Anti-Oedipus I: Logic of Flows, Lecture 9, 18 April 1972

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p>During his first year at Vincennes, where Deleuze began in fall 1970, he taught two seminars, back-to-back in the same three-hour weekly sessions, one titled “Logic and Desire”, the other titled “Spinoza’s Logic” (with no documents on either currently available). Hence, the first transcripts available correspond to Deleuze’s second year at Vincennes as he continues to expand the concepts developed for <em>Anti-Oedipus </em>(published in March 1972) but also with the long view of the second volume, <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>, in progress with Félix Guattari. Focusing on this forthcoming book, Deleuze with Guattari develop only one text for publication corresponding directly to the seminar, their first jointly published essay titled “La synthèse disjonctive”, in the journal <em>L’Arc</em> 43 (1970), an issued dedicated to Pierre Klossowski.</p>

<p>In session 9, 18 April 1972, the transcript of this final session is divided into two specific parts, the second section (with the title “The body without organs”) appearing to be incomplete given its brevity. This session serves in many ways as a review of the intersections between psychoanalysis and political economy, hence material corresponding to both to chapters I and III of <em>Anti-Oedipus</em>. The coordinates for desire determined as libido are within the familial act, specifically Oedipal coordinates, Deleuze suggesting that in this shift, psychoanalysts created an entirely ambiguous relationship with myth and tragedy, a new reterritorialized form emerging either as the bourgeois family or bourgeois private property. Deleuze outlines two steps in this process: on one hand, human beings that furnish a labor force gain an abstract equality insofar as such individuals and the family gain a theoretically equal value from the perspective of capital’s reproduction. On the other hand, social reproduction creates an overlap between economic and political figures and specifically familial figures. Under the capitalism’s axiomatic, psychoanalysis becomes the necessary application corresponding to capitalism’s political economy, three aspects of which Deleuze outlines. In the brief final section, Deleuze returns to discuss the body without organs as an intensive matrix, crisscrossed by flows, notably delirium crossing thresholds of intensity and between thresholds. He then begins to outline this process on four kinds of body without organs (masochistic, addicted, schizophrenic, hysterical).</p>

<p>No recording of this session is available currently. The original French transcript provided here, in Open Data Text (odt) format, is from the WeDeleuze site, also with the revised French transcription and new English translation in odt format. [WebDeleuze was founded by Richard Pinhas -- a student in Deleuze's seminars -- who, with the Deleuze family's support, developed transcripts and translations of many of the seminars.]</p>

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<p>Les Séminaires de Deleuze sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>Cette séance 9, le 18 avril 1972, est la dernière séance, du moins pour les documents dont nous nous disposons. La transcription de cette séance est divisée en deux parties spécifiques, la seconde partie (intitulée « Le corps sans organes ») paraissant incomplète étant donné sa brièveté. Cette séance sert à bien des égards à revoir les intersections entre la psychanalyse et l’économie politique, et contient donc des éléments correspondant aux chapitres I et III de <em>L’Anti-Œdipe</em>.</p>