Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus

Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 1 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Introductory Note: A study, in two parts, of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of two sources in Anti-Oedipus for their interpolation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts: Gérard Granel's "L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la ‘coupure’" (1968) on the concept of species-being and François Châtelet’s “La question de l’athéisme de Marx” (1966) on the concept of atheism.1 I advance the following thesis: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desiring-production, their critique of “the ideology of lack” in theories of desire, and their program of “materialist psychiatry” are Marxian (if not Marxist in the orthodox sense) 2 in character, provided we take the young author of the 1844 Manuscripts as seriously as they have. It is the 1844 Manuscripts, rather than Capital or the Grundrisse, through which Deleuze and Guattari encounter Marx as a fellow traveler and path-breaker in overturning the traditional logic of desire, or what they call a priest’s psychology in their Nietzschean idiom. (Of all the moments in Anti-Oedipus that still might annoy the right people, Deleuze and Guattari’s identification of Marx—and Engels—with Nietzsche as far as desire, anthropology, atheism, and philosophical naturalism are concerned is a particularly strong candidate.) Though I agree with Fredric Jameson’s assessment in The Political Unconscious that Anti-Oedipus is a necessary corrective to a practice of “Freudian rewriting,” or the reduction of all meaning in political life to a narrative of familial romance (PU, 21-22), there’s nothing in Anti-Oedipus to justify a wholesale dismissal of psychoanalysis (or for that matter an unqualified embrace of anti-psychiatry) unless you read Deleuze and Guattari too quickly. (And they are almost always read too quickly.) Taking for granted that Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to psychoanalysis as a “combined formation” was “ambiguous,” in their own words (AO, 117), my focus in this series will be Deleuze and Guattari’s adoption and modification of what Marx calls in the 1844 Manuscripts the sensuous apprehension of human psychology through the history of industry.3 Part I. Process and Industry: the Pre-history of Desiring-Production, from the 1844 Manuscripts to Anti-Oedipus Before Granel, a problem: isn’t the 1844 Manuscripts supposed to be the foundational text for Marxist humanism? In Foucault (1987), Deleuze writes that “Man” did not survive the death of God and, in agreement with Foucault, “there is no point in crying over the death of man.” (F, 130) Michel Tournier, who attended Sartre's era-defining speech, "Existentialism is a Humanism," with Deleuze on October 29th, 1945: "We were floored. So our master had had to dig through the trash to unearth this worn-out mixture reeking of sweat and of the inner life of humanism." (qtd. in Dosse’s Intersecting Lives, p. 95) Bad air! Bad air! as Nietzsche would say, and whenever humanism came up Deleuze held his nose. As Althusser has it, the re-publication of the 1844 Manuscripts in Western Europe in the early 60’s was a theoretical event for humanists of all accents (existentialists, phenomenologists, spiritualists, Marxist-humanists).4 Whether the humanism controversy is important for the reader, it was for Deleuze and Guattari, who owe a significant debt to the theoretical anti-humanists—Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey are Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 2 named—throughout Anti-Oedipus both for their reading of Marx and their original contributions to theorizing capitalist society.5 Despite Deleuze and Guattari's evident disagreements with Althusser (one explicit, on the usefulness of the concept of structure, 6 one implicit, on the usefulness of the concept of ideology)7, the principal commentary through which they read the 1844 Manuscripts—Gérard Granel's "L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la ‘coupure’" (1968)—was a direct response to Jacques Rancière's theoretical anti-humanist criticism of the 1844 Manuscripts—"The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy"—written under Althusser's direction during the latter's seminars on Marx at the École Normale Supériere, published in Reading Capital (1965).8 Given Deleuze’s lifelong Nietzschean distastes, theoretical anti-humanism was a natural ally. The thesis I’ll pursue in this study is that Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of the 1844 Manuscripts relies on the theoretical anti-humanist argument that Marx displaces the human essence from its role as the primordial subject of history in his mature work with a concept of the process of production, and that this concept of process is what Deleuze and Guattari, following Granel, identify with ‘industry’ in the 1844 Manuscripts. Process For Althusser, the foundational gesture for Marxist humanism was an uncritical return to the 1844 Manuscripts that embraced the young Marx’s “pre-Marxist,” or Feuerbachian, problematic of alienation.9 By way of brief summary, Althusser identifies the project of the young Marx (specifically in Marx's 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) with Ludwig Feuerbach's call for the practical re-appropriation of the essence of Man. The story so far: Man's essence as an active and communal subject [Gemeinwesen], which pre-exists and is presupposed by human history, is lost or alienated in the products of human activity— private property, capital, commodities, money, State, religion—which humans are reduced to serving and reproducing as if these products were themselves subjects or powers independent of human beings that captured humanity to reproduce themselves. Each of these products is, however, a partial expression and realization of true humanity (as an active, communal being). Developing this insight into (1) the simultaneous alienation of humanity in its products and (2) partial realization of a higher/truer humanity in its alienated products is the first task of critical philosophy, which arises alongside the proletariat, the most alienated and dispossessed class, at the end of history, or the pinnacle of Man's alienation under capitalism, the State, the Church). The second task of critical philosophy is to suffuse the proletariat with this critical consciousness of alienation on the one hand and total/full humanity on the other to precipitate a revolution in which the human species recognizes itself as the author of its own alienation and reappropriates its original/lost essence in a practical reorganization of society beyond capitalism, State, and Church. Human history retrospectively appears as a necessary passage from original essence through alienation towards a full, self-conscious, and practical re-appropriation of the original essence. Here the story ends.10 At this stage of the young Marx's theoretical development, Althusser argues Marx's Feuerbach-derived method is empiricist-idealist: through an empiricism of the subject (concrete givens like Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 3 money, state, church) Marx approaches the idealism of the essence (the Gemeinwesen of Man).11 In Reading Capital, Jacques Rancière demonstrates the retention and (partial) transformation of this humanist, or anthropological, problem in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, the problem of alienated labor. This concept constitutes what Rancière calls “the classical image of alienation.” For this image, alienation consists in (i) the separation of the productive subject from the object of their production, (ii) the domination of the object, which is the objectified essence of the active subject, over the active subject, and (iii) the resulting reversal in the roles of subject and object such that the alienated object (capital) poses itself as the subject of movement and the active subject (the worker) becomes the object of their own product. Rancière opposes this schema of the subject-object reversal to Marx’s account of “inversion” in Capital, whereby “what passes into the thing is not the essence of a subjectivity but a [social] relation [of production]”; consequently, in Capital, capital is itself a thing-ified, or “reified” in technical terms, social relation, and the worker appears in Capital as a bearer [Träger] of the wage-labor relation of production instead of the primordial subject of the process. (RC, 159-161) Furthermore, Rancière develops Althusser's criticism of the "empiricist-idealist" approach in his (Rancière's) account of the theoretical procedure we find in the 1844 Manuscripts. Rancière calls it an "amphibological" procedure through which each law or category of political economy is revealed to have higher significance as an anthropological law or category (Ibid., 86), which presupposes that the categories of political economy are a simple mirror of economic reality grasped through economic phenomena (Ibid., 83). However, Rancière continues, Marx's procedure in the 1844 Manuscripts is exactly the kind of naive approach which Marx himself will later (in the 1859 Contribution and Capital) criticize the political economists for taking, as they never distinguish between economic phenomena as they appear to agents of production (capitalist or worker) and the real process of production that determines the forms of appearance of economic phenomena in the first place. It never occurs to the classical political economists to ask: how are economic phenomena given to us as phenomena in the first place? To answer that question, Rancière argues, we need Marx's theory of the social relations of production, which are necessarily expressed and simultaneously concealed in economic phenomena (Ibid., 167). Only the mature Marx's theoretical apparatus enables us to grasp both the real capitalist process of production and the necessity of its misrecognition by the agents of production. (Ibid., 168) The primordial subject of active humanity (as Gemeinwesen) is no longer either the starting-point (insofar as it is alienated through human history) or endpoint (insofar as it is recognized in the different forms of its alienation) of the mature Marx's theoretical procedure. Rather, the relations of production determine both the position of the subject (as an agent of production) and the position of the object (economic phenomena as they are given to the agents of production). (Ibid., 134) To conclude: for the mature Marx, the critical-phenomenological approach of the young Marx is no longer tenable, as it is incapable of piercing through the apparent motion of economic phenomena (the fetish) to produce a theory of the real motion of the capitalist process of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 4 production. (Ibid., 127-128) It is not enough to discover the essence of Man as it is alienated in economic phenomena, as this leaves the phenomena themselves untouched. The task, rather, is to grasp economic phenomena as phenomenal forms, or better yet as necessary forms of appearance, of the capitalist process of production—itself structured by the social relations of production—which is mystified in economic phenomena.12 Taken together, Althusser and Rancière's Marxian critiques of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts offer us a model of Marxist humanism as a theoretical and practical project. One premise, two tasks. 1. Premise: the primordial subject—the essence of Man—constitutes objective reality, but loses itself in the historical products of its own activity (private property, capital, money, State, Church, etc.). 2. Task 1: recognize in these products, as economic and political phenomena reflected in the laws and categories of political economy and political theory, a partial expression of the activity of the transhistorical subject which has become alienated in a world-historical subject-object reversal. (This is what Althusser calls empiricism of the subject and idealism of the essence; what Rancière calls an “amphibology,” a procedure which reveals the higher, anthropological significance implicit in the categories and laws of political economy.) 3. Task 2: spread this critical consciousness through the ranks of the proletariat, preparing them for a practical re-appropriation of the original essence in the construction of a new, fully human society beyond money, gods, states. The original premise of the reality-constituting subjective essence of Man awaits retroactive confirmation in the revolutionary realization of a truly human society. As Rancière argues, however, in the work of the mature Marx, this primordial subject has been displaced. Rather than constituting reality, the human subject is understood as constituted by the social relations of production in motion, by the capitalist process of production. In the passage where they criticize Althusser's use of the concept of structure, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate exactly this displacement of the essence of the human subject from its role as the sole explanans of capitalist social production—“the discovery of social production as ‘machine’ or ‘machinery,’ irreducible to the world of objective representation.” (AO, 306) Moreover, they agree with the theoretical anti-humanists on the limitations of a phenomenological analysis of capitalist society: Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. (AO, 24) Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 5 Given these two points of agreement, we can already anticipate two conditions for Deleuze and Guattari’s recovery of the 1844 Manuscripts. First, a substitution at the level of explanatory ground: the process of production and social relations of production instead of the primordial essence of the human subject. Second, a substitution at the level of theoretical procedure: relating social phenomena as products back to the process of production instead of relating them back as expressions to the primordial essence of the human subject. Deleuze and Guattari refuse both the ideal premise and the twofold task of Marxist humanism. Deleuze and Guattari hold, with Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (1846), that the first premise of materialist history is a real premise: human beings exist through a definite form of productive activity that modifies the natural conditions of their existence and, by necessity, themselves. Marx and Engels write: "What they are, therefore, coincides with production, both with what they produce and with how they produce."13 If the twofold theoretical task of what Deleuze and Guattari call materialist psychiatry is, on the one hand, the introduction of desire into production and, on the other, the introduction of production into desire (AO, 22), the theoretical anti-humanist account of the subject as a product of the process of production is indispensable for the second task. As for the first, the introduction of desire into production, Deleuze and Guattari return to the 1844 Manuscripts for the concept of industry, since “industry” there concerns desire as productive. This improbable coalition of theoretical anti-humanism and the young Marx makes the following thinkable: a single process of production in which the subject is produced and desire is productive. This is the threshold that defines the concept of desiring-production. Industry For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of industry has two aspects: the unity of humanity and nature and the simultaneous affirmation of desire and its object. Unity of Humanity and Nature According to Bellini, Granel’s commentary on the 1844 Manuscripts begins towards the end of the third manuscript in the chapter “Private Property and Communism,” where Marx criticizes reactive atheism, or a simple negation of God. Granel: “Marx’s atheism does not revolve around fighting against God, but around making him appear secondary.” (qtd. in Bellini, 4) For Granel, the critique of the critique of atheism in the young Marx consists neither in fighting God nor in fighting atheists, but in establishing a positive atheism through the demonstration of the essential unity of humanity and nature through industry, at once sensuous and practical activity, which suspends the problem of relating humanity to nature entirely. If the unity of humanity and nature can be demonstrated, Granel argues, there is no need to introduce the divine (in any of its avatars—theological or philosophical) as a mediating term between them. Granel’s hypothesis is unapologetically ontological: “Production is, within the Marxist ontology of 1844-5, the term which designates the very meaning of being.” (qtd. in Ibid., 8) Already, we know that Marx and Engels claimed that what humans are coincides with their production (with what and how they produce). What Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 6 still needs to be argued for is the coincidence of the being of nature with the process of production. As the young Marx argues, the unity of humanity and nature is both sensuous and practical. Sensuous Unity: Rather than recalling a primordial subject, in the discussion of industry Marx appeals to a fundamental experience: in the sensation of nature as their only object of sensation humans simultaneously sense themselves through the sensation of other humans; through the sensation of other humans humans simultaneously sense nature as their only object of sensation.14 It’s a tortured, chiastic formula, the kind for which the 1844 Manuscripts is notorious. But the chiasmus is strictly necessary for Marx, since it’s a literary figure uniquely suited for the expression of simultaneity. The fundamental experience to which Marx appeals—the sensation of humanity through the sensation of nature; the sensation of nature through the sensation of humanity—is just the simultaneous experience of humanity and nature through the other. We might be tempted to use the language of mediation and claim that humanity exists for itself only through the medium of nature and nature exists for itself only through the medium of humanity. Yet, Marx insists that man simply is nature: “The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.”15 Granel, in an explicitly phenomenological register, calls this experience “Being in the World,” or the existence of human beings in a world before the world has become an object for the human subjects (qtd. in Bellini, 7). The antithetical terms “humanity” and “nature” are derived from this unity—the same essential reality of humanity and nature. Only then does the problem of mediation arise. Practico-sensuous unity: Of course, for Marx the unity of humanity and nature cannot be established solely through an analysis of the “sensuous,” which is the dimension of philosophy opened and exhausted by Feuerbach. It’s a simple dimension with far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, the active faculty of sensation, and on the other, the sensuous object. Each of these terms is realized, or finds reality, through the other. For Granel, when Marx and Engels ridicule Feuerbach’s concept of sensuousness in The German Ideology, they do so because of Feuerbach’s failure to tie the sensuous unity of humanity and nature to the activity of production. (Bellini, 7) This is Marx’s famous reproach to Feuerbach in the Theses: he “does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity.”16 Consequently, for Granel, and Deleuze and Guattari, there is no experience of the unity of humanity and nature except through industry, or the process of production as it develops throughout human history. Marx: “Industry is the historical relationship of nature (…) to man.” (1844, 163) Deleuze and Guattari dramatize the experience of the essential unity of humanity and nature through industry in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus with Büchner’s portrait of Lenz’s stroll: A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Büchner. This walk outdoors is different from the Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 7 moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. “What does my father want? Can he offer me more than that? Impossible. Leave me in peace.” Everything is a machine, celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. “He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.” To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer having any meaning whatsoever. (AO, 2, emphasis mine) For Deleuze and Guattari, this experience of the singular essence of humanity and nature through industry—“universal primary production” (Ibid., 5)—is anterior even to what Marx will later call the metabolic exchange between nature and society following Granel’s suggestion that, at least in the writings of the young Marx from 1844-5, industry is not extrinsic to nature. Only from the point of view that already takes industry as extrinsic to nature allows us to say industry opposes nature, or industry extracts materials from nature, or industry returns waste-products to nature, etc.17 The novelty of Granel’s reading of the 1844 Manuscripts is his argument that the young Marx’s concept of industry already attests to a break with Feuerbach’s “contemplative materialism.” This explains Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach’s reverence for purely theoretical scientific perception and cognition in the 1844 Manuscripts (“natural science will then abandon its abstract materialist, or rather idealist, orientation”)18 and Marx and Engels’ criticism of Feuerbach’s “higher perception” in The German Ideology: “where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men.” We will return to their criticism of Feuerbach’s abstraction of natural science from industry shortly. For Marx, the experience of the unity of humanity and nature is neither a pre-lapsarian garden lost to us as an irretrievable origin nor an esoteric secret for those initiated into the mystic rites of a theoretical, scientific perception. It’s the most ordinary experience in the Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 8 world, even if we might have a hard time recognizing it at first. (Hegel: what is familiar is for that reason not known.) At the end of “Private Property and Communism” Marx argues that the concept of God as a creator is made superfluous with the dissolution of the problem this concept was supposed to solve: the origin of humanity and nature. For Marx, the problem of the origin of humanity and nature is a false problem. He says, for example, that “the idea of the creation of the earth has received a severe blow from the science of geogeny (…) which portrays the formation and development of the earth as a process of spontaneous generation” (Generatio aequivoca). (1844, 165) Marx and Engels use the same concept of spontaneous generation to designate the biological origin of the human species in The German Ideology.19 Setting aside the technical details of Marx and Engels’ use of the pre-Darwinian theory of spontaneous generation, Marx draws the simplest lesson from natural history: “nature and man exist on their own account.” (1844, 165) This is the thesis Marx debates with an imaginary interlocutor who defends the concept of Godas-creator. Marx opens with Aristotle: you are yourself a product of the self-reproduction of the human species, the species-act of sexual intercourse. His interlocutor asks: who produced my parents, or their parents before them, or etc.? Marx responds: you have to admit the circular movement in this regression, that at each step in this indefinite series the human species reproduces itself in a new generation. His interlocutor asks: if the species is self-reproducing, who produced the human species? If nature is selfreproducing, who produced nature as a whole? Marx has two responses. This problem is both false and necessary—false because it is the product of a bad abstraction, necessary because we are only prompted to ask about the origins of humanity and nature as a result of our practical mode of life and the real conditions of our existence. On the falsity of the problem: I can only reply: your question is itself a problem of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrive at that question. (…) If you ask a question about the creation of nature and man you abstract from nature and man. You suppose them non-existent and you want me to demonstrate that they exist. (1844, 166) For whom is the question of the origin of nature and humanity meaningful? For whom do the discoveries of natural history—the autoproduction of the earth and the species—fail to dispel the question of creation? For “popular consciousness,” Marx writes, these questions persist as long as people’s lives have an external cause outside of their control. (1844, 165) Under the regime of private property, the survival of the bulk of humanity depends on the asymmetrical relation between those who labor and those who command labor. Marx gives two cases in the 1844 Manuscripts. In the case of feudalism, for example, the existence of the serf depends on the whims of the lord of the land for their access to the land, which the serf works to produce their means of subsistence. Governed by the satisfaction of the needs of the landowner, this is a relation of personal social domination.20 In the case of capitalism, however, the “free laborer” depends not only on the fluctuations of the price of labor, and therefore their wage, to purchase means of subsistence, but also on the demand for labor itself, which rises and falls depending on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 9 the rate of profit from the employment of labor in different enterprises. Governed by the laws of the market, this is a relation of impersonal social domination.21 Whether feudal lord or industrial capitalist, personal or impersonal social domination, Marx argues that the false question of the origin of humanity and nature will persist as long as workers are forcibly kept separate from the means of production and subsistence (an abstract, schematic anticipation of the history of “primitive accumulation” in part eight of Capital). In 1844, Marx has already developed the critical procedure to which he and Engels will subject the Young Hegelians—Feuerbach, Stirner, Bauer—in The German Ideology (and The Holy Family): false problems cannot be corrected with theoretical-scientific consciousness, but only by the practical transformation of the mode of life that explains the reason for the persistence of these problems because it gave rise to these problems in the first place. This is what Marx means when he concludes: Since, for socialist man, the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man, he, therefore, has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins. Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an alien being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. Atheism, as a denial of this unreality, is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a negation of God and seeks to assert by this negation the existence of man. socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the theoretical and practical sense perception of man and nature as essential beings. (1844, 166-7) If the experience of the unity of humanity and nature is ordinary, it is nevertheless new, a product of the socialist synthesis of the sensuous experience of the practices of production that comprise the extant production process and the scientific analysis of history—both human and natural history—as the development of industry. Therefore, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels claim not only that “the celebrated ‘unity of man and nature’ has always existed in industry,”22 but that we can perceive this unity empirically in the “active life-process” of human beings as they produce and reproduce themselves through multiple practices of production organized into a definite mode of life.23 For Granel, and by extension Deleuze and Guattari, the significance of the concept of species-being in the young Marx is reduced to the meaning of industry as the process of production in which the unity of humanity and nature is constantly exhibited. Granel quotes Marx: “It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life.” (qtd. in Bellini, 9) Granel calls the self-production and -reproduction of the human species through industry an objective subjectivity.24 Finally, if, in the words of Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man” can only be understood through industry, we can make sense Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 10 of Granel’s claim that production is the meaning of being not only for the human species but also for nature itself. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write: We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. This definition of the science of history has the grandest of implications: industry, as the self-production and reproduction of the human species, is simultaneously, given that human beings are only a part of nature, the self-production and reproduction of nature itself as long as human beings exist. For the materialist, no theory of history without a theory of nature and no theory of nature without a theory of history. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is the atheism shared between Marx and Engels and Nietzsche: The question of the father is like that of God: born of an abstraction, it assumes the link to be already broken between man and nature, man and the world, so that man must be produced as man by something exterior to nature and to man. On this point Nietzsche makes a remark completely akin to those of Marx or Engels: "We now laugh when we find 'Man and World' placed beside one another, separated by the sublime presumption of the little word 'and.'" (AO, 107) Returning to Marx and Engels’ criticism of Feuerbach’s abstraction of natural science from industry, it’s worth quoting at length: Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution, the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 11 Lacking the concept of industry, Feuerbach is left with two bad abstractions—Man, transcendent to nature, and Nature, transcendent to humanity. Both terms—Man and Nature—exist for Feuerbach only as objects of the senses and not in their developing historical relation through the process of production. This is the reason Marx and Engels write: “As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist.” Since Deleuze and Guattari define their twofold task of materialist psychiatry with explicit reference to this criticism, 25 it’s worth considering each side in turn. As far as Feuerbach considers history he is not a materialist. Feuerbach flees from the empirical, or sensuous, reality of existing humans—“a crowd of scrofulous, overworked, and consumptive starvelings”—into idealism of the essence, a higher perception of Man behind human beings.26 Feuerbach makes Man’s idealized psychology the motive force of history. As a consequence, he views all history retrospectively as as the necessary selfestrangement of Man from himself in the evolution of consciousness, a self-estrangement to be solved by feelings of friendship and love.27 Neither the relations or process of production enter his historical account of Man at any point, and so Marx and Engels deny that Feuerbach gives any real “criticism of the present conditions of life.” For Marx and Engels, it’s no accident that this idealized psychology of Man turns out to be the real psychology of one man in particular, Feuerbach himself, projected onto a factitious image of “the species.”28 A materialist approach to history differs in two respects. First, given the “identity of nature and man,” the relation between human beings and nature at any historical juncture (through industry) determines the relation of human beings to each other, and vice versa.29 Second, different historical forms and organizations of production cannot be explained by ideas held in common at that historical juncture, but rather these different historical forms and organizations of production explain the ideas commonly held at that historical juncture.30 (Both of these insights prefigure the infamous dialectic between the forces and relations of production.)31 As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history. Marx breaks down Feuerbach’s “contemplative materialism” into two steps, a double perception: first, an empirical perception of facts and stuffs, second, a higher and philosophical perception of the true essence of things. (Recall Althusser’s helpful formula: empiricism of the subject, idealism of the essence.) What Feuerbach does not see, however, is “how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given directly from all eternity (...) but the product of industry (...) [and] an historical product.” Marx and Engels use the example of a cherry tree: Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 12 It is because of Feuerbach’s philosophical procedure of perceiving the essence of material things through empirical perception of them that Feuerbach misunderstands natural science. As we have already seen, even the purest natural science of the physicist and chemist is a product of industry and pursued for the sake of industrial advancement. Feuerbach’s eternal essence of nature, transcendent to Man, exists no more than his eternal essence of Man, transcendent to nature. Marx and Engels conclude their criticism of Feuerbach’s abstraction of natural science and its objects of study from industry with the example of recently formed coral islands: For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach. According to Granel’s reading of The German Ideology, we should read the concept of industry—the practical, sensuous unity of humanity and nature through the historical development of the production process—as it is presented in the 1844 Manuscripts as a real break with Feuerbach before the epistemological break that the theoretical antihumanists, under Althusser’s direction, locate in 1845. The concept of industry Marx advances even in 1844 precludes both a transhistorical essence of Man and a transhistorical essence of Nature. By essence, we can only understand the identical essence of humanity and nature in the process of production. This single essence is itself the historical process of social production and reproduction of the human species as it modifies nature. However, at a first glance, Marx and Engels seem to be of two minds about the usefulness of the concept of species-being in The German Ideology. On the one hand, as we have already seen, Marx and Engels uses the same scientific reference—the theory of spontaneous generation—to refer to the self-generation of the human species in The German Ideology Marx uses in the 1844 Manuscripts. On the other hand, Marx and Engels call the self-generation of the species a “speculative-idealistic” or even “fantastic” expression for the real manifold of historical forms of social-cooperation and mutual dependence (determined themselves by the forces and relations of production).32 The context of Marx’s criticism of the concept “species-being” is crucial, however, because he criticizes the use of the concept only so far as it designates “the mystery” by which human beings reproduce themselves without explaining social production/reproduction by reference to the “real connections” between human beings. As Marx explains in the Theses on Feuerbach, specifically thesis 6, Feuerbach only understands “the human essence” as an abstraction inherent in individual humans, but not for what it truly is--an ensemble of social relations.33 Therefore, Marx continues, Feuerbach is compelled to discover the transcendent essence of the human being through isolated extant human beings as a “genus,” which Marx calls “an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.” As opposed to species-being understood as the real connections between humans and nature and humans and other humans formed in industry, Feuerbach Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 13 conceives of the human genus only as a transcendent generality shared by all humans considered abstractly (viz., as individuals isolated both from nature and each other). Without the concept of industry, species-being would only name a mystery—how do human beings produce/reproduce themselves? But this mystery only arises in the first place as the result of an abstraction of existing human beings from industry, the real historical relationship between human beings and nature and between human beings through the developing process of production. As Marx writes in thesis 8: “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” For Granel, species-being, or the self-production and -reproduction of the human species, is not only thinkable only through the concept of industry, but is itself derivative of the real unity of humanity and nature in the process of production. This is Granel’s argument for the claim that production is the meaning of being—of both humanity and nature—in the young Marx. Citing Granel, Deleuze and Guattari write: [W]e make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature within the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. (AO, 4) In a curious turn of events, for Deleuze and Guattari it seems that only the theoretical antihumanist displacement of the primordial subject of Man by a concept of the process (and relations) of production allows us to read the 1844 Manuscripts from what Adorno would call “the standpoint of redemption” through Granel and recover even the concept of species-being through the concept of industry. Marx breaks with Feuerbach in 1845 using his concept of industry developed first in 1844, regardless of whether Marx turned industry against Feuerbach’s contemplative materialism explicitly in the 1844 Manuscripts. Affirmation of Desire and its Object Having dealt with the first aspect of the concept of industry, the unity of humanity and nature, we can move on to the second, the simultaneous affirmation of desire and its object. This aspect of industry is crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of what they call “the ideology of lack” in theories of desire. The key passage in Marx seems to be from the “Money” chapter of the third manuscript: If man’s feelings, passions, etc. are not merely anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are true ontological affirmations of being (nature), and if they are only really affirmed in so far as their object exists as an object of sense, then it is evident (...) [that] only through developed industry (…) does the ontological essence of human passions, in its totality and its humanity, come into being; the Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 14 science of man itself is a product of man’s self-formation through practical activity (...) (1844, 189) This quote can function as a center of gravity for many of Deleuze and Guattari’s floating, often uncited, references to the 1844 Manuscripts throughout Anti-Oedipus. Analyzing it, we can grasp the inseparability of the first aspect of the concept of industry—the unity of humanity and nature—and the second—the simultaneous affirmation of desire and its object. A1: For Deleuze and Guattari, this unity of anthropological passions and natural being gives the process of production a dual meaning, both social and metaphysical: "process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacal within nature, and process as social production of desiring-machines within history. Neither social relations nor metaphysical relations constitute an 'afterward' or a 'beyond.'" (AO, 49) Alongside this single process of production, something is produced. The product is the historical human subject, homo historia, as a residue left over from the process of production. (Ibid., 16-21) The difference between the two senses of subject in Anti-Oedipus would take us too far afield from the 1844 Manuscripts into Deleuze’s and Guattari’s very idiosyncratic use of the play of the categories of political economy—production, distribution/exchange, consumption—at the beginning of Marx’s Grundrisse.34 However, it should be noted that there is an asymmetry in Anti-Oedipus between homo historia, the human subject as a residual byproduct of the historical development of industry, and homo natura, which is less of a ‘subject’ proper than the pre-subjective experience human beings have of the unity of humanity and nature through industry. From the point of view of industry as the fundamental identity of humanity and nature, Deleuze and Guattari describe the pre-subjective experience of humanity: Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other—not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producerproduct. (Ibid., 4-5) This is what it’s like to experience species-being at all. A2: Just as human beings and nature derive their very being from industry, so do human passions and natural objects. Deleuze and Guattari use Marx’s concept (and Fourier’s concept) of “passion” interchangeably with their own concept of “desire” at several crucial moments in Anti-Oedipus. In one of these uncited references, identifiable as a reference to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 15 Marx solely through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the adjective ‘sensuous,’ they imply that the only theory of desire fit for Marx and Engels’ materialist approach to history is one that holds the mutual definition of desire and its object: on the one hand, of desire as “natural and sensuous objective being” through its object, and on the other, its object through “the objective being of desire” (Ibid., 311). For Deleuze and Guattari, Marx’s theory of passion— inseparable, they imply, from the materialist theory of history—is incompatible with the psychoanalytic model of desire-as-lack, according to which desire is conceived of as an "incurable insufficiency of being" missing its object. (Ibid., 26) In their critique of desire-aslack, Deleuze and Guattari recruit the young Marx: “As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a 'natural and sensuous object.” (Ibid., 27) It is by way of Marx, then, that Deleuze and Guattari argue desire is productive and industry is the process of the real producing the real, desire and desire’s object, or the autoproduction of reality itself. 35 Though it lies beyond the scope of this study, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari identify the autoproduction of the real with the autoproduction of the unconscious, which, for them, is the autoproduction of life itself. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is the groundbreaking discovery of the young Marx (and Engels), referred to anonymously as “the socialist thinker” in the following passage: For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man. The autoproduction of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the subject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence from an indefinite parental regression. To quote Artaud once again: "I got no/papamummy." — Deleuze and Guattari (Ibid., 49, emphasis mine) This discovery of the pre-subjective experience of species-being is the reason, Deleuze and Guattari write, “why desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of and deals with the schizo as Homo natura.” (Ibid., 5) Undoubtedly, this raises more questions than answers, and questions that I cannot answer in this study. For example: what is the relationship between species-being and schizophrenia? How does what Marx held to be the ordinary experience of the unity of humanity and nature through industry relate to the extraordinary experience of this same unity through schizophrenia? These two questions can only be answered through a more thorough investigation of Deleuze and Guattari’s program of materialist psychiatry than I am able to provide here. At the very least, however, I hope I was able to de-familiarize the first few pages of Anti-Oedipus a little. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 16 Part II. Atheism: Only a Passage - Overcoming the Criticism of Religion and Myth with Marx, Châtelet, Deleuze, and Guattari Postscript to Part One This study is part two of a series on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Karl Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Anti-Oedipus. In part one, I argued that Deleuze and Guattari combined the theoretical anti-humanist criticism—by Louis Althusser and Jacques Rancière—of the young, yet-Feuerbachian Marx and Gérard Granel’s commentary on (and response to the theoretical anti-humanists with regards to) the 1844 Manuscripts to recover a concept of industry, and by extension a concept of species-being, from that same text without, thereby, recapitulating Marxist humanism. The theoretical antihumanists demonstrated how the essence of Man in the work of the young Marx was displaced from its role as the primordial, constitutive, and transcendent “subject of history” by the concept of the process (and relations) of production in the mature Marx (of the Contribution and Capital). Rather than explaining the forms of modern social life (state, church, money, capital, private property, etc.) by reference to the self-estrangement of the essentially active subject “Man,” the scientific procedure of the mature Marx consists in explaining the production of human subjects themselves from the process (and relations) of production, or the real, historical production and reproduction of human society in a succession of definite modes. Through Granel’s singular reading of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology (1846), Deleuze and Guattari recover the concept of industry from the young Marx, which concerns the real, historical process of production as a perpetual exhibition of the fundamental unity of humanity and nature in their dynamic, reciprocal definition of one another. In turn, this enables Deleuze and Guattari to recover the concept of human species-being from the young Marx without ever re-establishing the essence of Man to its role as the author of history. Given the logical anteriority of industry as the unity of humanity and nature through production to the antithetical terms “humanity” and “nature,” taken as extrinsic and/or antagonistic to one another, Granel, and Deleuze and Guattari in his wake, re-conceptualizes the human essence—the natural essence of humanity and the human essence of nature, in the discourse of the young Marx—as immediate identity with the essence of nature through the process of production. 36 To experience human species-being, then, is not to elect to a transcendent essence and, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, become “king of creation,” but rather to be restored to immanence—to active, and total, participation in the process of production that produced you. To become, in their words, “the being who is in intimate contact with all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe.” (AO, 4) This, I argued, is the theoretical pre-history of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desiring-production, since human desire and its natural object reciprocally define one Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 17 another (in their reality, crucially, for Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalytic models of desire-as-lack) through the same unity in which humanity and nature do. Consequently, even though Deleuze and Guattari reprise the struggle against alienation37—or, in their idiom, reterritorialization38—with explicit (though uncited) reference to the third manuscript,39 we are compelled to understand alienation as the forcible separation of human beings as products from the process of production—at once natural and historical—that produced them. For Deleuze and Guattari, this forcible separation takes the form of social repression40 that serves the interest, or rationality,41 of forms of social sovereignty as they secure their own reproduction.42 Though I won’t do so here, I hope to expand on Deleuze and Guattari’s idiosyncratic theory of alienation in the future. Introduction to Part II For this week, just a few reflections on François Châtelet’s contribution to Deleuze and Guattari’s reception of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Anti-Oedipus. As with Granel’s, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Châtelet’s commentary—“La question de l’athéisme de Marx” (1966)—once. However, I contend that its importance is just as decisive. I’ll pursue Châtelet’s impact indirectly (for the most part) as well, specifically through Deleuze’s own article “Pericles and Verdi: The Philosophy of François Châtelet” (1988), published three years after Châtelet’s death. My thesis is that through Châtelet’s reading of Marx, as well as Deleuze’s own reading of Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari argue that atheism is something like what Fredric Jameson called a “vanishing mediator”: a bearer of social transformation which can be forgotten once that transformation has been secured (and, perhaps, the forgetting of which is the index of a successful transformation).43 If, once again, it is the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts to whom Deleuze and Guattari turn before any other Marx, this time through Châtelet, it is precisely to capture the intensity of his passage through atheism towards the rich indifference to pseudo-problems of the non/existence of God that finally allows real problems to emerge. The Question of Atheism [I]f there is, for us, a question of Marx’s atheism, it is because, for Marx, having achieved the mastery of his thought, atheism is no longer even a question for him. Basically, Marx is not a master in thinking atheism—like Epicurus, Sade, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, or Sartre; he is closer to Spinoza: like him, he teaches us that atheism cannot, in the end, be understood as a doctrine, that it is only an attitude, an ideology, in short, that it is conceptless. (Châtelet, 373) With the exception of Nietzsche’s inclusion, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari will agree. Atheism is essentially a passage to more serious matters—to communism and the science of societies. Châtelet identifies this first passage—from atheism to communism—in the 1844 Manuscripts, which prefigures the second—from atheism to the science of societies—in the theoretical development (“epistemological break,” perhaps) that Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 18 distinguishes the mature Marx (of the Contribution and Capital) from the young Marx. Châtelet claims that the theoretical anti-humanist intervention makes a new reading of the disappearance of the atheist polemic against “religion in general” in Marx’s mature work both possible and necessary.44 Rather than assuming Marx considered his earliest remarks on the subject of atheism as a passage to communism sufficient, Châtelet argues the mature Marx goes further, to the point of denying “religion in general” as an object or premise in the materialist analysis of societies. We will consider each passage in turn. From Atheism to Communism At the outset, Châtelet periodizes Marx’s body of work roughly along the lines of the theoretical anti-humanists into three periods: the “writings of youth” (pre-1844), the works of the break (1844-45, possibly extending until the publication of the Contribution in ‘59), and the works of maturity (post-1859). Subsequently, Châtelet traces the shift in Marx’s treatment of religion through all three periods: first, Marx is a committed Feuerbachian who undertook the critique of religious alienation, second, a critic of Feuerbach who located the source of religious alienation in civil society, third, Marx appears to abandon the critique of religion in general and instead analyzes the specific functions of religious doctrines and rituals in certain periods in history. Châtelet plays all the hits—from religion is the heart of a heartless world and opium of the people45 to the appropriateness of Christianity’s cult of the abstract man in a society of generalized commodity production. 46 For our purposes, however, Châtelet’s discussion of the 1844 Manuscripts is most important. For Châtelet, Marx has already broken with Feuerbach in the 1844 Manuscripts to the extent that he poses a certain question and offers a certain answer. To the question why humanity experiences religious alienation (the alienation of Man from himself in a hypostasized image of Man called God) at all, Marx refuses Feuerbach’s speculativepsychological account (a story about consciousness splitting itself from itself) and refers instead to the structure of (civil) society, the real social existence and relations of human beings in the production and reproduction of their mode(s) of life. In my last study, I reconstructed Marx’s argument that the concept of God as Creator of humanity and nature and Mediator between them was rendered superfluous by the discovery of natural history that man and nature exist on their own account (1844, 165) and in immediate unity with one another through industry (Ibid., 163). Put simply, nature and humanity generate themselves and in the self-generation of humanity we discover a mode of the self-generation of nature itself. Nevertheless, Marx explains that the concept of God as Creator and Mediator persists for a reason: the asymmetrical relation under the regime of private property between those who labor and those who command labor. Without getting into specifics again—Marx’s two examples are personal social domination under feudalism and impersonal social domination under capitalism—Marx argues that the idea of God as Creator persists as long as people’s survival is dependent on the lords of labor— whether the whims of a lord with a title and landed property or the calculations of the capitalist adding/eliminating jobs according to the laws of the marketplace and the rate of profitability—a source of livelihood that is neither transparent nor tractable to the mass of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 19 laborers. Marx’s explanation for the persistence of the concept of God as Mediator between humanity and nature concerns the real separation of humanity from nature under the regime of private property, a problem Marx introduces in the 1844 Manuscripts47 and develops in the Grundrisse48 but which I don’t have the time to treat in detail in this study. Consequently, the Feuerbachian problem of religious alienation—or the domination of Man by God, an image of himself in the face of which he experiences himself as inessential and to which he is beholden—is, for the young Marx, one of those problems that might express itself in a theoretical discourse but can only be solved by practice.49 The problem of religious alienation demands the real overthrow of the conditions of everyday life under private property. Hence, in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes: Religious alienation as such occurs only in the sphere of consciousness, in the inner life of man, but economic alienation is that of real life and its supersession, therefore, of both aspects. (…) Communism begins where atheism begins (Owen), but atheism is at the outset still far from being communism; indeed it is still for the most part an abstraction. Thus the philanthropy of atheism is at first only an abstract philosophical philanthropy, whereas that of communism is at once real and oriented towards action. (156-7) For Châtelet, there are therefore three moments to the passage from atheism to communism in the 1844 Manuscripts. To paraphrase his presentation: first, the atheist who diagnoses religious alienation as a problem discovers the inessentiality of human beings in the face of God is only the expression in theoretical discourse of the reality of a society in which, under the regime of private property, human beings are reduced to inessentiality; second, the atheist is compelled to practically address the contradictions of alienated society and overcome the reduction of humanity to inessentiality; third, the atheist develops a theory of this practice of addressing the contradictions of alienated society, which engenders the final practice Marx calls communism. (Châtelet, 380) It is a model for the development of the unity of theory and practice—from a theoretical discovery to a practical re-orientation to a second theoretical discovery and second practical re-orientation. In the first moment, a theoretical discovery of the root of religious alienation in economic alienation. In the second, a practical re-orientation away from theoretical disputes over the existence or non-existence of God towards the process and structure of social relations of private property that reduce human beings to inessentiality. In the third, a theory of this practical re-orientation that grasps the scattered acts of resistance to the regime of private property as part of a single, real movement to overturn the status quo. During this third moment, resistance to the regime of private property acquires a proper name—communism—which effects a second practical re-orientation towards the formation of socialist political associations. Though Marx has not, at this stage, abandoned the criticism of religion,50 he nevertheless mocks atheism. It has significance only as the denial of an unreality, an unreality that is no longer meaningful for socialists to deny. He concludes “Private Property and Communism” Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 20 by criticizing the attempt of doctrinaire atheists to assert the existence of essential humanity through a negation of God. However, Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the theoretical and practical sense perception of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human self-consciousness, no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion; just as the real life of man is positive and no longer attained through the negation of private property, through communism. (1844, 167) For the young Marx, therefore, the socialist struggle against the regime of private property to both make the conditions of the existence of humanity transparent/tractable to all and overcome the separation of humanity from nature (restoring to producers the means of subsistence and production) is a living demonstration of the discoveries of natural science—the autoproduction of nature and humanity, the autoproduction of nature through the autoproduction of humanity. But this requires that the abstract philanthropy of atheism, which claims to disalienate humanity through a theoretical critique of the domination of religious images over human minds, vanishes into the practical generosity of the communist associations struggling to overturn the order of private property and restore, in the chiastic refrain of the 1844 Manuscripts, nature to humanity and humanity to nature. Marx: Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an alien being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. (Ibid., 166-7) From Atheism to the Science of Societies You would expect, Châtelet continues, Marx to develop this conception of the unity of atheism and communism, or of the necessary passage of the former into the latter, in his later work. He does not. Châtelet says we have two alternative explanations: either Marx considered the matter settled more or less by his early work or Marx’s refusal to speak of “religion in general” as an object of critique indexes a fundamental shift in his thought. (Châtelet, 381) Châtelet tells us he finds the latter, a reading Althusser makes available to us for the first time, both more correct and more interesting. For Châtelet, the criticism of “religion in general” is incompatible with the historical science of societies. If Marx’s great discovery is the science of history, of the determination in-the-last-instance of social institutions by the relations and forces of production, Marx can no longer be concerned with religious phenomena in general. Châtelet: “What matters to him is less to criticize religion as a source of illusion than to analyze, for a given society, the ideological function of its various forms.” (381-2) This is precisely what Châtelet claims we find if we turn to the argument in Capital that Christianity’s cult of the abstract man, in the form of bourgeois protestantism, “is the most fitting form of religion” for Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 21 a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labors into relation with each other as homogeneous human labor (…) (Capital, 172) If the young Marx mocked atheism as the denial of an unreality, an ultimately senseless attempt to solve a practical problem with theoretical consciousness, Châtelet argues the mature Marx goes further, refusing the criticism of religion as a point of departure for the materialist analysis of history: One thing is clear: the Middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part. (Ibid., fn. 35, 176) Most concisely, perhaps: Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one. (Ibid., fn. 4, 493-4) As for the problem of God and his existence or non-existence, Châtelet concludes that, to the historical materialist at least, it appears either as nonsense or a dramatic response to tedious folklore. For Châtelet, that we have to ask what happened to Marx’s atheism in his mature works at all is a sign that he had more serious work to attend to. From Atheism to Materialist Psychiatry As Deleuze has it in “Pericles and Verdi,” Châtelet’s was a tranquil atheism: There never was a more quietly godless philosopher, except of course for Nietzsche. His is a tranquil atheism, that is, a philosophy in which God is not a problem—the nonexistence and even the death of God are not problems, but rather conditions that should be treated as givens so that the real problems can then emerge: this is the only humility. Never has philosophy located itself more firmly within a field of immanence. (Deleuze, 716) If Châtelet remained an atheist, Deleuze writes, it was in his lifelong treatment of all forms of transcendence and the belief in transcendence as arrogance, but a very violent arrogance. Deleuze quotes Châtelet directly: Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 22 In our philosophers’ jargon, the term for a principle that is posited as both a source of all explanation and as a higher reality is transcendence—a pretty word, which I find quite suitable. Presumptuous types, great and small, from the leader of a tiny fringe group to the president of the United States, run on transcendence like a wino runs on red wine. The medieval God has been dissipated without losing any of his force or deep formal unity: his avatars include Science, the Working Class, the Country, Progress, Health, Security, Democracy, Socialism—the list is too long to give in full. These forms of transcendence have taken his place (which is another way of saying he is still there, omnipresent), carrying out their plans for organization and extermination with increased ferociousness. (Ibid.) If Châtelet remained an atheist, therefore, it was only because, in the idiom of Nietzsche, even we are still pious. This is the context in which Deleuze and Guattari refer to Châtelet’s commentary on the atheism of Marx in Anti-Oedipus: Let us recall Marx’s great declaration: he who denies God does only a “secondary thing,” for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God’s place (the transformation taken into account). But the person who knows that the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning “an alien being, a being placed above man and nature”: he no longer needs the mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation—the negation of the existence of God—since he has attained those regions of an autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan—immediately atheist, immediately orphan. (AO, 58) For Deleuze and Guattari, the death of the Father in psychoanalysis is like the death of God in Nietzsche, who they write, “is exceedingly tired of all these stories revolving around the death of the father, the death of God, and wants to put an end to the interminable discourses of this nature.” (Ibid., 106) Nietzsche, they continue, “wanted us finally to pass on to serious things” and even “gives us twelve or thirteen versions of the death of God, for good measure and to be done with it, so as to render the event comical.” (Ibid.) If Nietzsche says that the news that God is dead takes time to bear fruit, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “The fruits of this news are not the consequences brought about by the death of God, but this other news that the death of God is no consequence.” (Ibid., 106-7) It is through the unlikely pair of Nietzsche and Engels, in his reproach to Bachofen in the preface to The Origin of the Family, that Deleuze and Guattari reproach the psychoanalysts: “it would seem that they really believe in all this—in myth, in Oedipus and castration.”51 The evaluation of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis— Freudian and Jungian!52—for not only believing in myths, but in saving belief in an historical era in which belief in myth has become impossible by imputing it directly to the unconscious (in Deleuze and Guattari’s estimation, an egregious category mistake) 53, lies outside of the scope of this study. More relevant for our purposes is Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of idealism, borrowed directly from the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology: the separation in theory of the human being as a product from the Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 23 process that produced it54 that is only an effect the real separation of the human subject from the process of social production and reproduction in practice under the regime of private property.55 For Deleuze and Guattari, if traditional psychoanalysis tends towards idealist psychiatry, that’s because it needs to refer back to myth, to retain a belief in God as Creator and Mediator through the figure of the Father, in order to analyze the origin of psychic pathology and re-establish the relationship between the analysand and the world (of history and nature). The premise of materialist psychiatry is, however, the premise of historical materialism—the co-extension of humanity and nature in industry, the autoproduction of nature itself in the mode of the historical autoproduction of the human species.56 This is why Deleuze and Guattari claim that Judge Schreber’s “self-cure” was an affirmation of his own immediate relationship to history and nature.57 Again, I have to conclude by raising questions that can only be answered by a more sustained reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s program of materialist psychiatry, especially the following: what is the relationship between the process of desiringproduction and the process of social production/reproduction in Anti-Oedipus? How did Deleuze and Guattari account for their identification of psychic and social repression? What is clear, however, is that Deleuze and Guattari returned to Marx’s atheism in order to undertake a passage through the real premise of historical materialism (the concept of industry) towards a new science, “a truly materialist psychiatry,” the “twofold task” of which is “introducing desire into the mechanism [of production] and introducing production into desire.” (Ibid., 22) Or, in terms of “the two positive tasks of schizoanalysis” at the conclusion of Anti-Oedipus: on the one hand, the analysis of a given subject’s immediate relation of desire to the machinery of the production process; on the other, the analysis of the collective libidinal investments of groups in the capitalist social field that indicate the degree to which these groups are invested both (simultaneously, even) in the reproduction of the regime of private property and in its revolutionary overthrow. 58 Concretely, this is what it would mean for Deleuze and Guattari to pass on from the critique of idealist psychiatry to more serious matters. If Deleuze and Guattari remain atheists, however, it is because even we, the cynical subjects of capitalist modernity, are still pious.59 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 24 Notes 1 In Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (1999), Eugene Holland notes in passing that Deleuze and Guattari's view of human-natural relations is drawn explicitly from Spinoza, Bataille, and the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts. (Holland, pp. 53-54 / endnote 45, p. 135). Holland also identifies Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Body without Organs, as the limit approached by the schizophrenic, with Marx's project in the 1844 Manuscripts of freeing ourselves from either pre-given biological or manufactured and historical modes of sensory gratification (Ibid., p. 32 / endnote 16, p. 132). In The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (2003), Jason Read, in a masterful reconstruction of the precursors in Marx's work to Marx's concept of living labor in Capital, situates his own reading of the 1844 Manuscripts between the work of Jacques Ranciere on the one hand, whose contribution to Reading Capital (1965)--"The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy: From the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital"-concerns the difference between Marx's early approach to the critique of political economy and his mature approach, and the work of Gérard Granel on the other, who wrote a direct response to Ranciere--"L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la ‘coupure’" (1968)--criticizing Ranciere's account of the 'epistemological break' between the 1844 Manuscripts and Marx's later work (Read, endnote 65 p. 180). On Deleuze and Guattari's reception of the category of production from the 1844 Manuscripts, see also Read's review of Eric Alliez's Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy? (link: http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2006/10/?m=1 ). For an excellent recent essay on Deleuze and Guattari's "Gothic Marxism," understood through Marx's theory of sensation in the 1844 Manuscripts, See Gregory Marks' "Underground Intensities: The Gothic Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari" (2020) (link: https://thewastedworld.wordpress.com/2020/02/22/gothic-deleuze/amp/ ). In another recent essay, "Marx and 'AntiOedipus.' On Desiring One's Own Suppression" (2020), Tomofei Gerber suggests a near-total coincidence between Marx's concept of species-being in the 1844 Manuscripts and Deleuze and Guattari's reception of this Marx in their deployment of the concept of "the generic life of the species" (vie générique) in chapter one of Anti-Oedipus (link: https://epochemagazine.org/32/marx-and-anti-oedipus-on-desiring-ones-own-suppression/ ). For another paper that identifies Deleuze and Guattari's "generic life of the species" with the young Marx's concept of species-being, see Nick Dyer-Witheford's "Species-beings: For Biocommunism" (link: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.8546&rep=rep1&type=pdf ). 2 Dosse's explanation of Deleuze and Guattari's occasionally ambivalent relationship to Marx, and to Marxism, is read entirely through a claim Deleuze makes in his 1973 lectures at Vincennes that Anti-Oedipus was not a "return to Marx" (Dosse pp. 197-198), a claim which warrants further examination given the fact that Deleuze and Guattari directly call for a "return to Marx" (specifically for a renewal of the Marxist theory of money) in Anti-Oedipus (AO p. 230). I will deal with the content of Deleuze's claims in the 1973 Vincennes lectures in this series--specifically Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Marx's theory of needs in favor of a problematic of desire (Dosse, p. 197). Put simply, even Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Marx’s theory of needs, which they identify with the “ideology of lack” or the traditional logic of desire, in AntiOedipus they use the theory of passion advanced by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts to critique the primacy of need and lack in analysis. (AO, pp. 26-27) It is worth noting that Deleuze himself, in an interview with Guattari--"From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus," collected in Deleuze's Negotiations (1977)--repeats the claim that he and Guattari aren't after a return to Marx (N, 22). However, Deleuze later not only defends Marx from the "New Philosophers" (Ibid., p. 145) in an interview titled "On Philosophy" but says no one needs a critique of Marx, only a modern theory of money as good as Marx's that picks up from where Marx left off (Ibid., p. 152). Deleuze's refers in "On Philosophy" to the work of Bernard Schmitt. For a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's use of Schmitt in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and a critical recovery of their use of the work of Suzanne de Brunhoff on Marx's theory of money, see Christian Kerslake's excellent "Marxism in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia: On the Conflict Between the Theories of Suzanne de Brunhoff and Bernard Schmitt" (2015) (link: https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia22/parrhesia22_kerslake.pdf ). For a final reference on Deleuze and Guattari's ambivalent relationship to Marx, see Deleuze's interview with Antonio Negri, "Control and Becoming," where Deleuze explains the ways in which he and Guattari have "remained Marxists" (N, pp. 171-172). For another recent essay on Deleuze and Guattari's ambivalence towards Marxism and their inheritance of Marx, see Geoff Pfeifer's "The Question of Capitalist Desire: Deleuze and Guattari with Marx" (link: https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/14493/12%20Pfiefer%20Capital.pdf?sequence=5 ). Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, “Private Property and Communism”: “It can be seen that the history of industry and industry as it objectively exists is an open book of the human faculties, and a human psychology which can be sensuously apprehended.” (p. 162) 3 4 see Althusser's "The '1844 Manuscripts' of Karl Marx" and "On the Young Marx" from For Marx Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 25 5 In Deleuze and Guattari’s first citation of Capital in Anti-Oedipus, specifically the quote from Capital vol. 3 concerning capital as “a very mystic being” (qtd. in AO, p. 11), Deleuze and Guattari recommend Althusser, Balibar, and Macherey’s contributions to Reading Capital as a guide for understanding their (Deleuze and Guattari’s) theory of the mystical character of capital (Ibid., endnote 9, p. 384). Beyond this, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Althusser and Balibar’s contributions to Reading Capital twice [to construct their theory of the uniqueness of capitalism]: (1) the predominance of political, rather than economic, social domination before capitalism (Ibid., p. 247) and (2) the contingent conjunction of flows of money-capital and flows of labor at the origin of capitalism (Ibid., p. 225). In an uncited reference to Balibar, Deleuze and Guattari depend on his work for their discussion of the tendencies that counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Ibid., p. 228). Deleuze and Guattari criticize Althusser for reducing the (machinic) process of social production and reproduction to a structure of representation: "Why the theater? How bizarre, this theatrical and pasteboard unconscious: the theater taken as the model of production. Even in Louis Althusser we are witness to the following operation: the discovery of social production as "machine" or "machinery," irreducible to the world of objective representation (Vorstellung); but immediately the reduction of the machine to structure, the identification of production with a structural and theatrical representation (Darstellung). Now the same is true of both desiring-production and social production: every time that production, rather than being apprehended in its originality, in its reality, becomes reduced (rabattue) in this manner to a representational space, it can no longer have value except by its own absence, and it appears as a lack within this space." (AO, p. 306) The evaluation of Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of Althusser’s use of the concept of structure lies outside of the scope of this study. 6 Deleuze and Guattari famously criticize the concept of ideology in Anti-Oedipus as “an excerable concept that hides the real problems, which are always of an organizational nature” (AO, p. 344), which distinguishes their project from Althusser’s in no uncertain terms. They argue that (1) ‘ideological analysis’ is a poor excuse for literary criticism (since, they argue, people can be ‘co-opted’ or ideologically compromised but literary texts can’t) (Ibid., p. 133), (2) preconscious libidinal investments (see their discussion of the ‘Leninist break’l) are mediated by ideology but unconscious libidinal investments are investments made directly into the infrastructure or economy and happen “well beneath” ideology (Ibid., p. 104-105), (3) Reich misunderstands revolutionary/reactionary libidinal investments as merely ideological instead of as not investments made directly into social production/reproduction (Ibid., p. 118-119), (4) ideology cannot explain the libidinal investments that bind us to capitalism (Ibid., p. 239) because the economic organization of capitalism itself arouses us (Ibid., p. 346), (5) desire belongs to the infrastructure and not to ideology (Ibid., p. 348). However, Deleuze and Guattari are inconsistent and use the concept of ideology several times: they (1) say the ideology of capitalism is “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed” (Ibid., p. 34), (2) denounce Oedipus as an “ideological beginning, for the sake of ideology” (Ibid., p. 101), (3) call the idea of a liberal/humane capitalism ideological (Ibid., p. 373), (4) refer to their object of criticism (the psychoanalytic theory of castration) as the “ideology of lack” (Ibid., p. 295 & p. 308). 7 See Jason Read's Micro-Politics of Capital: "These two tendencies are clearly articulated, on very different grounds, the first by Gérard Granel (“L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la ‘coupure’”) and second by Jacques Rancière (“The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’: From the Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital”). Granel’s essay is a direct response to Rancière and the argument of the “break” between the young Marx and the scientific Marx. In citing these essays together I do not mean to suggest a simple balancing of perspectives, or an interpretive indecisiveness, rather, the fact of breaks and tensions in Marx that cannot be fixed by a date." (endnote 65, 108) 8 Althusser, in "Marxism and Humanism": "Now, it is not less striking to see that these problems are occasionally, if not frequently, dealt with theoretically by recourse to concepts derived from Marx’s early period, from his philosophy of man: the concepts of alienation, fission, fetishism, the total man, etc. However, considered in themselves, these problems are basically problems that, far from calling for a ‘philosophy of man’, involve the preparation of new forms of organization for economic, political and ideological life (including new forms of individual development) in the socialist countries during the phase of the withering-away or supersession of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Why is it that these problems are posed by certain ideologues as a function of the concepts of a philosophy of man – instead of being openly, fully and rigorously posed in the economic, political and ideological terms of Marxist theory? Why do so many Marxist philosophers seem to feel the need to appeal to the pre-Marxist ideological concept of alienation in order supposedly to think and ‘resolve’ these concrete historical problems? We would not observe the temptation of this ideological recourse if it were not in its own way the index of a necessity which cannot nevertheless take shelter in the protection of other, 9 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 26 better established, forms of necessity. There can be no doubt that Communists are correct in opposing the economic, social, political and cultural reality of socialism to the ‘inhumanity’ of Imperialism in general; that this contrast is a part of the confrontation and struggle between socialism and imperialism. But it might be equally dangerous to use an ideological concept like humanism, with neither discrimination nor reserve, as if it were a theoretical concept, when it is inevitably charged with associations from the ideological unconsciousness and only too easily blends into themes of petty-bourgeois inspiration (we know that the petty bourgeoisie and its ideology, for which Lenin predicted a fine future, have not yet been buried by History)." 10 Althusser, again in "Marxism and Humanism": "Marx still professes a philosophy of man: ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root; but for man the root is man himself’ (1843). But then man is only freedom-reason because he is first of all ‘Gemeinwesen’, ‘communal being’, a being that is only consummated theoretically (science) and practically (politics) in universal human relations, with men and with his objects (external nature ‘humanized’ by labour). Here also the essence of man is the basis for history and politics. History is the alienation and production of reason in unreason, of the true man in the alienated man. Without knowing it, man realizes the essence of man in the alienated products of his labour (commodities, State, religion). The loss of man that produces history and man must presuppose a definite pre-existing essence. At the end of history, this man, having become inhuman objectivity, has merely to re-grasp as subject his own essence alienated in property, religion and the State to become total man, true man. This new theory of man is the basis for a new type of political action: the politics of practical reappropriation. The appeal to the simple reason of the State disappears. Politics is no longer simply theoretical criticism, the enlightenment of reason through the free Press, but man’s practical reappropriation of his essence. For the State, like religion, may well be man, but man dispossessed: man is split into citizen (State) and civil man, two abstractions. In the heaven of the State, in ‘the citizen’s rights’, man lives in imagination the human community he is deprived of on the earth of the ‘rights of man’. So the revolution must no longer be merely political (rational liberal reform of the State), but ‘human’ (‘communist’), if man is to be restored his nature, alienated in the fantastic forms of money, power and gods. From this point on, this practical revolution must be the common work of philosophy and of the proletariat, for, in philosophy, man is theoretically affirmed; in the proletariat he is practically negated. The penetration of philosophy into the proletariat will be the conscious revolt of the affirmation against its own negation, the revolt of man against his inhuman conditions. Then the proletariat will negate its own negation and take possession of itself in communism. The revolution is the very practice of the logic immanent in alienation: it is the moment in which criticism, hitherto unarmed, recognizes its arms in the proletariat. It gives the proletariat the theory of what it is; in return, the proletariat gives it its armed force, a single unique force in which no one is allied except to himself. So the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and of philosophy is once again sealed in the essence of man." Althusser, also in "Marxism and Humanism": "These two postulates are complementary and indissociable. But their existence and their unity presuppose a whole empiricist-idealist world outlook. If the essence of man is to be a universal attribute, it is essential that concrete subjects exist as absolute givens; this implies an empiricism of the subject. If these empirical individuals are to be men, it is essential that each carries in himself the whole human essence, if not in fact, at least in principle; this implies an idealism of the essence. So empiricism of the subject implies idealism of the essence and vice versa. This relation can be inverted into its ‘opposite’ – empiricism of the concept/idealism of the subject. But the inversion respects the basic structure of the problematic, which remains fixed." 11 Rancière, "The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy": "Classical economics proposes to dissolve these fixed forms, to restore their essential inner unity. Thus, for example, it reduces rent to surplus profit. But it cannot carry out its project because it does not understand these forms as phenomenal forms of the inner essence of the process. It thus affirms the inner essence by the dogmatic negation of appearances and can only exorcise the forms of fetishism without understanding them. Marx's theory, on the contrary, understands these alienated and imaginary forms as the phenomenal forms of the inner essence of the process. It can constitute simultaneously the theory of the process and the theory of its misrecognition. Here we can return to a fourth discourse, that of the 1844 Manuscripts. This discourse also has as its starting-point the 'alienated and imaginary forms' that I have just examined. (...) The discourse of the Manuscripts is therefore a discourse which starts from the alienated and irrational forms and attempts to confine itself to the level of Wirklichkeit. This means that for it these irrational forms will be forms of unreason, of reason estranged, forms of man become foreign to himself. In other words, these alienated forms--and we have seen what meaning this term should be given here--are for this discourse forms of alienation in the anthropological sense of the term. Thus the reduction of the forms of wealth to the determination of alienated labor does not constitute a true critique of the forms of economic Gegenständlichkeit, but maintains the mere form of a reversal in which determinations of the human subject and intersubjectivity are introduced everywhere in the place of material determinations and relations between things (...) This discourse thus still remains captive to the illusions of Wirklichkeit." (RC, pp. 168-169) 12 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 27 Marx and Engels inThe German Ideology: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production." 13 Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, “Private Property and Communism”: “Man is the direct object of natural science, because directly perceptible nature is for man directly human sense experience (an identical expression) in the form of the other person who is directly presented to him in a sensuous way. His own sense experience only exists as human senseexperience for himself through the other person. But nature is the direct object of the science of man. The first object for man—man himself—is nature, sense experience; and the particular sensuous human faculties, which can only find objective realization in natural objects, can only attain self-knowledge in the science of natural being. The element of thought itself, the element of the living manifestation of thought, language, is sensuous in character. The social reality of nature and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical expressions.” (p. 164) 14 15 Ibid., “Alienated Labor” (p. 127) 16 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis 9. See also theses 1 and 5. Deleuze and Guattari: “What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production. What do we mean here by process? It is probable that at a certain level nature and industry are two separate and distinct things: from one point of view, industry is the opposite of nature; from another, industry extracts its raw materials from nature; from yet another, it returns its refuse to nature; and so on. Even within society, this characteristic man-nature, industry-nature, societynature relationship is responsible for the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, consumption. But in general thus entire level of distinctions, examined from the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes (as Marx has demonstrated) not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an over-all process.” (AO, pp. 3-4) 17 Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, “Private Property and Communism”: “If Industry is conceived as the exoteric manifestation of the essential human faculties, the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man can also be understood. Natural science will then abandon its abstract materialist, or rather idealist, orientation, and will become the basis of a human science, just as it has already become—though in an alienated form—the basis of actual human life.” (pp. 163-4) 18 19 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology: “Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature.” 20 See “Rent of Land” in the first manuscript 21 “Wages of Labor” and “Profit of Capital” in the first manuscript 22 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology: “For instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno [Bauer] goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and history” (...), as though these were two separate “things” and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of which all the “unfathomably lofty works” on “substance” and “self-consciousness” were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that the Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 28 celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” of man with nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis.” Ibid.: “This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.” 23 Bellini: “But this “objective world” is nothing other than a reflection of man himself: this “objective being” such as it is defined in the third manuscript allows for their essential unity to be understood.And yet, according to Granel, Marx’s “objective being” designates a sort of “objective” subjectivity, which — like positively established positivity — is built specifically on the primitive grounds of experience set out by Feuerbach. In terms of a study of objectivity within a real unity that metaphysics had always conceived of via representation, Marx’s ontological materialism thus seeks to alter the fate of modern reason. (p. 9) 24 Deleuze and Guattari: “Hence Clerambault regarded automatism as merely a neurological mechanism in the most general sense of the word, rather than a process of economic production involving desiring-machines. As for history, he was content merely to mention its innate or acquired nature. Clerambault is the Feuerbach of psychiatry in the sense in which Marx remarks: “Whenever Feuerbach looks at things as a materialist, there is no history in his works, and whenever he takes history into account, he no longer is a materialist.” A truly materialist psychiatry can be defined, on the contrary, by the twofold task it sets itself: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into desire.” (AO, p. 22) 25 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology: “Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when, for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the species,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure. As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is already obvious from what has been said.” 26 Ibid.: “[H]e still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognising “the true, individual, corporeal man,” emotionally, i.e. he knows no other “human relationships” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life.” 27 Ibid.: “Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature.” Marx criticizes Adolph Wagner in his Notes on Wagner (1879) for making the same substitution of personal psychology for the psychology of Man. 28 Ibid.: "Marx uses the example of “natural religion,” a putative historical stage of human consciousness in which natureworship or the personification of natural forces predominates: “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s restricted relation to nature.)” (emphasis mine) 29 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 29 Marx: “This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,” but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.” This last formula—circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances—prefigures to well-known quotes from Marx. The first, fromThe 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The second, fromA Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” 30 Marx, in the Contribution: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” 31 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology: “But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more below) and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed again in speculativeidealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as “self-generation of the species” (“society as the subject”), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.” 32 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach: “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: 1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – 33 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 30 human individual. 2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.” 34 See Deleuze and Guattari’s first definition of the process of production (AO pp. 3-4) and, for a full account of the relationship between desire and the categories of political economy in question (production, distribution/exchange, consumption), see the entirety of chapter 1, “The Desiring-machines.” (pp. 1-50) Deleuze and Guattari: "If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Hence the product is something removed or deducted from the process of producing: between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum. The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself." (Ibid., 26-27) 35 Marx: “Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural science, to man. If industry is conceived as the exoteric manifestation of the essential human faculties, the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man can also be understood.” (1844, p. 163) // Karl Marx: Early Writings trans. and ed. by T.B. Bottomore with a foreword by Erich Fromm (1964) 36 For a discussion of the role alienation plays in Anti-Oedipus, see Jeffrey Bell’s “Whistle While You Work: Deleuze and the Spirit of Capitalism.” (2011) (https://edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641178.001.0001/upso9780748641178-chapter-2) 37 Deleuze and Guattari: “Production as the abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the forms of property that objectifies it all over again, that alienates it by reterritorializing it.” (AO, p. 259) And: “Marx summarizes the entire matter by saying that the subjective abstract essence [of labor, by Adam Smith and Ricardo] is discovered by capitalism only to be put in chains all over again, to be subjugated and alienated—no longer, it is true, in an exterior and independent element as objectivity, but in the element, itself subjective, of private property: “What was previously being external to oneself—man’s externalization in the thing—has merely become the act of externalizing—the process of alienating.”” (AO, p. 303) 38 This is an uncited reference to “Private Property and Labor” in the third manuscript, where Marx writes the following: “Under the guise of recognizing man, political economy, whose principle is labor, carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man. Man himself is no longer in a condition of external tension with the external substance of private property; he has himself become the tension-ridden being of private property. What was previously a phenomenon of being external to oneself, a real external manifestation of man, has now become the act of objectification, of alienation. This political economy seems at first, therefore, to recognize man with his independence, his personal activity, etc. It incorporates private property into the very essence of man, and it is no longer, therefore, conditioned by the local or national characteristics of private property regarded as existing outside itself.” (1844, p. 148) 39 Deleuze and Guattari: “It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.” (AO, p. 25) 40 See Deleuze and Guattari on the “pathological rationality” of capitalism discovered by Marx (AO, p. 373) that affixes an historical order of historical rationality (Ibid., p. 367) to which desire for-its-own-sake—alienated/reterritorialized on the family like labor is alienated/reterritorialized in private property (pp. 270-271)—is counterposed as the irrational (Ibid., p. 379), as desire for-its-own-sake is production-for-its-own-sake against the compulsions of capitalist society to maintain private property and facilitate the accumulation of capital (Ibid., p. 259). On this last point, about how production forproduction’s sake is only realized in parody by capitalism (on the condition that production produce and expand capital), see Deleuze and Guattari’s connection between this alienation and the figure of the “industrial eunuch” (Ibid., pp. 224225) Marx introduces in “Needs, Production, and the Division of Labor” in the third manuscript. (1844, pp. 168-169) 41 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 31 For an extended discussion on the self-reproduction of social forms of sovereignty through social repression (which is not, for Deleuze and Guattari, distinguishable from psychic repression), see “The Second Positive Task” (AO, pp. 340378) of chapter 4, “Introduction to Schizoanalysis.” 42 See Jameson’s “The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber” (pp. 78-80) (1973) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/487630) 43 Not only does Châtelet credit Althusser and the others in passing with the rediscovery of Marx as a theoretician in his own right beyond the “practical Marxism” of Sartre (Châtelet, p. 372), but he also claims the theoretical anti-humanist intervention allows us for the first time to answer the question why atheism—and the critique of religion in general— disappears in Marx’s work after 1844-45 without having to assume Marx considered the matter sufficiently dealt with by his earliest polemics. (Ibid., p. 381) 44 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843): “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” 45 Marx, Capital: “For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labors into relation with each other as homogeneous human labor, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.” (p. 172) 46 Specifically, as the historical tendency towards proletarianization which strips the laborer of the means of subsistence and production. This early, abstract sketch of Marx’s mature historical theory of primitive accumulation is theorized through the concept of alienated labor in the 1844 Manuscripts in “Alienated Labor” in the first manuscript, where Marx describes this forcible separation as the alienation of producers from their product and the alienation of producers from the activity of production—the first and second kind of alienation. (1844, pp. 122-126) 47 Marx, Grundrisse: “It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital.” (p. 489) 48 Marx, 1844 Manuscripts: “The resolution of [these] theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, and only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical problem.” (p. 162) 49 50 Châtelet identifies the persistence of the criticism of religion in the 1844 Manuscripts with Marx’s critique of Hegel. To paraphrase: “Here then is the second stage in the development of Marx’s thought: atheism—abstract, philosophical doctrine—must be replaced by a theoretical and practical, conceptual and [historical] criticism of religion and all of the ideological forms in which religious alienation is hidden and reinforced. From this perspective, Marx, for example, demonstrates how Hegel’s philosophy of History and philosophy of the State have their foundation in a panlogicism which is itself [abstracted from] a theology: there can be no reconciliation, as the Berlin philosopher dreamed, of knowledge and faith, of legitimate theory and religion. Legitimate theory legitimizes itself theoretically and practically [only] in its endeavor to destroy religious illusion.” (p. 381) Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 32 Deleuze and Guattari on Engels’ reproach to Bachofen: “Engels paid homage to the genius of Bachofen, for having recog- nized in myth the figures of a maternal and a paternal law, their struggles and their relationships. But Engels slips in a reproach that changes everything: it really seems as if Bachofen believes all this, that he believes in myths, in the Furies, Apollo, and Athena? The same reproach applies even better to psychoanalysts: it would seem that they believe in all of this-in myth, in Oedipus and castration.” (AO, p. 107) And again: “Yet aren't myth and tragedy, too, productions— forms of production? Certainly not; they are production only when brought into connection with real social production, real desiring-production. Otherwise they are ideological forms, which have taken the place of the units of production. Who believes in all this-Oedipus, castration, etc.? The Greeks? Then the Greeks did not produce in the same way they believed? The Hellenists? Do the Hellenists believe that the Greeks produced according to their beliefs? This is true at least of the nineteenth-century Hellenists, about whom Engels said: you'd think they really believed in all that-in myth, in tragedy. Is it the unconscious that represents itself through Oedipus and castration? Or is it the psychoanalyst—the psychoanalyst in us all, who represents the unconscious in this way? For never has Engels's remark regained so much meaning: you'd think the psychoanalysts really believed in all this-in myth, in tragedy. (They go on believing, whereas the Hellenists have long since stopped.)” (Ibid., p. 297) 51 Deleuze and Guattari on the agreement between Freud and Jung after their break: “It should be noted that Judge Schreber's destiny was not merely that of being sodomized, while still alive, by the rays from heaven, but also that of being posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social, and historical content of Schreber's delirium not one word is retained, as though the libido did not bother itself with such things. Freud invokes only a sexual argument, which consists in bringing about the union of sexuality and the familial complex, and a mythological argument, which consists in positing the adequation of the productive force of the unconscious and the "edifying forces of myths and religions." This latter argument is very important, and it is not by chance that here Freud declares himself in agreement with Jung. In a certain way this agreement subsists after their break. If the unconscious is thought to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations. The basic question is never asked, but cast aside: Why return to myth? Why take it as the model? The supposed adequation can then be interpreted in what is termed anagogical fashion, toward the "higher." Or inversely, in analytical fashion, toward the "lower," relating the myth to the drives. But since the drives are transferred from myth, traced from myth with the transformations taken into account… What we mean is that, starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism. Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as lung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation. But to render religion unconscious, or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something religious into the unconscious. (And what would Freudian analysis be without the celebrated guilt feelings ascribed to the unconscious?)” (Ibid., pp. 57-58) 52 Deleuze and Guattari on the category mistake of imputing belief to the unconscious: “We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked. And far from being able to get by with anything like the wretched maneuver where men answer that this itself is proof that women are castrated-or even console women by saying that men are castrated, too, all the while rejoicing that they are castrated the other way, on the side that is not superimposable-it should be recognized that Women's Liberation movements contain, in a more or less ambiguous state, what belongs to all requirements of liberation: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment by desire of the social field, the disinvestment of repressive structures. Nor are we going to say that the question is not that of knowing if women are castrated, but only if the unconscious "believes it," since all the ambiguity lies there. What does belief applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but "believe," rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with "beliefs" that are not even irrational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order?” (Ibid., p. 61) 53 Deleuze and Guattari on the “idealist psychiatry” that treats the schizophrenic as a product without relating them back to the process of social production/reproduction: “Every time that the problem of schizophrenia is explained in terms of the ego, all we can do is "sample" a supposed essence or a presumed specific nature of the schizo, regardless of whether we do so with love and pity or disgustedly spit out the mouthful we have tasted. We have "sampled" him once as a dissociated ego, another time as an ego cut off from the world, and yet again-most temptingly-as an ego that had not ceased to be, who was there in the most specific way, but in his very own world, though he might reveal himself to a clever psychiatrist, a sympathetic superobserver—in short, a phenomenologist. Let us remember once again one of 54 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 33 Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends.” (Ibid., p. 24) Deleuze and Guattari on the deliberate creation of lack under private property: “We know very well where lack—and its subjective correlative—come from. Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on (se rabat sur) the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack (manque). It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.” (Ibid., 28) 55 Deleuze and Guattari on the idealism of Oedipus: “But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself—in myth, tragedy, dreams—was substituted for the productive unconscious.” (Ibid., p. 24) Further, on Freud’s substitution of the materialist insight into the coextension of humanity and nature in the autoproduction of the unconscious for a model of the unconscious as a classical Greek theater: “The whole of desiringproduction is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented' in representation. And there is the essential thing: the reproduction of desire gives way to a simple representation, in the process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself-express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream. But who says that dream, tragedy, and myth are adequate to the formations of the unconscious, even if the work of transformation is taken into account? Groddeck remained more faithful than Freud to an autoproduction of the unconscious in the coextension of man and Nature. It is as if Freud had drawn back from this world of wild production and explosive desire, wanting at all costs to restore a little order there, an order made classical owing to the ancient Greek theater.” (Ibid., p. 54) 56 Deleuze and Guattari on Schreber’s self-cure: “Freud is more specific when he stresses the crucial turning point that occurs in Schreber's illness when Schreber becomes reconciled to becoming- woman and embarks upon a process of self-cure that brings him back to the equation Nature = Production (the production of a new humanity). As a matter of fact, Schreber finds himself frozen in the pose and trapped in the paraphernalia of a transvestite, at a moment when he is practically cured and has recovered all his faculties: "I am sometimes to be found, standing before the mirror or elsewhere, with the upper portion of my body partly bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, trumpery necklaces, and the like. This occurs only, I may add, when I am by myself, and never, at least so far as I am able to avoid it, in the presence of other people." Let us borrow the term "celibate machine" to designate this machine that succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between the desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism.” (Ibid., p. 17) 57 Deleuze and Guattari on the first positive task of materialist psychiatry: “[L]earning what a subject’s desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case. Moreover, this positive task cannot be separated from the indispensable destructions, the destruction of the molar aggregates, the structures and representations that prevent the machine from functioning. It is not easy to rediscover the molecules—even the giant molecule—their paths, their zones of presence, and their own syntheses, amid the large accumulations that fill the preconscious, and that delegate their representatives in the unconscious itself, thereby immobilizing the machines, silencing them, trapping them, sabotaging them, cornering them, holding them fast.” (p. 338) Deleuze and Guattari on the second positive task of materialist psychiatry: ““reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them in opposite modes. In the generation-gap conflict we hear old people reproach the young, in the most malicious way, for putting their desires (a car, credit, a loan, girl-boy relationships) ahead of their interests (work, savings, a good marriage). But what appears to other people as raw desire still contains complexes of desire and interest, and a mixture of forms of desire and of interest that are specifically reactionary and vaguely revolutionary. The situation is completely muddled. It seems that schizoanalysis can make use only of indices—the machinic indices—in order to 58 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2021) – James Callahan 34 discern, at the level of groups or individuals, the libidinal investments of the social field. Now in this respect it is sexuality that constitutes the indices.” (Ibid., 350) 59 For an excellent essay on capitalism as “the age of cynicism” in Anti-Oedipus, see Jason Read’s “Age of Cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the Production of Subjectivity in Capitalism” (2006). (link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291854898_The_Age_of_Cynicism_Deleuze_and_Guattari_on_the_Productio n_of_Subjectivity_in_Capitalism)