-Quotations-

( from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.)

(1) The molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of castration,

because the multiple breaks never cease producing flows, instead of repressing

them, cutting them at a single stroke (pp. 289)

(2) Doubtless each organism interprets the world from the perspective of its

own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye

interprets everything speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking- in terms of

seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a

traverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or sees

its own current interrupted. (pp. 6)

(3) As for the schizo, continually wandering about, migrating here, there and

everywhere as best as he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of

deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the

socius on the surface of his own body without organs. (pp. 35)

(4) Desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one

and the same thing as social production. (pp. 30)

(...) Desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement

desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all

production is at once desiring production and social production (pp. 296)

(5) The despot is the paranoiac: there is no longer any reason to forego such a

statement, once one has freed oneself from the characteristic familiarism of the

concept of paranoia in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and provided one sees in

paranoia a type of investment of a social formation. () But in reality one can

perceive the movement of this formation just as well when one empire breaks

away from a preceding empire; or even when there arises the dream of a

spiritual empire, wherever temporal empires fall into decadence. It may be that

the enterprise is primarily military and motivated by conquest, or that it is

primarily religious, the military discipline being converted into internal ascetism

and cohesion. It may be that the paranoiac himself is either a gentle creature or

a raging beast. But we always rediscover the figures of this paranoiac and his

perverts, the conqueror and his elite troops, the despot and his bureaucrats, the

holy man and his disciples, the anchorite and his monks, Christ and Saint Paul.

(pp. 193)

(6) By boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making

familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to

understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective

mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on the unconscious: in particular,

the entire interplay between primal psychic repression, the desiring machines,

and the body without organs. (pp. 49)

(7) But psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say

ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion, and

who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and

regression: your father, and your fathers father, a snowball gathering speed as

it moves from Oedipus all the way to the father of the primal horde, to God and

the Paleolithic age. It is Oedipus who makes us man, for better or for worse,

say those who would make fools of us all. (pp. 108)

() The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your

father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so thats what I wanted! (pp.

114)

(8) capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of

decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract

quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of

desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of

its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated

strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. (pp. 139)

(9) A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are

themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and

subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive

of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invests always mortal

formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real

coefficients without a hierarchy or a group super-ego. What complicates

everything, it is true, is that the same individuals can participate in both kinds

of groups in diverse ways. (pp. 349)