ABSTRACT
For radical critics such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977), it is the Symbolic order itself that is an imposition. Leaving the world of flux that preceded ‘Oedipalization’ and acculturation is the real human tragedy, for in that flux desire is polymorphous and hence ‘revolutionary’. Drawing on a range of writers and movements from Hegel and Nietzsche, to Dadaism and Sartre – but above all Nietzsche – their productive theory of desire rebelled against a linked set of targets: left puritanism as much as right-wing authoritarianism, the ‘fascism of the mind’ as much as of the streets. Now society itself is condemned, along with Lacan’s phallocentrism, the family, the ‘Oedipalization of society’ – and psychoanalysis itself, which is seen as the agent for the imposition of Oedipus and the control of desire. Any acceptance of Oedipus implies an artificial restriction on the unconscious, where everything is potentially infinitely open. There is in this flux no given self, only the cacophony of ‘desiring machines’, desiring production. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not a striving for the lost unity of the womb, but a state of constant productive flux. But this flux is too much for capitalist society to endure, for it simultaneously encourages and abhors this chaos, and cannot live with the infinite variety of potential interconnections and relationships. So the Oedipus complex, instead of being, as in Lacan, a necessary state of the development of a human individual, is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as the only effective means of controlling the libido in capitalist societies (Weeks 2009b). And Freudianism plays a key role under capitalism: it is both the discoverer of the mechanisms of desire and the organizer of its control. Guy Hocquenghem, in Homosexual Desire (1978), applies this approach more specifically to homosexuality. Capitalist society manufactures homosexuals just as it manufactures proletarians by imposing a psychologically repressive category, that of homosexuality, on the polyvocal nature of desire. Psychiatry has classified what is marginal, and in doing so placed it in a central position, and has given it social salience. Yet simultaneously it reveals the arbitrariness of social classifications and the power of desire, which cannot so easily be restricted.
