Anti-Oedipus II, Lecture 1, 12 February 1973

<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>In his third year at Vincennes, Deleuze continues to expand the concepts developed for <em>Anti-Oedipus</em> with the long view of the second volume, <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>, in progress. Moreover, alongside these sessions, Deleuze alone and with Guattari develop texts for publication that correspond directly to the seminar: Deleuze’s conference presentation, ‘Nomadic Thought’ for the July 1972 conference ‘Nietzsche aujourd’hui?’ at Cerisy-la-Salle is published in 1973; second, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Bilan-Programme pour machines désirantes’ appears in <em>Minuit </em>2 (January 1973), and then is included as an appendix to the revised edition of <em>Anti-Oedipus </em>(1975).</p>

<p>In session 1, 12 February 1973, Deleuze’s initial comment concerns his and Guattari’s goal of searching for the conditions of statements (<em>énoncés</em>) within, for example, psychoanalysis, i.e. regarding desire and the unconscious. Referring then to the previous session, he quickly shifts to how mass groupings or distributions function in relation to a subject’s trajectory on a body without organs. Deleuze points to two coexistent states of the sign, one paranoid, another freed from the signifier, and he maintains that these states correspond to two positions on the body without organs, a position of mass and a position of packs (<em>meute</em>). These two positions intersect in the unconscious, not in opposition, but in interplay within a bi-polar machinic apparatus, the mass machine as the signifying semiotic machine, hierarchized and egalitarian, on one hand, and on the other, the pack machine of particle-signs, types of Brownian movement, as the a-signifying semiotic machine. Deleuze examines Kafka’s love for Felice, an example of how one cannot know which apparatus might come to dominate in a given situation, mass or pack. Finally, Deleuze returns to the initial student’s question about schizo incest, stating that this incest opens the schizo to a world of connections and a kind of defamiliarization of the individual.</p>

<p>No recording of this session is available currently, nor are the French transcripts at WebDeleuze of adequate quality. Hence the original French transcript provided here, in Open Data Text (odt) format, is from the Le Terrier web site. A revised French transcription of the WebDeleuze transcription and its new English translation in odt format is also included. [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. Le Terrier is a multimedia site providing a small but important set of Deleuze transcripts, as well as documents by numerous other writers and artists, at http://www.le-terrier.net/index2.html.]</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 1, le 3 décembre 1973, est plutôt fragmentaire, dominée par la discussion entre Deleuze and quelques participants en particulier. Beaucoup des concepts considérés seront développés dans <em>Mille Plateaux, </em>notamment le corps sans organes, le signifiant, le paranoïa, les phénomènes de masse et de meute, l’appareil machinique. Deleuze se réfère aux écrits de Kafka, surtout sur son amour pour Felice, un exemple qui signale, selon Deleuze, comment on ne peut pas savoir quel appareil pourrait finalement dominer dans une situation donnée, la masse ou la meute.</p>