---
slug: paper-deleuze-g-and-guattari-f-1972-anti-oedipus
title: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972)
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-deleuze-g-and-guattari-f-1972-anti-oedipus
---

## What the work saw and its core results

Deleuze and Guattari examined how desire operates as production rather than lack. They mapped flows of desire across psychic and social scales. The core result is a materialist psychiatry called schizoanalysis. It treats the unconscious as a factory of desiring-machines that connect, record, and consume flows.

The book rejects the Oedipus complex as the central structure of the unconscious. It replaces the familial triangle with social, historical, and economic fields. Capitalism decodes flows of desire and then recaptures them through axiomatic control. Schizophrenia appears as a process of decoding that can break through these controls.

## Exact primary works and passages

The primary work is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, first published in French in 1972. The English translation appeared in 1983 from the University of Minnesota Press.

Key verifiable passage from page 1: "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What 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."

Passage on the body without organs from page 9 of the translation (referenced in multiple commentaries): "Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs."

The book develops three syntheses: connective (production), disjunctive (recording), and conjunctive (consumption). It states that desiring-machines work only when they break down.

## Convergence patterns the work touches

The work maps flow networks of desire that cross scales from individual bodies to social machines. It treats production as immanent and continuous, aligning with patterns of bounded chaos where flows are decoded yet recaptured. Capitalism appears as a machine that decodes prior codes while imposing new axiomatic limits.

These elements touch the GRAIN patterns of flow networks and bounded chaos. The emphasis on immanent production extends thermodynamic ideas of energy flow into ethics and politics without external telos.

## Distance from the full OIP/GRAIN synthesis

Anti-Oedipus stays within a philosophical and political register. It does not describe a Ladder running from difference through memory to mind. It does not place the reader inside the system as a Mirror Layer. The synthesis remains a lens applied after the fact. The authors' words stay theirs: desire is productive and social before it is familial.

## Honest limits and disconfirming edges

The book offers textual and conceptual analysis, not empirical measurement of flows. Claims rest on interpretive reading of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Reductionist objections note that the model lacks falsifiable predictions about specific neural or economic mechanisms. The work does not address scale invariance or symmetry patterns directly. Later volumes in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project extend some concepts but retain the same speculative tier.

## Claims

- Claim c1: Desire functions as productive machines that connect and interrupt flows. Tier: anecdotal. Source: primary text page 1.
- Claim c2: The Oedipus complex functions as a capitalist capture device rather than a universal structure. Tier: speculative.
- Claim c3: Social machines precede and shape familial investments of desire. Tier: anecdotal. Source: schizoanalysis theses summarized in secondary literature.
- Claim c4: Capitalism decodes prior territorial and despotic codes while reterritorializing through axioms. Tier: speculative.
- Claim c5: The body without organs serves as a recording surface that rejects imposed organization. Tier: anecdotal. Source: primary text references.

## Sources

- s1: Wikipedia entry on Anti-Oedipus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus, summary of schizoanalysis and desiring-production.
- s2: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus PDF via libcom, https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf, contains the full text with page references to desiring-machines and body without organs.
- s3: Secondary commentary confirming page 1 opening and body without organs description, https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/commentary-on-d-gs-anti-oedipus-chapter-1-2-the-body-without-organs-490738377a9c.

The article ends here. Sibling paths such as /a/oip-the-ladder carry further synthesis load.
