ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia provides an inspiring analysis of the processes of desire production. Deleuze and Guattari do not differentiate between libidinal economy and political economy: libidinal and political flows form the processes of desire which, in their turn, produce that which we call the real. In this sense, schizophrenia designates not the clinical state of mental illness, but the deepest tendency of capitalism, its potential for change and permanent revolution. The counter-tendency of the same capitalism is seen as paranoia. Paranoia here means the libidinal tendency to stick to stable and fixed meanings, beliefs, and authorities. Thus, schizophrenia and paranoia designate two poles of social libidinal investment which are analysed in terms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the molecular and the molar, and the revolutionary and fascist drives in the political. In this chapter, the schizophrenic and paranoid poles are examined using the concrete example of the Lithuanian political scene: the revolutionary drives of 1990 were quickly replaced after twenty years of independence by reactionary nationalist forces which reveal the deep connections between the paranoid form of the psyche and the nation-state.
