Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

The Disjunctive Synthesis

Translation, Ian Jakobi

https://www.academia.edu/36885240/Deleuze_and_Guattari_The_Disjunctive_Synthesis_1970_

 

All of Pierre Klossowski’s work is marked by a particular use of the disjunctive synthesis from the dual perspective of a theory of the body and a theory of thought, each one reflecting the other. For the unconscious is not psychical, it is inseparably physical and noological. The disjunctive syllogism of Klossowski follows this dual articulation. We pose the question of what the nature, scope, and use of this synthesis is for a knowledge of the unconscious. This text is not presented as a commentary on Klossowski, but it owes all the more to him as a constant point of reference.^[1]

 

The nature of the syntheses operated by the unconscious, in the unconscious, remains the great problem of psychoanalysis. The imperialism of Oedipus in psychoanalysis consists in bringing all the syntheses of the unconscious back to the triangle of daddy–mummy–child (ego). This triangle can be interpreted in terms of personal images or structural functions, but in both cases it has to account for the syntheses of the unconscious in their supposedly normal or ideal functioning, as well as when they become unhinged.^[2] Psychoanalysis is oedipal both in its diagnostic and in its therapeutic. The insistence on drives^[3] and partial objects changes nothing as long as they are determined merely as pre-oedipal. The problem is much more that of the an-oedipal nature of the unconscious syntheses and the corresponding sexuality. Oedipalisation, this placing of the unconscious into an orphanage, is perhaps nothing other than the effect of the social repression which disfigures and covers up the real life of the unconscious. Might it not be that the unconscious is orphaned by nature and that, in the midst of all its ignorance, it has a sublime ignorance of parents?^[4] Persons and functions are oedipal, but beyond persons and functions there are formations^[5] of the unconscious, orphaned desiring-machines, which are anoedipal. The unity of Nature and the unconscious (homo natura) was discovered at the point of the auto-production of the unconscious; at the very same point that the subject of the Cartesian cogito discovered itself to be without parents; that point also when the communist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature; when the cycle discovers its independence from the indefinite parental regression; when sexuality proclaims its independence from generation. It is from this perspective that all the syntheses of the unconscious are to be re-examined and must be situated in relation to the desiring–production of the unconscious itself.

It has recently been shown with what hesitations Oedipus was introduced into psychoanalysis.^[6] But instead of marking the milestones in the definitive constitution of this theory, we wonder about the treasures, or the potentialities, that were abandoned: the vision of an unconscious that is freer, more diverse, as well as more sexualised, more sombre, and more serious. A text like the Schreber case shows how much Freud was still sensitive to the ‘forcing’^[7] he had to resort to in order to bring Oedipus into it (‘they will say that I exaggerate… that I am monotonous in seeing daddy everywhere… in God, in the Sun…’). We cannot get rid of the feeling that the psychopath is far, very far beyond Oedipus. The psychoanalyst hopelessly says that the latent content stays where it is and that we have to uncover the father beneath Schreber’s superior God, and, while we are at it, the older brother beneath the inferior God. Sometimes the psychopath is impatient and asks to be left alone. At other times he plays along, he even lays it on thick, only to introduce his own coordinates^[8] into the model that is imposed upon him and make it burst from within: ‘Yes, it’s my mother, but my mother is none other than the Virgin…’. We imagine President Schreber replying to Freud: ‘but yes, of course, the talking birds are young girls, and the superior God is daddy, and the lower God is my brother’. But on the sly he re-impregnates the young girls with all the talking birds, his father with the superior God, and his brother with the inferior God, all of them being divine forms that become complicated, or rather, un-simplified as they pierce up from beneath the terms and functions of the oedipal triangle that are all too simple.

 

I don’t think in the father

nor mother

I haven’t no

to daddy–mummy

 

It seems that psychoanalysts, as a result of an ingrained habit, no longer even sense any ‘forcing’ when they oedipalise everything they get their hands on. Even Melanie Klein, who led the way in the discovery of partial objects, does not hesitate to write:

The first time Dick came to me, he did not manifest any kind of affect when his nurse left us alone. When I showed him the toys that I had prepared, he looked at them without the slightest interest. I took a big train and placed it next to a smaller one; I called them ‘daddy–train’ and ‘Dick–train’. He took the train that I had called ‘Dick’, rolled it up to the window and said ‘Station‘. I explained to him that the ‘station is Mummy’. ‘Dick is going into mummy’. He left the train, ran into the space between the inner and outer doors of the room, shut himself in, saying ‘dark’, and then ran straight back out. He repeated this performance several times. I explained to him, ‘it’s dark in Mummy; Dick is inside dark Mummy’ … When his analysis had progressed… Dick also discovered that the sink symbolised the maternal body, and he manifested an extraordinary fear of water and getting wet.^[9]

Say it’s Oedipus or you’ll get a slap. In this respect, it is unclear whether Oedipus, which gives us an image of psychosis that is absurdly reductive, provides an image of childhood that is any better. The conception we call childish is not the child’s, it is the one which the adult has made of childhood. The child is a being that is more metaphysical: for example, he asks himself what breathing is, watches himself breathe, breathes himself in, stops breathing, while a ‘certain woman named mother’ prepares his din-dins. That the child relates his experiences to the woman named mummy does not mean that these experiences are related to her.^[10] The child conducts incredible experiments with desiring–production and desiring–machines in a world of partial objects and non–familial relations. The child may borrow partial objects from his parents, and these same parents may intervene as agents of production or anti-production, but this does not alter the fact that Oedipus only imposes one particular type of recording on the experiments and machinations which spill out from it on all sides. From the very start, the child’s first experiences are of generated^[11] partial objects, organ-machines or energy-machines, and of the unengendered body without organs on which these machines are connected and distributed. Failing to see the nature of this desiring–production from the outset, and how, under what conditions, or under what pressures the oedipal triangulation intervenes at a very precise moment in the recording process,^[12] we find ourselves caught in the snares of a diffuse and generalised oedipalism which radically disfigures the life of the child and leads to the neurotic and psychotic problems of the adult. Instead, then, of participating in the attempt to forge an effective liberation, psychoanalysis takes part in the work of the most general repression which keeps European humanity under the yoke of daddy-mummy and never puts an end to this problem.

The doctrine of Jacques Lacan is often considered as a new means that is more certain, and more effective, of imposing an oedipal structure on the schizophrenic. Recent statements by Lacan show that his doctrine is not at all meant like this^[13], quite the opposite. Its novelty is much greater. In truth, it lays out two possible directions for a cure, one is known all too well, the other still too little: oedipalisation, and, at the other pole – schizophrenisation. The problem of schizophrenisation as a cure is this: how can schizophrenia be released as a power of man and Nature without at the same time producing a schizophrenic? This is analogous to Burroughs’ problem (how to embody the power of the drug without being a junkie?) or Miller’s (how to get drunk on pure water?). This has nothing to do with simulation. It is now apparent that the schizophrenic possesses an immense revolutionary potential, that he is a universal producer, today’s^[14] proletarian, the one who makes desiring-machines function and introduces them into the social field. Schizophrenia must be viewed as a means to interpret this entire field. Not that this reduces the schizophrenic to a generality. On the contrary, it is on the basis of his singularity, his ‘secret’, that it becomes possible to read the modern world in general and to invent a code, or rather, a scrambling^[15] of code as its effective ‘negative’.^[16] Klossowski has recently indicated the practical scope of such a process of schizophrenisation.^[17] We do not seek here to analyse the features of this process as a political and analytical undertaking. There are too many misunderstandings that first need to be dispelled. Even today, any alignment of Artaud and schizophrenia raises some confused protestations.^[18] This is because they want to have a conception of Artaud that is thorough and rigorous, but they have a notion of schizophrenia, inherited from psychiatry, which is the most traditional and reactionary. It is written for example: ‘We only need apprehend a discourse at the level of its contents, its signifieds, and to completely disregard the work of and on the signifier, in order to peremptorily declare that Artaud’s language is that of a schizophrenic. The psychotic produces a discourse that is involuntary, stymied, submissive – the opposite in every way to textual writing…’. This sounds like Dr. Delay: a little bit of neurosis is good for creativity, but not too much, and certainly not psychosis. And who is it that tells us that the discourse of the psychotic is involuntary, stymied, submissive? It is not that it is the contrary, rather, we may think that these oppositions are singularly irrelevant. Artaud makes a mockery^[19] of psychiatry precisely because he is schizophrenic and not because he is not. If schizophrenisation is defined, it is by a particular use of the syntheses of the unconscious in opposition to other uses and exercises, even ‘textual’ ones.

In the schizophrenic process, the partial objects, organs of desire, attach themselves^[20] to the body without organs. This unproductive and inconsumable body will serve as a surface for the recording of the entire process of desiring-production and the distribution carried out in this process. The organ-machines, whether unhinged or in good condition, will be inscribed here, suspended from the body without organs like coat hangers^[21], or like the cravat, or belt on the round body of Humpty Dumpty. They are inscribed as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of syntheses is woven. The body without organs is therefore utterly quadrilated.^[22] This is the sense of the schizophrenic ‘either… or…’, or of the ‘or in good’: no matter which two organs are considered, the way they are attached to the body without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between them amount to the same thing on the slippery surface. Hence the mouth–anus of the anorexic. The schizophrenic writes the litany of disjunctions on his body and constructs a world of charades^[23] for himself in which the tiniest permutation is intended to respond to the new situation or the prying questioner. The libido, as the energy of production, or rather, a part of the libido becomes the Numen, as the energy of inscription or recording. In Schreber the divine (numen) is inseparable from the disjunctions in which he is divided within himself: anterior empires, posterior empires; posterior empires of a superior God, and of an inferior God. The fantastic genealogies thus spill out from all sides of the oedipal framework. And each disjunction allows for the recording of corresponding agents of production in such a way that they can be found on all sides and switched around, since their permutations all amount to the same thing: birds, voices, nerves, rays. It is, then, not surprising that the delirious, or rather, desiring code of recording possesses an extraordinary fluidity. We could say that the schizophrenic flows from one code to another, that he scrambles all the codes in a rapid sliding, following the questions put to him, not giving the same explanation from one day to the next, not invoking the same genealogy, not recording the same event in the same way. He even accepts the banal oedipal code, when it is imposed upon him, and he isn’t irritated, but only so he can stuff it full with all the disjunctions that the code was made in order to exclude.^[24] The schizophrenic lands on his feet, always teetering, for the simple reason that he is the same thing on all sides and in every disjunction. In order to be recorded, the organ-machines may well attach themselves to the body without organs, but this body nevertheless remains without organs and does not become an organism in the usual sense of the word. It retains its fluid and slippery character. The organs of president Schreber, whether unhinged or in good condition, are attached to an inorganic body without organs. It matters little whether they are in good condition or not, since when they are unhinged they are restored by the divine rays. However, on the catatonic body they are so firmly placed that they can no longer function, given this mode of recording, except in the form of divine miraculations. “Almost every time I need evacuation, I am miraculated…”.^[25] It is the same with the agents of production placed on Schreber’s body, such as the divine rays that it attracts and which contain thousands of tiny condensed spermatozoa. Suspended from this body, they enter into complex genealogical relations with God and the divided forms of God. But it is on the body without organs that everything flows and is recorded, even the copulations of agents, even the divisions of God, even the quadrilating^[26] genealogies. Everything is on this body like lice on the lion’s mane. This body remains without organs, uncreated, exempt from genealogy, always fluid and slippery. For this reason, Schreber has a special relation with God in which he is higher than God himself. He can orchestrate^[27] others in any way he wants, forming pseudo-societies, or the societies to come. And the recording code of desire, which quadrilates^[28] his body, remains equally fluid and slippery, and is determined in multiple ways (this has nothing to do with the signifier and the signified).

If we call this form of energy divine (numen), it is despite all the ambiguities raised by a problem of the unconscious that is religious only in appearance. Even in strictly religious terms, a functional God is defined less by the act of creation, its prehistoric activity, than by the disjunctions which it establishes in the created as a reality derived from its function. This is why God appears, in the most satisfyingly scholastic way possible, as the master of disjunctions, or the a priori principle of all disjunctive syntheses (omnitudo realitatis – all realities emerge through division). But the real question concerns the use of the disjunctive synthesis when it thereby finds its principle in God. Undoubtedly this use is exclusive, limitative, negative, as we see in the Kantian theory of the Ideal of pure reason in which Kant takes up the definition of God as a principle of the disjunctive syllogism (a thing is limited by denying of it all that it is not in an ensemble of reality which proceeds by division). Irrespective of the complex relations between religious and family triangulations, such a theological use of the disjunctive synthesis is found in Oedipus: be daddy, mummy or child. Oedipus represents the minimum condition, just as God represents the maximum conditions, under which an ‘ego’^[29] receives the coordinates which differentiate it all at once in terms of age, sex and vital status (parent or child, man or woman, dead or alive). The misfortune of Oedipus is, without doubt, to no longer know where one person begins and another ends, or even who is who. Nevertheless, Oedipus leaves us with no alternative except the following: either abide by the exclusions (the prohibitions) that correspond to the lines of functional differentiation, or fall into the dark night of the undifferentiated.^[30] This is because Oedipus creates both the differentiations that it imposes upon us and the undifferentiated with which it threatens us. Oedipus tells us: ‘either you spread around the triangle and pass it on to your offspring, or you can rot all alone in the night of neurosis’. It prohibits something that it has itself created. It orders us to extricate ourselves from what it has surrounded us with. Oedipus is a double impasse, or a double ‘bind’, in which, one way or another, social repression sticks all desiring–production. We have to imagine a Lutheran Oedipus: it internalises theology, the theological synthesis, in us. This reminds us of something Marx said that is relevant here: modern society is able both to comprehend itself and to legitimately discover elements that belong to it in earlier societies, only on the condition that it leads at a certain point to its own self-criticism. But leading Oedipus to the point of its own self-criticism is precisely what psychoanalysis seems unwilling to do.

It is here that one of the main senses of Klossowski’s work comes to light: to uncover an altogether different use of the disjunctive synthesis on which life and thought in the unconscious would depend. It is in this sense that Klossowski opposes the God of Christian theology with an Antichrist, the ‘prince of modifications’, the master of the disjunctive syllogism from the point of view of a different exercise. That this exercise is schizoid here underlines its anoedipal character. To the exclusive, limitative, and negative use of the disjunctive synthesis there is opposed a use that is inclusive, ilimitative, and affirmative. Schizophrenisation: a disjunction that remains disjunctive and which nonetheless affirms the disjoint terms. It affirms them across all their distance, without limiting or excluding one by the other. The schizophrenic is not man and woman. He is man or woman, but precisely by being on both sides, a man amongst men; a woman amongst women. Aimable Jayet (Albert Désiré, matriculation 54161001) recites the masculine and feminine series, and places himself on both sides: ‘Mat Albert 5416 ricu – the mad Roman sultan;’ ‘Mat Désiré 1001 ricu – the mad Roman sultaness’.^[31] The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at the same time, but each one of the two as endpoints of a distance that he surveys in his sliding.^[32] He is child or parent, not one and the other, but one at the end of the other, like the two ends of a stick in a nondecomposable space. Everything is divided, but only into itself: ‘Yes I was my father, and I was my son;’ ‘I am my son, my father, my mother and myself^[33]‘. To take the schizophrenic as replacing disjunctions with the vague syntheses of the identification of contradictory elements, like the last of the Hegelian philosophers, would be to misunderstand this order of thought. He does not replace the disjunctive synthesis with the synthesis of contradictory elements, rather, he replaces the exclusive and limitative usage of the disjunctive synthesis with a use that is affirmative and inclusive. He is, and remains, in disjunction: he does not suppress the disjunction in an identity of contradictory elements by digging into their depths,^[34] on the contrary, he affirms the disjunction by surveying an indivisible distance. He is not at all bi-sexed, or something in between, or inter-sexed, but trans–sexed.^[35] He is trans–livead, trans–parchild.^[36] It is as though the schizophrenic works with a pure genealogical material, which is inclusive and ilimitative, and in which he can be situated^[37] across every junction and on all sides. It is this raw material that will be diverted from its wild course by an oedipal genealogy that introduces its exclusions and limitations according to the exigencies of family and society. For the oedipal genealogy always forms and closes an upside down triangle, and then uses the summit to form another triangle. However, to return genealogy to itself, as material – straightening it, de-triangulating it, surveying it, separating the homunculus-like agents of production, which are the same beings in it, putting them simultaneously at both ends of the transversals of all the triangles – this is the highest task of the wild genealogist^[38]. It is a bit like the absolute surveying of indivisible distances are discovered in measurable and stepped progressions, or in graduated relations.

It is on the body without organs that all the differential positions (man-woman, parent-child, living-dead, God-creature) and the corresponding non-oedipal genealogy are installed. It is on the body without organs that the distances between hanging bodies, and between suspended agents, are nondecomposable and indivisible, and are necessarily surveyed at the same time as all the disjoint terms are necessarily affirmed. The non-oedipal genealogy is the one that is inscribed on the body without organs insofar as this body is itself unengendered. It is therefore inevitable that this glorious body has a representative: the subject, which is alongside each thing that flows on it, at both extremes of each indivisible distance and on all sides of the genealogy. In relation to this subject, the disjoint terms^[39] form a circle which is the circle of the return of the Same. These terms – partial objects and productive agents – are not persons, but a series of singularities that converge around a desiring-machine. The subject may experience them as allies, or rivals and enemies. In any case, they are intensive states through which the subject flows. For the subject flows through all the states in the series, always outside of itself on the eccentric circle. It is not at the centre, as an ego would be, but is instead on the disjointed perimeter. It is a mistake to talk about an ego that identifies with other persons. It is said, for example, ‘he thinks he’s Louis XVII’. But this isn’t it at all. In the Louis XVII affair, or rather, in the most wonderful case of Richemont the pretender, it is a desiring-machine that is at the centre: the horse with short articulated legs in which the Dauphin was placed for his escape.^[40] And then, all around it, there are agents of production – the organisers of the escape, the accomplices, the allied sovereigns, the revolutionary enemies, hostile and jealous uncles – all of which are not persons but so many singularities through which the pretender flows. Moreover, the stroke of genius of Richemont the pretender is not merely to ‘account for’^[41] Louis XVII, or to account for the other claimants by denouncing them as false. His genius is to account for the other contenders by assuming them, by authenticating them, in other words, by making them into singularities through which he has flowed: ‘I am Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau, who claimed to be Louis XVII’.^[42] Richemont does not identify with Louis XVII, he claims the reward which comes to the one who flows through all the singularities in the series converging around the machine for kidnapping Louis XVII. There is no ego at the centre, nor are there persons distributed around the periphery. There is nothing besides a series of singularities forming a circle of convergence and a transpositional subject on the circle. This subject flows through every state, the triumphing of some as his enemies (= falls), the savouring of others as his allies (= rebounds), and everywhere collecting rewards from its avatars. Regarding the centre, there is nothing but the desiring-machine that makes everything turn, and the subject itself on all the trajectories. The synthesis can then be expressed: ‘So I am King! So it is to me that the Kingdom rightfully belongs!’ This ego shows itself for what it is – fraudulent – since it is the product of an operation that featured no ego, but only local singularities and the non-specific subject capable of traversing them. This is what is so difficult to understand in the inclusive synthesis of the unconscious: this supreme indifference to the problem of the ‘ego’, as to the problem of God, or kinship, this character of the synthesis that is always partial and non-specific, this royal manner of ignoring global persons and the ego-specific, of only taking into account local singularities and a non-specific subject.

In his recent book on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski went further than anyone has gone, not only in the analysis of the case of Nietzsche, but in the discovery of the problem of schizophrenia. There is no Nietzsche–ego, the former professor of philology who suddenly loses his powers of reason and identifies with strange characters. There is the Nietzschean–subject that flows through a series of states and which never exists at the centre, but always on the perimeter of the disjointed circle around a centre which is unlocatable and unnameable. As Klossowski says,

“centrifugal forces do not flee the centre, never to return, but close in on it again, only to once again move away: such are the vicious oscillations that perturb an individual as long as he only seeks his own centre and is not able to see the circle of which he thereby makes himself a part. For if these oscillations perturb him, it is because each corresponds to an individuality which is other than the one he believes himself to be from the perspective of the unlocatable centre. It follows that an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must each be traversed, such that the fortuitous nature of this or that individuality renders them all necessary.”

Each state of the series, each ‘individual,’ appears as a non-specific partial object, a singularity, or a fortuitous case within a chaos of pure oscillations, some designating increases in intensity (Prado, Lesseps, Chambige – the ‘honest criminals’), and others designating falls in intensity (Caiaphas, Guillaume, Bismark – the ‘anti-Semites’). Of course, the disjointed circle of states makes it so those global and specific persons with whom Nietzsche had a real relationship (Cosima, for example) also return. But the point is that Nietzsche needs these so-called real persons to be present so he can make his own use of them – slicing off^[43] partial objects or fortuitous states which he draws from them in order to produce a surplus reality.^[44] For the idea of a loss of reality, like autism, is a particularly inadequate and inept notion. The body without organs is instead a desert, but the desert is the indivisible and nondecomposable distance that the schizophrenic surveys everywhere where the real is produced, everywhere where the real has been and will be produced, whether against him (paranoia–machine) or for him (desiring–machine), as much in the misery of persecution as in the elation of grandeur. And never has anyone made as much history as the schizophrenic, nor in the same way. For all the persecutions are real, as are all the grandeurs. I am all the pogroms of history, and all the triumphs, too. The names of history are states of nerves, states of the world, states of the mind – extremely pure intensities. By dressing up, Schreber actually produced his femininity, like Caligula, who made himself worshipped by the old Senators, like Elagabalus, who made Rome penetrate him by walking backwards into it.^[45] Antonin Artaud produces plague. Will I say that acting as though all the real affected me, either for me or against me, all the tortures that befell me and all the glories that exalted me, is not the least bit real? I am Schreber, Elagabalus and Caligula. The irreality is only in the head of the spectator – the psychiatrist himself. The schizo is a case? But he treats others as so many cases through which he flows. There is no ego that simulates other persons, nor does the schizophrenic identify with characters. Instead, he identifies a region of intensity, a gradient designated by this or that proper name on his body without organs. Discovering everywhere, in all times, and in all places, the production of the real – O Nature! – leaping over social and familial bonds in order to seize the real as it is produced in Nature and by history: excavating the Roman Empire, Mexican cities, Greek gods, and the known continents in order to extract this surplus reality, this raw product of desiring-machines in the depths^[46] of time and space, and forming the treasure trove of paranoid tortures and celibate glories. Such is the ‘histrionism’ of the schizophrenic according to Klossowski’s formulation, the true programme for a theatre of cruelty, the mise en scène of a machine that produces the real.^[47] This is the paradox: that it is necessary to scramble the codes and break the bonds in order to seize this raw identity, this coextension of Nature and history. Perhaps this is the element of revolutionary potential in schizophrenia. Far from having lost who knows what contact with life, the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, at the unbearable point of being merged with the production of the real, and which led Reich to say: ‘What characterises schizophrenia is the experience of this vital element… concerning their sense of life, the neurotic and the pervert are to the schizophrenic what the petty small-town shopkeeper is to the great adventurer’^[48].

Notes

^[1] Extract from the forthcoming book, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

^[2] T.N. I have chosen ‘unhinged’ to translate ‘détraquement’ since this is a colloquial term that fits the French here and has the breadth of meaning which allows it to apply both to states of the mind and the physical condition of machines that have fallen into disrepair, which will be important later in the text.

^[3] T.N. ‘pulsions’.

^[4] T.N. D&G are here of course recalling Freud’s claim that the unconscious knows no time, death or language. But for them, what the unconscious really does not know are parents.

^[5] T.N. ‘formations’.

^[6] Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the origins of sexuality’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:1 (1968). Reprinted in Formations of Fantasy, Eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cara Kaplan, London: Methuen, 1986, pp. 5-27.

^[7] T.N. ‘forcing’.

^[8] T.N. ‘repérages’.

^[9] Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921-1945, London: Hogarth Press, 1948, pp. 242-43.

^[10] T.N. In this sentence and those following in this paragraph there is an appeal to both senses the French ‘expériences’ has of experience and experiment. I have chosen the term that best fits the context but both senses should be kept in mind.

^[11] T.N. ‘produits’.

^[12] T.N. ‘l’enregistrement du procès’ is translated as ‘recording process’ but the French ‘enregistrement’ has several meanings, such as the registration of births, deaths, and marriages.

^[13] T.N.  ‘ne va pas du tout dans ce sens’.

^[14] T.N. ‘actuel’.

^[15] T.N. It should be noted that ‘brouillage’ has certain resonances in French which are lost in the choice of ‘scrambling’ for its translation into English. While the sense of mixing is not entirely misplaced, it is perhaps helpful to note that the French verb ‘broulier’ is used in the idiom ‘brouiller les pistes’ which means to cover one’s tracks or to leave false clues to send those that are pursuing down the wrong path. However, even this layer of meaning seems to miss something in the above as Deleuze and Guattari are claiming that the schizophrenic scrambling of code is a way of reading the modern world, and not simply disrupting it.

^[16] T.N. ‘Negatif’ here is meant in the sense of a photographic negative.

^[17] Interview in L’Idiot International, no. 3.

^[18] T.N. Deleuze is talking about Tel Quel, about whom, in a letter to Michel Foucault, he is even more disparaging about when using almost identical lines (p. 69 of Lettres et autres textes).

^[19] T.N. ‘mise en pièce’.

^[20] T.N. ‘s’accrochent’.

^[21] T.N. ‘porte manteaux’.

^[22] T.N. ‘quadrillé’ – This term has both the meaning of something that is laid out in a grid, or squares, and an area that is divided such that a (police or army) patrol would cover it fully. I have chosen the neologism ‘quadrilated’ as preferable to a circumlocution that would be necessary to capture these meanings.

^[23] T.N. ‘monde de parade’.

^[24] Cf. the case of Wöfi, L’Art Brut, no. 2. Freud has emphasised the importance of disjunctions in delirium (Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides’, in ed. and trans. J. Strachey, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, London: Hogarth Press, 1911/1958, p. 49; Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 39). But he sees it as a secondary operation which presupposes a primordial ‘condensation’. This is one way of maintaining the oedipal nucleus.

^[25] T.N. See Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, tr. & ed. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, New York: NYRB, 2000, 204-205.

^[26] T.N. ‘quadrillantes’.

^[27] T.N. ‘machiner’.

^[28] T.N. ‘quadrille’.

^[29] T.N. ‘moi’.

^[30] T.N. ‘indifférencié’.

^[31] On the genealogies of Aimable Jayet, cf. Art Brut, no. 3, and the commentaries of Jean Oury which name Jayet ‘the non-delimited’, ‘in permanent surveying’ [survol].

^[32] T.N. For ‘survole’ I have chosen to follow other translations (see Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, ix-x) and use ‘survey’ and its variations, here and below. However, the more colloquial meaning of ‘skimming over the surface’ should also be kept in mind.

^[33] T.N. ‘moi’.

^[34] T.N. ‘approfondissement’.

^[35] T.N. These three terms translate the French ‘bisexué’, ‘intersexué’, and ‘trans-sexué’, respectively. I have not used the suffix ‘-sexual’ since these terms do not refer to sexual practices but ‘gender’.

^[36] T.N. These terms translate ‘trans-vimort’ and ‘trans-parenfant’, respectively.

^[37] T.N. ‘se repérer’.

^[38] T.N. ‘généalogiste-fou’.

^[39] T.N. ‘termes’.

^[40] T.N. The horse in question was a mechanical horse which the Dauphin’s doctor recommended to be used for exercise.

^[41] T.N. ‘rendre compte de(s)’ also has the meaning of ‘chart’ as in to trace a path/chart a course’.

^[42] Cf. Maurice Garçon, Louis XVII ou la fausse énigme, Hachette, Paris, p. 177.

^[43] T.N. ‘prélèvement’.

^[44] T.N. ‘plus de réalité’.

^[45] T.N. This last point is no doubt a reference to Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné, which adds to the account that Elagabalus paraded, walking backwards, as part of a religious ceremony, that he entered Rome by walking backwards to make it as though he had been ‘buggered by the whole Roman Empire’ (see Martijn Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus, 2011, 200).

^[46] T.N. ‘au fond’.

^[47] On such a production of reality in history, cf. the very beautiful ‘historical’ tales of Jacques Besse in La grande Pâque, Ed. Belfond, Paris.

^[48] T.N. The actual quote, in English translation, runs as follows: “With respect to their experiencing of life, the neurotic patient and the perverse patient are related to the schizophrenic as the petty thief to the daring safecracker” (Reich, The Functions of Orgasm, tr. Vincent R. Carfagno, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973, 70).

For the original text from L’Arc 43 (1970), see the French pdf link below.