Anti-Oedipus I: Logic of Flows, Lecture 2, 14 December 1971

<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 2, 14 December 1971, the session begins in progress, and its brief length indicates that this only a fragment of a longer session. Deleuze starts by suggesting the need to define flows more clearly in order to render an initial system of concepts related to flows and their interruption as social investment of desire. Deleuze’s development yields additional concepts, in rates of transformation, sectors, and stocks, and he indicates that the utility of stocks varies with each case, and yet they maintain linkages through flows which yield movements of value between the poles (cf. <em>Anti-Oedipus </em>ch. III, sections 9 & 10). Deleuze proposes to focus on the notion of break-flow, a notion emerging both as a break-subtraction of flow and break-detachment of code, which Deleuze calls the mechanism of delirium in the double schizz operation. Deleuze suggests that the economic operation of coding flows entails the double break-flow operations, with capitalism’s formation as madness in its pure state, yet also the opposite of madness, at once producing decoded flows, and yet establishing itself on that which terrified all other social formations. Here lies the deep link between capitalism and schizophrenia, the decoding of flows, yet also capitalism’s harsh repression of madness for this very reason. Deleuze then shifts to a detailed historical presentation of this unfolding linkage, starting with Marx’s depiction of the Asiatic state, demonstrating the radical contingency of capital’s formation, its generalized decoding of flows yet also an apparatus for conjugating such flows. The session ends with an interruption as Deleuze, describing the merchant capitalists’ seizure of production by turning associations of producers into sub-contractors, follows Marx toward a second aspect of this movement, which is cut off.</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 2, le 14 décembre 1971, est fragmentaire dans la version qui se trouve à WebDeleuze, où Deleuze continue la discussion des concepts socio-économiques qui soutiennent le déroulement de l’<em>Anti-Oedipe</em>, avec des références à la troisième et quatrième parties. Voici le lien profond entre le capitalisme et la schizophrénie, le décodage des flux, mais aussi la répression dure de la folie par le capitalisme pour cette même raison. Deleuze passe ensuite à une présentation historique détaillée de ce lien en commençant par la description par Marx de l’État asiatique, démontrant la contingence radicale de la formation du capital, son décodage généralisé des flux, mais aussi un appareil pour conjuguer ces flux. La séance se termine par une interruption alors que Deleuze est interrompu lorsqu’il décrit la prise de contrôle de la production par les capitalistes marchands en transformant les associations de producteurs en sous-traitants, puis propose de suivre Marx vers un deuxième aspect de ce mouvement.</p>