ABSTRACT
Life is the production of difference, or the actualisation of tendencies to differ. But Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on desire as production also marks a distinction from the usual notion of possibility. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari describe the immanent production of human history, leading up to the point in capitalism and modernity where we can recognise the desire or difference that has produced all the political illusions of transcendence. Just as life tends to organise itself into relatively stable points, so human history has tended to reduce its own life to the already formed productions of desire. An attack on the picture of the Oedipus complex—the picture of the human self that enters culture by repressing ‘natural’ desires for the maternal origin—frees desire and life from such supposedly fixed instinct. Immanent connection begins with the flows of desire from which persons are formed as organised ‘zones’.
