 'invested', 'tied', or bound in such a way that its resolution becomes systematically possible. Scattered resolutions become integrated; a second layer of the Id--the name Freud gave to the mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field--emerges: the beginning of an organisation. This second layer corresponds to the first (passive) synthesis of the ego (corresponding in its turn to the first synthesis of time): 'Investments, bindings or integrations are passive syntheses or contemplations (...) At the level of each binding, an ego is formed in the Id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego. The Id is populated by local egos which constitute the time peculiar to the Id, the time of the living present there where the binding integrations are carried out.' Because the binding of different excitations is a necessary condition for the pleasure principle to exist, we could say that this second layer of the Id precedes the principle and renders it possible. In other words, the (first) passive synthesis of binding is 'beyond' the pleasure principle.

On the basis of this passive synthesis a twofold development emerges. On the one hand we can see the materialisation of an active synthesis for which the passive synthesis serves as a foundation. The active synthesis denotes an activity which is carried out by the contemplative mind rather than occurs in it. It is an attempt to relate the bound excitations (the drives from the Id) to reality or a real object. 'Active synthesis is defined by the test of reality in an "objectal" relation,' writes Deleuze, 'and it is precisely according to the reality principle that the Ego tends to "be activated", to be actively unified, to unite all its small composing and contemplative passive egos, and to be topologically distinguished from the Id.' In other words, moving beyond the binding in the direction of a real object entails moving beyond all the local (passive) egos towards a unified conception of the 'active self' as an integrated whole.

On the other hand and at the same time, however, there is a movement towards another direction, that is, an extension of the passive synthesis towards the virtual. Excitation as a difference was already the contraction of an elementary repetition. It is to this more elementary difference that the passive synthesis--while remaining passive--extends simultaneously and on its own account, finding new formulae at once both dissymmetrical and complementary with the activity. Deleuze substantiates this concept with various examples from childhood (like mirror-writing, handling books back to front, and sucking fingers) which he then loads with a considerable burden of validation. Consequentially he writes of a 'duality of centres' and an 'elliptical infantile world' (rather than a circular or egocentric one) with the ego situated at the point of connection between two intersecting asymmetrical circles: the circle of real objects and that of the virtual objects or centres.

It is Bergson who, in Matter and Memory, proposes the schema of a world with two centres, one real and one virtual, that gradually shade into one another. In Deleuze's words, from these two centres emanate on the one hand a series of perception-images, and on the other a series of 'memory-images' which are correlative and complementary: they borrow from and feed into one another. There is however a difference between the virtual and the real: 'Whereas active synthesis points beyond passive synthesis towards global integrations and the supposition of identical totalisable objects, passive synthesis, as it develops, points beyond itself towards the contemplation of partial objects which remain non-totalisable.' The virtual object is thus a partial object; it is a shred of the pure past. It is Eros, writes Deleuze, which tears virtual objects out of the pure past and gives them to us in order that they may be lived.

Here we return to the concept of series that we have seen in our treatment of Deleuze's appropriation of Proust. And again the theory is used to criticise the psychoanalytical concept of repetition which holds that there are complex points, traumas, primal scenes--fixation and regression. This theory of repetition, Deleuze argues, is subjected to the concept of the general, restricted by the law of Plato; it boils down to a repetition of the same. 'Consider the two presents, the two scenes or the two events (infantile and adult) in their reality separated by time,' writes Deleuze, 'how can the former present act at a distance upon the present one?' And: 'How can it provide a model for it, when all its effectiveness is retrospectively received from the later one?' Or: '[I]f we invoke the indispensable imaginary operations required to fill the temporal space, how could these operations fail ultimately to absorb the entire reality of the two presents, leaving the repetition to subsist only as the illusion of a solipsistic subject?' These problems which are aligned to the psychoanalytical concept of repetition evaporate when we consider Deleuze's conceptualisation:

Difference is thus placed at the very centre of repetition. Or, in other words, difference is shown to be a decentering that inhabits all repetition. Repetition, consequently, is presented as a function of displacement and disguise. It does not simply repeat a primordial essence, but it rather incessantly displaces the virtual object which circulates the series of reals. This conception of difference and repetition contests the psychoanalytical conception of these terms and thus the very notion of original models.

But what, then, should we think of the pure past from which emanate various series of Proustian signs? Despite the fact that this pure past was never present, it will inevitably be accused, and not erroneously so, of being an original model. After all, it is a ground which remains relative to what it grounds, borrows the characteristics from what it grounds, and is proved by these. Deleuze acknowledges this shortcoming and conceives of a yet more profound synthesis to evade the equivocal position of the second synthesis which, as an in-itself remains a correlate of representational thought.

This third synthesis is the 'unground' of time--time out of joint, as Hamlet says--which places difference at the heart of repetition. This third synthesis points towards the new, the future, because it ensures the decentering of repetition: there is no original point, says Deleuze, only a primary difference or rather a primary system of differences (the so called dark precursor which enables two heterogeneous series to resonate without recourse to the identity of a third, a relational ground). It causes only the yet-to-come to return and thereby necessarily supersedes any ground, replacing it by a groundlessness which constitutes a nebulous time that is pure and empty. It is the line of flight from the circular conception of time (the intolerable image that is the last sign of a higher form of thought) which the second synthesis inevitably resuscitates. It seems, writes Deleuze, as if this circle has 'unrolled, straightened itself and assumed the ultimate shape of the labyrinth, the straight-line labyrinth which is, as Borges says, "invisible, incessant"'.

What the third synthesis represents is the eternal return freed from the restrictions which Plato had established. It is metaphysics, all right, but metaphysics freed from originary models and profundity, freed from the primacy of the Same and the Similar, and from concepts like resemblance, identity, analogy, and opposition which are now considered as mere effects, products of a primary multiplicity of differences. The third synthesis serves as the transcendental differenciator which differenciates between the different things spoken of, relating these immediately to one another in series which it causes to resonate. It is an acategorical differenciator which denies the existence of a fixed underlying or overarching notion--be that the transcendental ego, an unconscious complex, or God--but instead advances a free and fluid multiplicity which can never be reduced but which always affirms difference, becoming Other, becoming new. To paraphrase Foucault, new thought is possible, thought is again possible after Deleuze.

It relates the book to what Deleuze describes in his letter to Michel Cressole as 'the trend which is going to grow, according to which people are more and more fed up with being told about "papa, mama, Oedipus, castration, regression," and with the properly imbecile image of sexuality (...) that they are offered.' These people, claims Deleuze, already criticise psychoanalysis, but do this, paradoxically, in psychoanalytical terms ('What on earth are they doing on that couch?'). L'Anti-Oedipe, now, offers them a way out of this stranglehold. It provides various tools that could help them to walk away from that couch, take a walk in their exteriority, find paths never noticed before, and make motionless trips to the limits of the familliar.

For many people it seemed to have worked this way, says Deleuze, referring to the great number of letters he and Guattari have received, but for others, especially the better educated, 'those spoiled by psychoanalysis', it didn't seem to work; nothing happened. Deleuze expounds this by associating these different groups to different reading practices:

Many critics have not taken this word of advice, for L'Anti-Oedipe has been prodigiously carped at, more often than not in an agressive, hostile and unacademical way (for instance by Cressole who attacks Deleuze, amongst other things, on his long and untrimmed nails). To some extent, the more serious critics are correct in asserting that L'Anti-Oedipe is only based on the most reductive and orthodox version of Oedipus as a complex and does not paint a very acute picture of psychoanalysis in its multiformity. Similarly, they are correct in stating that the more or less positive picture of schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari present is, despite Guattari's expertise on the subject, an abstract, romantic sketch which is not very considerate to the people who actually suffer from the disease, nor attentive to the many-sidedness of the affliction. It is, however, too easy to denounce the book simply on these grounds, for behind its mask of playfulness and parody, underneath its surface of polemical political and theoretical sympathies which are nowadays often decried as quixotic and voguish, lies a serious and in-depth analysis of desire in our capitalist age. This is not to say that L'Anti-Oedipe should be read as the new theoretical reference ('you know that much heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures'), but it does, in my view, deserve more credit than Manfred Frank gives it in his depiction of the book as a 'symptom' of the 'discontent' of the 'younger generation', a phenomenon that 'should not be overestimated'. What Frank, writing in 1984, could not know, is that Capitalisme et schizophrénie, would become a 'symptom' that can hardly be overestimated; the 'whisperings of fan clubs or sectlike groups on the margins of the academic scene' would slowly but steadily grow into a penetrating buzz, a strong undercurrent of our postmodern condition, resonating in philosophy, a wide variety of human and social sciences, the arts (especially 'new' arts like video- and mixed-media-art) and art criticism, but also in lifestyle, management training, and informational technology. The conceptualisations that Deleuze and Guattari coin seem to dip into everyday life, to yield answers to concrete questions. In this sense, L'Anti-Oedipe, is indeed a toolbox, as Deleuze and Guattari described it: a toolbox for living, an eclectic travelguide for the exploration of the yet-to-come--always motivating us to go further, to draw lines of flight, to become nomadic.

It all starts with Deleuze and Guattari's meeting in the autumn of 1969. Guattari had the impression that Deleuze was very much ahead of him, because he was not tied to psychoanalysis--unlike most theoreticians at that time--but rather thought it was pathetic, or better even, an hilarious joke. Conversely, Deleuze thought that Guattari was in the vanguard because, as he says in an interview, 'Felix m'a parl--eacute; de ce qu'il appelait déjà les machines d'ésirantes: toute une conception théorique et pratique de l'inconscient-machine, de l'inconscient schizophrénique.'

A first draft of this theory was formulated in the aforementioned article 'Machine and Structure', written earlier that year, in which Guattari establishes a distinction between machines and structures in an attempt to 'identify the peculiar positions of subjectivity in relation to events and to history.' For this he adopts the complementary categories of series and singularities that Deleuze suggested in Différence et répétition and Logique du sens. Structure, then, relates to the generality characterized by a position of exchange or substitution of particularities, whereas, the machine relates to the order of repetition 'as behaviour and viewpoint relative to a singularity that cannot be changed or replaced'. Structure, thus, positions its elements, including the subject or the agent of action, in an all-encompassing system of references consisting of 'two heterogenious series which relate each element to the others and thereby enclose the ego-centered subject as but one of many other enclosed elements.' In contrast, the machine is not such a stuctural representation, but rather an event or a point of convergence for the heterogeneous series to which the subject remains remote:

Guattari's analysis now seems to parallel the research of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, which also talks about people 'disconnected from their roots' that are forced to function alongside machines. Guattari, however, emphasises the revolutionary possibilities of the machine. The essence of the machine, he writes, is its function of detaching a signifier from the unconscious structural chain, making it into a representative different in kind from the structurally established order, a differentiator. It is this essence that 'binds the machine to both the desiring subject and to its status as the basis of the various structural orders corresponding to it':

Guattari concludes that this machine process could be a new weapon in the struggle against social and state structures which, as we have seen before, tend to close off and forbid the emergence of every subjective group process or true individuality. Deleuze agrees that the machine process could have revolutionary potential, but comments that Guattari's conceptualisations are still confined in Lacan's psychoanalytic terminology, subjected to the symbolic law of the father:

Deleuze and Guattari decided to work together in order to produce conceptualisations which would be able to elude possible recuperation by the categorical image of thought, conceptualisations which are necessarily devoid of such terms as structure, signifier, and phallus. This leads to the complicated phraesology that they bring into play in L'Anti-Oedipe. However, behind this bewildering nomenclature lies a relatively simple thesis which follows a well known proverb from Deleuze and Guattari's mutual hero Antonin Artaud: '[C]e n'est pas l'homme mais le monde qui est devenu un anormal'. The world, Deleuze and Guattari assert, has become schizophrenic in yet another historical tragedy in three acts. The schizophrenic individual, on the other hand, is not abnormal but rather a paragon that points the way towards liberation from the tyranny of psychoanalysis, the Oedipal yoke, the primary system which helps to enforce the restriction of desire in capitalist societies.

Deleuze and Guattari assign this romantic role to the schizophrenic because s/he, they say, has long since ceased to believe in Freud's tripartite formula mommy-daddy-me. 'Freud doesn't like schizophrenics,' they continue, 'He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized.'. In Freud's conception, human beings that do not channel their libidinal energies should not be valued above animal beings who also act upon their desires without moderation. The channelling of desire, the constitution of a subjectivity, takes place within the above-mentioned triangular family-structure. That is why psychoanalysis brings everything back to the family. When, for instance, in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 Billy Pilgrim goes crazy shortly after his homecoming from the second World War, the doctors 'didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the YMCA swimming pool.'

This psychic plane of ego-constitiution through the Oedipal encounter is connected by Deleuze and Guattari to the political plane of creating a subjectivity suited for capitalist economy. This latter system is, in their view, the third and final stage of a long history of social desire production--or, desire repression--which could be described as a synthesis of a Nietzschean history of the internalisation of debt (comparable to the internalisation of guilt that we have seen in his history of the becoming reactive of wo/man) and a history of representation which describes the various ways in which signs are cut into the flesh of desire--from the primitive initiation rites involving scarification, tattoos, and piercings, through to the castration of Oedipus as a symbolic but ever so forceful violence for the establishment of a fixed socio-political order.

The first, savage, stage comprises primitive societies in which kinship relations channel, restrict, and code the flow of people, privileges, goods, and prestige, turning individuals immediately into representatives of the social. Filiation and alliance territorialises archaic deterritorialised (or I would say preterritorialised) desire, but not in any way comparable to the much more efficient and rigid channelling that takes place in the subsequent barbaric stage. This second stage, which introduces the organisation of the state, the Urstaat (after the biblical city of Ur, which was not formed in progressive stages but appears 'fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once') does not evolve from primitive societies, but befalls on them from without ('lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless'). The barbaric society is organised as a pyramid that has the despot at its apex, with a bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and the villagers at its base. The barbaric society is ruled in relation to the despot (be that a King, Emperor, or Pope) who introduces two new repressive entities, videlicet, money and writing.

In primitive societies, Deleuze and Guattari assert, the lateral structure (that of alliance) is maintained by a continuing chain of debt relationships (think, for instance, of the comical reversed chains of gifts and countergifts that maintained relations between neighbouring islands of the Trobiand archipelago as described by Malinowski). This debt becomes manifest by bargaining rather than by fixing an equivalent. In barbaric societies, on the other hand, debt is rendered indefinite by the invention of money--as we have seen before, the universal equivalent. It is, however, not the marketplace which necessitates this new, more flexible system of exchange, but the state itself, which can, eventually, only maintain its bureaucratic and military apparatuses by collecting taxes which are not paid in kind. Whereas the primitive social machine territorialises archaic desire by means of primitive capital ('fixed capital or filiative stock and circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts') the despotic machine deterriorialises them again by demanding direct filiation to the despot and direct alliance to the state:

This imperial inscription 'countersects all the alliances and filliations, prolongs them, makes them converge into the direct filiation of the despot with the deity, and the new alliance of the despot with the people.' All the coded flows of the primitive machine, Deleuze and Guattari continue, are forced into a bottleneck where the despotic machine overcodes them. This overcoding is put to work in order to end the dread of flows of desire that would resist coding; it makes all flows of desire into the property of the sovereign.

Deleuze and Guattari then turn to despotic representation which is closely connected to inscription. While the mobile blocks of desire which determine territorial inscription are compared to bricks, imperial inscription is compared to the cement that fixes these bricks into an immobile organisation (that of the pyramid). A similar operation takes place when the despot introduces writing. Primitive inscription, could be said to be related to a graphic system (a mark on the body, a drawing on the wall, a dance on the earth) which is independent of but nevertheless connected to the oral system of the primitive society. Territorial representation is thus made up of two heterogeneous elements which are in a connotative relation to each other: voice and graphism. The heterogeneity, the divergence of these two elements is resolved by a third element: the eye. Here, Deleuze and Guattari reappropriate Jean-François Lyotard's theory of designation which holds that the eye can bridge the gap between the two elements: 'the eye jumps'. The connotative order--a magic triangle with three sides--establishes a chain of signs which is continually jumping from one element to another, a polyvocal network radiating in all directions, which cannot be contained within an order of meaning, still less within a signifier. This surface organisation of representation changes radically when the despot aligns graphism to the voice; graphism, at one and the same time, subordinates itself to the voice in order to subordinate the voice. 'The subordination of graphism to the voice,' write Deleuze and Guattari, 'induced a fictious voice from on high which, inversely, no longer expresses itself except through the writing signs that it emits.' The voice no longer sings (as it often does in an oral societies) but dictates; the graphic system no longer inscribes itself into the flesh (it ceases to dance on the earth) but is set into writing on tablets, stones, and books; the eye sets itself to reading. The bricks are being piled and cemented; the magic triange thus becomes the base of the pyramid, all of whose sides cause the vocal, the graphic, and the visual to converge toward the eminent unity of the despot. The order of connotation no longer exists; it has been replaced by an order of subordination which caused the linearisation of the chain of signs, the series that we can now call the chain of the signifier.

What, now, is this despotic signifier in relation to the nonsignifying territorial sign? It is, Deleuze and Guattari argue, a detached partial object which jumps outside the territorialised network and superimposes linearity; it forms the transcendent dimension from which all the signs uniformly emerge in a deterritorialised flow of writing. The despotic signifier has become a sign of the territorial sign; it is the deterritorialised sign itself, the sign made letter.

This surface organisation of representation, on which inscriptions are carved and sounds recoil, shares its fate with the in-depth dimension of representation, where desires reside. In primitive societies desire is restrained by making the individual into a direct representative of the social. This territorial 'organisation' of desire, however, remains, like the connotative order, dispersed and haphazard as a result of the multidimensional character of the rhizomatic social network. In the subsequent despotic stage an individual jumps from this network of filiation and alliance and creates a transcendental position which organises a more systematic repression--not of desire itself, but of deterritorialised desire. Enter Oedipus, the repressing representation, the transcendental representative of deterritorialised desire--absent desire, desire as lack.

In a Whiggish attempt we are now led to believe that everything is and always was Oedipal. Deleuze and Guattari, however, turn to Victor Turner's anthropological study into the healing process of the Ndembu tribe in Africa in order to reverse this universalising sophistry. At first everything indeed appears to be Oedipal: the sick K. is treated by the soothsayer and the medicine man because he is preyed upon by the ghost of his maternal grandfather, that cruelly reproaches him. It is not the familial, Oedipal relation between K. and his grandfather that causes distress, argue Deleuze and Guattari, but rather the social order in which the latter had occupied the position of the chief:

It is under the effect of colonisation (that which befalls from without) that the analysis becomes Oedipal in part; for it is the coloniser who says: 'Your father is your father and nothing else, or your maternal grandfather--don't mistake them for chiefs; you can go have yourself triangulated in your corner, (...) your family is your family and nothing else; sexual reproduction no longer passes through those points, although we rightly need your family to furnish a material that will be subjected to a new order of reproduction.'

This colonisation is still taking place in the peripheral zones of the third stage of the history of desire-repression that Deleuze and Guattari sketch: capitalism. There Oedipus is still satisfied with pouncing his terrible claws on the populace from without. But at the 'soft centre' of capitalism he no longer wants to be merely a repressing representation for high above, for he knows too well that, as Abram Kardiner remarks, people can dream of Oedipus without 'having the complex'. To secure his primacy, he must migrate to the heart of desire, cuddling the population rather than pouncing on them, becoming intimate with them until he arrives at their interior, until he comes to occupy the position of the representative of desire. Thereafter there is no longer any need to burden individuals from the outside, they shoulder their own burden, desire their own repression--is that schizophrenic or what? Not that the individual steps into this pitfall consciously; rather s/he is lured into it by the social organisation of capitalism, the social mechanism of which the individual is, according to Marx, but one of the wheels. Thus Artaud's proverb could be said to be correct, it is not the individual but society that has gone crazy. Capitalism is the final stage of the history of becoming-decadent that Deleuze and Guattari sketch; it is the end of history, or to quote Heiner Müller rephrasing Artaud: 'Denken am Ende der Aufkläung, das mit dem Tod Gottes begonnen hat, sei der Sarg, in dem er begraben wurde, faulend mit dem Leichnam. Leben, eigesperrt in diesen Sarg.

Müller, in his Medea adaptation, expresses his idea that the individual is nothing personal--is always invested collectively, would Deleuze and Guattari say--through Jason who expounds on the impossibility to 'speak from the I'. Everyone carries the burden of history and reflects the culture one is part of. Thus Jason doesn't speak for himself, remarks Robert Steijn, which is emphasised by Müller's subtext which states that his comment should be uttered collectively:

This pessimism is evident in the works of many historians and critics of the Enlightenment and of our (post)industrial civilisation--Nietzsche (of course), Spengler, Huizinga, Adorno, and Baudrillard, to name just a few; they exhibit a yearning for a glorious--but distant--past (which is not incompatible with progressiveness). This also applies to Müller and Deleuze and Guattari, but they differ from some of the above-mentioned writers in that they adhere to a positive, active nihilism rather than to a negative, reactive one. In Die Hamletmaschine, Müller formulates a utopian line of flight which is strikingly similar to the concept Deleuze and Guattari come up with: the machine-human. 'Ich will eine Maschine sein,' says a genuinly schizophrenic Hamlet, 'kein Schmerz kein Gedanke.' Hamlet can only survive as a machine, a machine that runs on blood, that excretes shit, as if he wants to say: 'My blood flows (so does my shit, and also my sperm), therefore I am'--that is to say, I am not dead, not thinking, just functioning ('Arme zu greifen Beine zu gehn'); I am a human-machine.

In a similar way, the flows of desire are essential to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the desiring-machines: 'I desire, therefore I am' (not 'I love my mother and want to kill my father, therefore I am'). These machines likewise merely function, producing flows of desire which simply flow, with no aim or meaning whatsoever (it is production of production, desire to desire). Everything comes as a flow, even writing, as we have seen before. 'Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,/ They had begun the play,' says Hamlet, and this is similar to how Deleuze and Guattari describe their writing-process: as a becoming in-between, as a depersonalised flow, the hand as a writing-machine producing a flow of letters, words, sentences--without theological directedness or intentionality.

Here we indeed touch upon the most depersonalised part of the book--its opening chapter--where Guattari's machines and Deleuze's virtual realm are effectively linked up; the part which, I would say, also lays the most claim to the designation Dadaist because the rest of the book, although it builds on this first part and is indisputably an illustration of the Merz-totality Kurt Switters sought for, is still more analytic than creative ('still belongs to the university,' as Deleuze described it). This first chapter, which is called 'the desiring-machines', conceives of an imaginative assemblage of desiring-machines and bodies without organs which opposes the reign of the Gehirnschubkästen--the Dada-term for the classifying mind which tries to solidify all flows and becomings. This machinic process of desire-production is very similar to Nietzsche's perception of the world as an interrelated multiplicity of forces--the world of becoming, flux, and change--with desire occupying the same place in the former conceptualisation as the will to power does in the latter, that is to say, it is affirmative, positive, and productive, rather than (as Freud teaches us) negative and destructive.

'It is at work everywhere,' is the first sentence of L'Anti-Oedipe, '[w]hat a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines--real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.' The hand-machine that produces a flow of words is connected to the eye-machine. A flow-producing machine is always connected to another machine that interrupts or draws of part of this flow, and this first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off (the hand-machine draws on the brain-machine which in turn draws on the ear-machine, the eye-machine, etc.). Desiring-machines are thus binary machines: one machine is always coupled with another. At the same time it is a matter of binarism ad infinitum, thus creating a linear series. This theory of desiring-machines is a return in a Guattarian guise of Deleuze's virtual realm which, as we have seen, was also populated by partial objects:

It was Melanie Klein who 'discovered' the partial objects--'that world of explosions, rotations, and vibrations.' And this discovery is particularly appropriate because, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, 'we live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers.'--capitalism, the age of the second movement of deterritorialisation, the stage in which the transcendent unity of the despotic stage is radically deterritorialised (the pyramid is demolished, but it doesn't end there; even the bricks are shattered to bits). Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari assert, Klein has failed to grasp the logic of the partial objects. Firstly, she doesn't relate these objects to a real process of production, and secondly, she cannot rid herself from the notion that they are somehow related to a whole (either a primordial totality that once existed, or a final totality that awaits us at some future date). 'Partial objects hence appear to her to be derived from global persons; not only are they destined to play a role in totalities aimed at integrating the ego, the object, and drives later in life, but they also constitute the original type of object relation between the ego, the mother, and the father.' Thus, Klein does not use the partial objects to shatter the 'iron collar' of Oedipus, but uses them to watter Oedipus down, to miniaturise him, to find him everywhere, in short, to help Oedipus with his migration from the outside to the interior.

But psychoanalysis (hence Klein), claim Deleuze and Guattari, is wrong in their conceptualisation of the whole. The unconscious is totally unaware of persons as such:

Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the vital importance of parents or the love attachments of children to their mothers and fathers, they just oppose the reduction of the process of desire-production to parental images ('a question occurs to the child that will perhaps be 'related' to the woman known as mommy, but that is not formulated in terms of her, but rather produced within the interplay of desiring-machines,' they write). This, of course, ties in with Deleuze's post-dialectical theory of difference which argues that multiplicity is irreducible to any sort of unity--be it Oedipus (a primordial totality) or the integrated ego (a final totality). Deleuze and Guattari, nevertheless, also introduce a 'whole' which they name the 'body without organs' (after a phrase from Artaud). This is a whole, however, that neither unifies, nor totalises (and is as such, like the partial objects, particularly appropriate for our radically deterritorialised age); it is a peripheral totality, rather than a primordial or final one, a totality that is produced alongside the partial objects. 'Although the organ-machines attach themselves to the body without organs, the latter continues nonetheless to be without organs and does not become an organism in the ordinary sense of the word. It remains fluid and slippery.' The body without organs--as a 'third term in the series'--is not a totality aimed at integrating the partial objects and flows of desire (and I am almost tempted to add here the local egos that we have come across in Différence et répétition); it rather leaves untouched the essential binary-linear character of the series of desire-production:

The parallel that can be seen here between the body without organs and the organisation of the various social machines that Deleuze and Guattari describe is not coincidental. Deleuze and Guattari establish this parallel themselves in the first chapter with the 'one purpose (...) to point out the fact that the forms of social production, like those of desire-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius'. We have already seen that in the despotic society the body of the despot functions as this socius; in primitive societies it was the earth which fulfilled this role. What is inscribed on this full body of the earth are socially channeled flows of desire which are, after their production in the desiring-machines, stratified into the more or less prescribed (but nevertheless capricious and unpredictable) pathways of the savage social machine, established by filiation and alliance. Despite the territorialisation which has imposed some restrictions on the free flow of archaic desire the savage flows of desire remain relatively close to the binary-linear series which are produced by the desiring-machines (in this respect it is interesting that Nietzsche describes these savage societies as 'as yet nomad'). This is specifically manifest in the primitive surface-organisation of representation: the connotative order which, as we have seen, establishes a polyvocal network radiating in all directions and which, similar to the process of desire-production, cannot be contained within an order of meaning. The way in which the magic triangle of the voice-graphy-eye (which could be seen as a representation of the binary-linear series with its three terms) is replaced in the in-depth dimension of barbaric representation by the familial triangle, is illustrative of the becoming sign of desire, that is, of the perversion of productive desire and its subsequent curtailed efficacy. Instead of producing realities and remaing with its craving itself (the desire to desire) within the process of desire-production, 'it now produces only images, shadows, and representations [the desire for persons]: it realizes itself indirectly, symbolically; it dies as desire and is reincarnated as (a chain of) signification.' One partial object (or local ego) jumps from the rhizomatic connotative network and establishes a transcendental position which organises a more rigid channeling of desire--not of desire to desire, but rather of desire for persons, the representation of desire. This transcendental object (or ego) conceptualises a whole which is, in contrast to the body without organs, totalising and unifying; it conceives of the integrated ego, giving direction and meaning to desiring-machines and partial objects, making them into signs, representations of something, 'representations of parental figures or of the basic patterns of family relations'. Enter Oedipal totalisation, the representation of the territorial representation of the primary process of desire-production, the deterritorialised process of desire-production itself--the process of desire-production made unconscious.

But, albeit displaced, the process of desire-production is not supressed: 'it continues to rumble, to throb beneath the representative agency that suffocates it'. That is why Oedipus, instead of being the totalising representation which drives this process to the unconscious from outside, wants to migrate to the heart of the process and become the representation of desire itself. This migration is supposed to be fulfilled in capitalism.

The civilised capitalist stage does, in contrast with the despotic stage, develop gradually from the stage that precedes it. That is why many characteristics of the despotic stage persist in the capitalist stage, either changed or unchanged. In a way, the civilised stage is simply a reinforced continuation of the process of deterritorialisation that was set in motion in the barbaric stage, but instead of realising this through overcoding, the capitalist machine accomplishes this 'second great movement of deterritorialisation' through the decoding of flows. This decoding alone, however, is not enough to induce the birth of capitalism and the rise of a new socius. Deleuze and Guattari describe the specific conditions under which the decoded flows will resist the recoding of the state. 'In brief,' they write, 'the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases to be the capital of alliance to become filiative capital.' And capitalism becomes filliative, they continue, only when money begets money, or value a surplus value, when, as Marx writes, 'Value (...) suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts of in turn. Nay more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; (...) for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital.'

The birth of capitalism automatically entails a new socius because society is no longer organised by the despot. With the becoming capital of money s/he has lost one of his or her principal repressive instruments, that is, money. It is decoded (or 'demonetised' or 'dematerialised') as an instrument of exchange, and becomes credit money (or commercial credit), giving to infinite debt its capitalist form. Instead of the despot, capital now becomes the full body, the new socius that appropriates all the productive forces, effecting a tighter and tighter control over them. But this doesn't, as I already mentioned, involve the total eradication of despotic mechanisms (Deleuze and Guattari speak of 'post-mortem despotism'; it might be dead, but, I would say, as a subject of investigation it still plays a vital role). Exchange money continues to exist next to credit money, the first going into the account of the wage earner, the second into the balance sheet of the enterprise. The state remains to play an important role as a regulator that ensures a principle of convertibility of credit money, either directly by tying it to gold, or indirectly through a mode of centralisation that comprises a guarantor of the credit, a unity of capital markets, etc. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari write, 'filliative industrial capital (...) functions only through its alliance with commercial and financial capital'--the forms of capital that were inserted into the interstices of the old social body. Machinic surplus value, which develops along with automation and productivity, is ultimately dependent on machinic innovation, and this innovation can only be tested on its profitability when alliance capital is taken into consideration; whether or not a technique will be implemented should always be decided on in relation to market forcasts, interest rates etc. 'In brief, the flows of code that are "liberated" in science and technics by the capitalist régime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on science or technics themselves, but on capital.' Machines (and thus capital) produce value ever more efficiently than humans, that consequently cease to be constituent parts of the production process, in order to become adjecent to this process (functioning alongside the machine). So both what we could call the 'knowledge flow' and the 'labour flow' are ultimately determined by capital and are accordingly decoded and deterritorialised. This does not mean that either intellectual labour or manual labour is actualy liberated:

So capitalism is organised by an extremely rigorous axiomatic--a term used by the Bourbaki-group to designate 'intuitions' that are 'linked to resonances and conjunctions of structures', rather than to a Taylor system or a mechanical game of isolated formula. This axiomatic prevents the autonomous individual that it creates with one hand from becoming actually nomadic with the other. One would say, that workers, possesed with a flow of income, or, 'purchasing power', must have a certain amount of influence on this axiomatic, which, after all, organises capitalism as a system regulated by the free market. Deleuze and Guattari, however, explain in a highly abstract passage that this is hardly the case. The deterritorialisation of the flow of purchasing power is analogous to the becoming impotent of it. The individual and even the group is deprived of the power of unlimited freedom of choice; choice is reduced to what I would like to call a negative choice, that is, the freedom of choice that is related to the concept of negative (liberal) freedom as it is theorised by Isaiah Berlin. The liberal market reduces the individual in no more than a particularity in the capitalist system, to paraphrase Marx again, s/he is but one of the wheels of the capitalist machine (s/he is twirled by this machine, moving but always in a circle, with capital as its pivot).

The individual is liberalised rather than liberated. The same goes for the economy. The axiomatic organises all decoded and deterritorialised flows in terms of what we, following Georges Bataille, could call the 'unlimiting of economy': not only is there no aim but the production of a surplus value (there's only production of production), but there's always the movement towards a maximisation of the surplus value, no matter what it costs (the destruction of the environment, the ruin of traditional sectors in the periphery, that is, in the underdeveloped countries, the creation of immense zones of underdevelopment within developed countries to ensure cheap labour etc.). All unrealised surplus value is as if not produced and becomes embodied in unemployment and stagnation (think for instance of the discussion about Schiphol airport). The state is no longer an apparatus of antiproduction in the old--despotic--sense, that is, a bureaucratic and/or military instance that limits or checks production 'from above'; parallel to the migration of Oedipus to the heart of the process of desire production, anti-production has moved to the heart of production itself. What the state absorbs, write Deleuze and Guattari, 'is not sliced from the surplus value of the firms, but added to their surplus value by bringing capitalist economy closer to full output within the given limits, and by widening these limits in turn--especially within an order of military expenditures that are in no way competative with private enterprise, quite the contrary (it took a war to accomplish what the New Deal had failed to accomplish).' The antiproduction at the heart of production produces lack in the midst of the abundance of aggregates by means of a continual absorbtion of resources. Furthermore, it produces stupidity in the midst of knowledge and science, that is, an axiomatised stupidity, which roughly corresponds to all commercial forms of entertainment (connected directly or indirectly--that is, via advertisement--to consumption): from television's continuous flow of game-shows, melodrama, and infotainment, radio's perpetual repetition of hits, Hollywood's boundless pursuit for box-office success, through to stultifying recreation parks, interchangeable tourist resorts, and franchised--that is, standardised--restaurants and stores (where people go for an afternoon of 'fun-shopping'). All workers, from simple manual labourers to highly educated professionals, are so absorbed in capital that 'the reflux of organized, axiomatized stupidity coincides with him, so that, when he [sic] goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little desiring-machines by thinkering with a television set.' In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's words, it is 'completely clear to the viewer that it does not concern an apparatus for communication, but rather a means to refuse communication. You switch the TV-set on, in order to switch yourself off.'

Television is a medium that is preeminently suitable to transmit nothing, Enzensberger continues: 'Moving images with arbitrary meaning.' When we turn to capitalist representation we see that this is an accurate observation. The overcoding of despotic representation is replaced by a process of decoding, as is illustrated ingeniously by Raymond Hains and Jaques de la Villegé's Hépérile -éclaté. This is an unreadable book 'written' in 'ultra-letters'--written signs which are shattered by means of filters of fluted glass, making it rather a work of visual or plastic art than a work of literature. The 'poetry' of the two artists is paradigmatic for the double movement of language and representation in the transition from the despotic to the capitalist stage. Firstly, the ultra-letters are indifferent to the signifier that strangles and overcodes the flows of language in the despotic stage; the shattered poems dispose the text of its original meaning and establish a language of decoded flows. Secondly, the ultra-letters bring us, as I said, to the terrain of the plastic arts; 'Writing has never been capitalism's thing,' write Deleuze and Guattari, 'capitalism is profoundly illiterate'; it is much more a visual or 'figural' culture:

Like the partial objects the nonsignifying signs have no meaning; they just function, simply flow. They can have a temporal 'direction' when a flow enters in a relationship with another flow--similar to a breast-machine which is coupled to a mouth-machine and for the time of the attachment produces a flow of milk which is directed towards the later. But like the body without organs, the constellation in which the schizzes or break-flows become figurative remains fluid and slippery, dissolving regularly in order to be replaced by another temporary integration. 'Three million points per second transmitted by television, only a few of which are retained.'

But like many other characteristics of the despotic stage, writing has survived in the capitalist era, for instance in the form of Saussurian linguistics. Obviously, as poststructuralists, Deleuze and Guattari are determined to deny any current relevance to Saussure's theories. Instead, they hail Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics which, they write, 'implies the concerted destruction of the signifier' because it 'shatters the double game of the voice-graphism domination.' In this dismantling of the signifier Hjelmslev is tantamount to Lyotard who shows that what is at work in the plastic arts, in dreams, but also in language and writing itself, is 'not the signifier but a figural dimension underneath':

Capitalism, like schizophrenia, also thrives on decoded flows. The notion of the break-flow thus seems to define both capitalism and schizophrenia. It would, nevertheless, be a serious error to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical. They evolve from one and the same economy, one and the same production process, but the schizophrenic process is constantly arrested by capitalist production and transformed into a confined clinical entity. We see here the remains of the despotic function of overcoded stupidity, which not only, as decoded axiomatised stupidity does, keeps revolutionary potential in check via the destruction of all creativity, but also effects the integration of individuals and groups into the 'sane' system via the mechanisms which we have already seen in Différence et répétition and which produces the schizophrenic as a sick person along the lines sketched by Foucault in his Folie et déraison and Naissance de la clinique. When decoded flows escape the socius, that is, when they are not absorbed in capital by axiomatised stupidity, capitalism sees them as dangerous and consequently brings in action a gigantic machine for social-psychic repression aimed at 'what nevertheless constitutes its own reality'--the decoded flows.

That is the schizophrenic reality of capitalism, the most radical of all systems, the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that other social formations coded and overcoded--undercutting anything that represses the autonomous individual (alliance, filiation, religion, despotism, etc.). But it remains merely the relative limit of all societies, it effects mere relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an 'extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also as a socius that is even more pitiless than any other.':

Capitalism axiomatises with one hand what it decodes with the other, and it is impossible to distinguish between these two operations. For capitalism to survive it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits. It is here that Deleuze and Guattari show their Frenchness: this axiomatic is so complicated--always pushing back and enlarging limits, adding axioms, preventing saturation of the system, always grinding, sputtering, and starting up again--that it requires a technocracy, a bureaucracy, a 'whole apparatus of regulation', and what else than the state, from being at first the transcendent unity, becomes immanent within the field of capitalist forces (antiproduction becoming immanent to production), and is as such the unequivocal regulator of the decoded and axiomatised flows. And this state, Deleuze and Guattari continue, substantiating their leftist sympathies, is entirely in the service of the 'so-called' ruling class. What follows, however, is not an archetypical Marxist analysis of the state--this would of course not be in line with Deleuze's postdialecticism--but rather an analysis that follows Nietzsche. 'From the viewpoint from the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class,' they assert, 'the bourgeoisie.' Within this class everyone is a slave, a slave of the social machine. Furthermore, as we have seen before, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, enjoyement dissapears as an end and is replaced by abstract wealth. When we make this comparison with Nietzsche's theories, capitalism could indeed be seen as the final stage of history; a titanic pars destruens is drawing nigh, the air in Müller's coffin is almost used up. But where Nietzsche stages his --Übermensch, Deleuze and Guattari postulate the schizophrenic as the hero that escapes the axiomatisation of the decoded and deterritorialised flows, the shutting down of desire-production, in short as the line of flight from the end of history, the pars construens that enables the flows of particles and energy to go jusqu'au bout. 'Comment procède-t-il sortir de ses démolitions?' wonders Deleuze. How to escape the end of history? The answer seems to lay in a becoming schizophrenic. This would seem a way out of the self-constructed annihilation that the enlightenment has brought down on itself. This annihilation does not so much refer to a process of evolution brought to completion--a symbolical second comming, a separation of the good (the mad(wo)men) and the bad (the blind). The end of history should, I would say, rather be comprehended as an exhaustion of the common or sophisticated conception of past events that was long secreted by Western modernity, in short, the coming of postmodernism, the era in which history is replaced by historicity. In this sense, the escape from the end of history is an escape from the negative nihilism that some thinkers, in the wake of poststructuralism, seem to see as the only possibility to get rid of Enlightenment certainties as if the history of ideas, ever since Plato and the Sophists, ceaselessly oscillates dialectically between essentialism and relativism. At the same time as Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in the destruction of the categorical image of thought, they are already aware of the possible dangers of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Becoming schizophrenic not only offers a way out of the deadlock that psychoanalysis, as a categorical system of thought, has created, but also an alternative for what Guattari will later call the 'postmodern impasse' and the 'dead end' postmodernism of thinkers like Lyotard and Baudrillard who, in his view, are suspicious of the least desire for large-scale social action. Schizoanalysis does not only have, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a negative task--that is the overthrow, or deconstruction, of psychoanalysis--but also two positive tasks. These do not leave (schizophrenised) individuals in what Guattari calls in Les années d'hiver a black hole of history, but leads them to the discovery of the available lines of flight from the capitalist axiomatic, enabling them to escape both essentialism and relativism, encouraging them to follow the flow of their own desire-production.

The confined man is outside the fray, said Artaud, 'Outside the fray is the place of the confined man, walled inside madness, in the indecipherable echo of battle.' This battle is a non-dialectical one, that is to say, a real rather than a virtual struggle, one that desires the actual death of the antagonist. The basic opposition is between 'the' class and those who are outside of the class (les hors-classe); 'Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage it or its cogs and wheels. Between the social machine's régime and that of the desiring-machines.' This antagonism ties in with the anthropological bipolar opposition between the so called sacral and profane complexes, which are the complexes that reside in the lexical context of respectively the stable, statical, reactionary, dominant, and reactive (that which more or less coincides with what Deleuze and Guattari label molar) and the unstable, unbound, marginal, revolutionary, and active (corresponding to what they tag molecular). Here we see the two poles between which capitalism vacillates: on the one hand the territorialities and overcodings of the primitive and despotic stage are deterritorialised and decoded toward an absolute threshold, and on the other hand these deterritorialised and decoded flows are reterritorialised and recoded as if it would like to resuscitate the Urstaat. These movements belong to capitalism as two sides to a coin. The social axiomatic is torn in two directions, write Deleuze and Guattari: archaism and futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia (this would explain, for instance, why an originally revolutionary effort, like the Russian revolution, can suddenly turn fascist, or how a folklore can sometimes become charged with a revolutionary power). It is here that Capitalism turns to Oedipus, the migrated one, in order to ensure the axiomatisation and reterritorialisation of the decoded and deterritorialised flows, to make sure that the autonomous individual is not swept along by the schizophrenic figure, but remains calmly under the influence of the signifier.

The movement Oedipus makes from the molar aggregates which he organises 'from on high' to the apparently molecular--that is, the miniaturised Oedipus that is watered down, as it were, by Klein's great divide--is compared by Deleuze and Guattari to the way one goes from Parmenidean being to the atoms of Democritus. But Democritus' atomic flows are similarly only ostensibly molecular; in reality they resuscitate Parmenides' static rationalism which holds that matter is essentially unchangeable. Oedipus creates the illusion of a free autonomous individual, released from transcendentalism (and thus he creates the illusion of the molecular and the nomadic) while in fact he cunningly leads the individual right back to the shores so recently left behind, that is, the molar aggregates. Again we see that the subject is liberalised rather than liberated (it is like a denationalised enterprise; it gets rid of the strict constraints of government bureaucracy only to fall under the spell of the rigidness of the free market). Released from the territorialisation of (new) alliance and (new) filiation, it is all the more ironic that this 'folding operation' takes place through the family. This has become possible because in capitalism the family is no longer coextensive with the social field. The coding and overcoding of (new) alliance and (new) filiation are being replaced by the axiomatic, and the territorialisation and deterritorialisation that they effected in the primitive and barbaric stages are replaced by a reterritorialisation that does not go through familial reproduction but rather through economic reproduction, that is to say, capital. In Aristotle's language, the family is now 'simply the form of human matter or material that finds itself subordinated to the autonomous social form of economic reproduction, and that comes to take the place assigned it by the latter.' The private person has become an image of the second order, a simulacrum, an image which represents the first order image of the social person. Thus what Aristotle, as we saw, had already predicted has come true in capitalism: the private person is citizen first:

It is Freud, the Darwinist psychologist, who directed Oedipus to the interior and thereby creates a subjectivity that is highly pertinent to capitalism. He gathered that human desire--which he essentially defines as sexual desire and labels libido--could no longer be repressed by a transcendental organiser in the capitalist stage. Following Hegel, Freud insists that desire that goes jusqu'au bout is destructive and anti-social and thus needs to be restricted. The transcendental Oedipus pushed the process of desire-production to the unconscious, where it remained to throb. Oedipus, now, must become immanent to this process of desire-production; he cannot remain a displaced represented but must migrate to the heart of desire, that is the unconscious, and there capture the free flows within his familial triangle. Oedipus then becomes the interior limit which repels the absolute, exterior limit of schizophrenia. In it only in capitalism that this has become possible. Everywhere else the familial position is merely a stimulus to the investment of the social field by desire: 'the familial images function only by opening onto social images to which they become coupled or which they confront in the course of struggles and compromises; so that what is invested through the breaks and segements of families is the economic, political, and cultural breaks of the fields in which they are plunged,' write Deleuze and Guattari. But in capitalism the flow of the investment of desire, traveling from the familial stimulus to the social organisation or disorganisation, is as it were 'covered over by a reflux that flattens the social investment onto the familial investment serving as a pseudo organiser.' In other words, the family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. Desire is always desire for the mother and desire to kill the father. The flows of desire are no longer organised by a transcendental organiser, but by an immanent organiser that internalises guilt and the law of the father--the super-ego. So the ego now oscillates between the id and the super-ego, the desiring-machines and the symbolic law. Freud's work in that respect parallels the achievements of Luther: Catholicism spiritualises transcendentally, the reformation, however--following Luther's Ninety-five Theses which hold, among others, that the individual achieves salvation only through inner religious feeling and a sense of contrition for sins--realises the becoming immanent of the laws of God, resulting in the self-repression of all sinful desires and, consequently, the bringing about of bad conscience, which is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, in private persons, the correlate of the cynicism of social persons.