Anti-Oedipus II, Lecture 2, 26 March 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 2, 26 March 1973, Deleuze starts with a reference to Foucault regarding the emergence of statements over several domains at once, seeking a different explanation for this emergence beyond those given by structuralists and Marxists. He reviews in some detail various problems with a dualistic perspective, identifying psychoanalysis as the final inheritor of Cartesianism, thereby denying thought as a process which, for him, is fundamentally multiple. Deleuze considers how corrupt perspective about the history of desire emerges in Freud and also where Reich goes wrong, with whom he contrasts Roland Barthes’s perspectives in <em>The Pleasure of the Text</em>’s distinction of texts of pleasure and texts of jouissance. He argues that a perspective of process, through which desire emerges out of its own immanence and productivity, stands in sharp contrast with the Freudian and Lacanian view of lack-pleasure-jouissance. After a session break, Deleuze returns to the Western view of desire as a sign of lack (the first malediction), the second being recourse to an illusion of pleasure, the third being the impossible jouissance-death relationship. Deleuze posits in contrast the production of statements through collective agents of enunciation (and not individuals), i.e. multiplicities of varied nature, and he imagines a graph with two columns: the first is “the bad column” of the false conception of desire, whereas in the other column is the anti-Oedipal apparatus which he outlines. Deleuze suggests that for the next session, Carlos Castaneda’s books (<em>The Teachings of Don Juan</em> and <em>A Separate Reality </em>are the likely sources) provide a view of experimentation in search of a body without organs within a machinic assemblage with a certain distribution of intensities.</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 2, le 26 mars 1973, est fragmentaire dans la version qui se trouve à WebDeleuze, mais qui se trouve en forme plutôt sans lacunes au site Le Terrier. Dans la séance, il s’agit d’une réflexion sur la corruption de l’histoire du désir par la psychanalyse, et en contrepartie, la mise en place de plusieurs concepts, notamment l’un et du multiple, la triade désir-plaisir-jouissance (avec référence à Roland Barthes), et les multiplicités.</p>