Anti-Oedipus I: Logic of Flows, Lecture 8, 7 March 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 8, 7 March 1972, Deleuze reviews points from the previous session, then presents the five differences between codes and axiomatics, arguing that under capitalism, a new regime of alliance emerges with filiation as the operation through which capital produces money as industrial capital and continues to expand its schizo-limit through two sorts of displacement. Deleuze considers different examples from ethnography (researched by Robert Jaulin and Victor Turner) and then, after an unrecorded discussion concerning the Pierre Overney affair, he shifts focus to the intersections of capitalist economics and psychoanalysis. He refers to the role played by Christianity and its trick of placing subjects under the regime of infinite interiorized debt, with a pole of the despotic formation and a pole with the regime of immanence under capitalism. He links these poles to the death drive in the successive social formations, and he concludes that with capitalism, death is decoded. The session is interrupted as Deleuze refers to Freud belief that the death drive is transcendent and silent. [Pierre Overney was a militant Maoist worker assassinated by a Renault security officer at the Regie Renault door in Boulogne-Billancourt on February 25, 1972. On March 4, 200,000 people marched with his coffin through Paris, carrying him on their shoulders. He was buried at Pere-Lachaise cemetery.]</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>

<p>--</p>

<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>Dans cette séance 8, le 7 mars 1972, Deleuze considère en détail la fonction de l’axiomatique en termes de développement scientifique et enrichit ainsi considérablement les aspects des troisième et quatrième parties de <em>l’Anti-Oedipus</em> qui y sont moins développés. Deleuze présente les cinq différences entre codes et axiomatiques, en affirmant que sous le capitalisme, un nouveau régime d'alliance émerge avec la filiation comme opération par laquelle le capital produit de l'argent en tant que capital industriel et continue d'étendre sa schizo-limite à travers deux types de déplacement.</p>