A close friend challenged me to read this formidable text with him. We read over 100 pages and decided to put the project on hiatus. I wanted to capture some thoughts before I forget it all.

The text is difficult. It does not define key terms or elucidate the central claims of its argument. It jumps from idea to idea without a clear logic of development. It engages with a parade of obscure thinkers that the reader is unlikely to be familiar with unless they are a historian of psychoanalysis. All of this is perfectly obvious if you know what you are getting into but it presents a formidable challenge nonetheless.

That said, what presents as difficulty is often a raw, exploratory mode of exposition. In the obscure ballet of a French thinker’s argument, we see the motions of thought in a less formal modality. Lines of thought extend, unfurl, tangle together. Paragraphs and pages accumulate on matters of unclear significance before an idea explodes out of the drone. I once heard Leo Bersani giving a talk describing the experience of reading Lacan – pages and pages of unreadable sentences and then, out of nowhere, one sentence that you will never forget. Would that single sentence have had the same impact if you had not waded through the swamp to get to it? Probably not. Still, it’s a swamp.

At one level of abstraction, we can discern fragments of argument about desire and society, authority and creativity, individual and multiplicity. But everything is defamiliarized and strange. The argument is often prosecuted in what comes across as jargon-laden side quests. If you want a summary of the themes, the wikipedia article is good. But the actual experience of reading the text is suffused with disorientation.

The subject matter is the unconscious itself. At one point, the authors tell us that their argument is addressed not so much to the conscious mind as to the unconscious:

“It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach the real problems.” (81)

I feel similarly when reading difficult poetry or other dense texts that there is a kind of subconscious effect, even if I don’t follow every thread of argumentation. Vague and difficult and nonlinear things often operate at the unconscious level – burrowing into the backs of our heads while our eyes are fixed on the page.

One of the main protagonists of the text is the desiring-machine. Against Freud, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is not a lack, not a privation. Desire is production – it makes things. Desire is not a theater of representations but a factory that churns out flows. Desiring machines connect to other machines, composing a super-machine of machines, the universe is an engine of interpenetrating desires, always creating and changing.

Early in the book and occasionally afterwards, the authors claim that the figure of the desiring-machine is not a metaphor. What is the meaning of such a claim?

“In what respect are desiring-machines really machines, in anything more than a metaphysical sense? A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks. (36)

This is an odd definition of a machine and perhaps part of our misunderstanding. I wonder how they arrived at such a definition.

“These breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from reality; rather, they operate along lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them we are considering. (36)

I have to admit that I’m at a loss to explain what this means. The exposition that follows, in which the machines are described as meat-slicers that cut into a pig’s thigh (among other things) is more of a surrealist flight of fancy than a rigorous attempt to define any kind of concept. They catch us as we wander into a dark room and throw a bowl of water in our faces. It is shocking but what does it mean?

Perhaps most dismaying to me is the cavalier attitude that the authors take toward schizophrenia. Against Freud, whose key patients are often neurotics, Deleuze and Guattari seem to idealize the “schizo” as the figure to be contrasted with the square, authoritarian capitalist. Having spent time earlier in my life working in care facilities for disabled adults, I can attest to the real pain endured by people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Perhaps I am missing out on a layer of self-conscious irony or double meaning, but I have to admit to finding the discussion off-putting. I googled the topic and found a reddit thread where the internet Deleuzians defend the authors against this charge.

Finally, fascism. I didn’t get far enough into the book to really get to this part but the authors imply that fascist ways of thinking are closely aligned with the Oedipal structures that psychoanalysts use to make sense of the family and broader forms of social order. It is difficult to read an abstract account of fascism in 2024, when the concrete reality of the strong man stares us in the face. Maybe that’s why I had to stop.