Anti-Oedipus 2.7: Social Repression and Psychic Repression
In this section Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain the fourth paralogism.
Figure One: Child with Train. Image Link.
**Citation Note: The citation for this text is at the bottom of the blog post
Chapter 2.7: Social Repression and Psychic Repression
Deleuze and Guattari begin this section with a question regarding the underlying forces for which the triangulation of desire depend upon. “The general line of the response is simple,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, “It is social repression, the forces of social repression” (AO, 113).
Ultimately, if Oedipus is truly desired — the desire to have incestuous relations — Deleuze and Guattari admit that “psychic repression comes to bear.” Though, one ought not automatically assume that psychic repression presupposes the nature of the law. From Freud’s perspective, “the law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; … Instead of assuming, therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest that there is a natural aversion to incest, we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in favor of it” (AO, 114). Yet, the question lies in whether Freud is right here. Does the prohibition of incest automatically assume that there is this innate desire to have incestuous relations? Freud assumes yes: the law existing proves the “natural instinct” for these relations.
However, Deleuze and Guattari do not take this reductive reasoning as ultimate truth: “We didn’t want the train to be daddy, or the station mommy. We only wanted peace and innocence, and to be left alone to machine our little machines, O desiring-production” (AO, 114; emphasis mine). Surely, partial objects conjure as pieces from the father and mother which constitute a parental appellation of sorts, but this does not entail all desire being in relation to this familial unit. For the child is always making connections; connections that Freud will always substitute for the mommy-daddy-me triangle: “the teacher as father-substitute, and the book as family romance” (AO, 114).
We ought to question the laws that we are born into rather than create; the law presupposes one’s birth, for example. “The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that’s what I wanted!” (AO, 114). Yet, many never seem to question the validity of the law to begin with — the individual is always ‘presumed to be guilty’. “One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition the nature of what is prohibited” (AO, 114).
But one must remember: psychic repression is not the full story. Here, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the fourth paralogism. “There we have a typical paralogism — yet another, a fourth paralogism that we shall have to call displacement” (AO, 114; emphasis mine).
So … what’s the fourth paralogism?
Paralogism 4: The law restricts specific actions, persuading individuals to falsely believe that they always had the desire to do these specific actions.
- “The law restricts specific actions, leading individuals to falsely believe that they harbored intentions or desires to engage in those actions, even when such intentions or desires were never genuine” (AO, 115)
- “For what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the “instincts,” so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction” (AO, 115).
Figure Two: Found Guilty. Image Link.
The law is only able to maintain its grip by “making the unconscious guilty” (AO, 115). Individuals are always on trial, an unconscious found guilty of violating the prohibitions established by the law. Plantiff vs. Defendent. Judge vs. Criminal. On first glance, the law appears to be a “system of two terms where we could conclude from a formal prohibition what is really prohibited” (AO, 115). To put simply, one can easily conclude that there is always the ‘desire vs. the law’ where the law serves as a structure to repress the always guilty unconscious. It is very easy to deduce that desire desires incest if one only analyzes two terms. However, “we have before us a system of three terms, where [a system of two terms] becomes completely illegitimate” (AO, 115).
Instead, Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between not two, but three terms (AO, 115).
- “The repressing representation which performs the repression.” Firstly, this can be understood as the rules and regulations set forth by the law.
- “The repressed representative, on which the repression actually comes to bear.” Secondly, this can be understood as unbridled desire becoming repressed by the law.
- “The displaced represented, which gives a falsified apparent image that is meant to trap desire.” Thirdly, this can be understood as the subject becoming manipulated into believing that they actually desire what the law set out to prohibit.
Deleuze and Guattari make it incredibly clear that “repression cannot act without displacing desire” (AO, 115). They cite D.H. Lawrence, an English novelist fascinated with Oedipus (deconstructing aspects of Oedipus, that is). He can be seen in Figure 3 — he has a cool beard.
Figure Three: D.H. Lawrence. Image Link.
D.H. Lawrence does not innately disagree with Freudian psychoanalysis — specifically “in the name of the rights of the Ideal,” but is “bewildered by what Freud is doing when he closets sexuality in the Oedipal nursery” (AO, 115). From the beginning, individuals are Oedipalized; this Oedipalization though is just an idea “that repression inspires in us concerning desire” (AO, 115). The myth of Oedipus is “not a state of desire and the drives” but rather an idea promulgated by social repression. Or rather, social repression utilizes the myth of Oedipus and imposes it upon individuals.
Here’s a good quote summing up Lawrence’s idea:
This has nothing to do with the active unconscious [which] sparkles, vibrates, travels … we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological — a fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping (AO, 115).
Desire does not belong to the side of Oedipal desires but is rather trapped within the framework of Oedipus: “If desire is repressed, this is not because it is desire for the mother and for the death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed …” (AO, 116).
Deleuze and Guattari explain that desire is repressed because “[desire] is capable of calling into question the established order of society” (AO, 116). Nowhere are Deleuze and Guattari arguing that individuals naturally exude this desire to sleep with the mother and kill the father; rather, they are arguing that this act becomes repressed because it is revolutionary — it is a threat to the social order. “Desire does not ‘want’ revolution,” they write, “it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntary, by wanting what it wants” (AO, 116). To be clear, in chapter three, Deleuze and Guattari will explain the process of filiation and alliances to better address the question of incest, but for now, they are explaining why this act is repressed.
So, the problem appears quite simple then: desire without repressing itself is “real” desire “capable of demolishing the social form” (AO, 116). However, the fourth paralogism is at play, making desire repressing itself appear to be “real” desire. “But what is a ‘real’ desire,” Deleuze and Guattari ask, “since repression is also desired? How can we tell them apart?” (AO, 116).
Interestingly enough, Deleuze and Guattari are not only eviscerating Freudian psychoanalysis, but they are also drawing from it in order to craft their own political project. “We see no special problem in the possibility of a coexistence of revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements at the heart of the same theoretical and practical doctrine” (AO, 117). There is no primacy to psychic repression because as Wilhelm Reich has pointed out “psychic repression depended on social repression” (AO, 118). Social repression requires psychic repression “precisely in order to form docile subjects and ensure the reproduction of social formation[s]” (AO, 118). On this point, I am reminded of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish here. As Foucault explains how individuals discipline themselves and others operating as the state in their own right, Deleuze and Guattari are explaining the why.
Figure Four: Wilhelm Reich. Image Link.
At any rate, Deleuze and Guattari praise Reich and claim that “he is the trust founder of a materialist psychiatry” (AO, 118):
The fact remains that Reich, in the name of desire, caused a song of life to pass into psychoanalysis. He denounced, in the final resignation of Freudianism, a fear of life, a resurgence of the ascetic ideal, a cultural broth of bad consciousness … Reich was the first to attempt to make the analytic machine and the revolutionary machine function together. In the end, he only had his own desiring-machines, his paranoiac, miraculous, and celibate boxes, with metallic inner walls lined with cotton and wool (AO, 118).
Yet, social production does not exist without an agent carrying out this action. “The family is the delegated agent of psychic repression, or rather the agent delegated to psychic repression; the incestuous drives are the disfigured image of the repressed” (AO, 119). The family is an institution that serves to carry out the forces of social production; Oedipus serves as a result of this functioning. Incest serves as an image or the law that traps desire, when in reality, this is “placing the distorting mirror of incest before desire” (AO, 120; emphasis mine).
In a call back to 1.1–1.3 Deleuze and Guattari reiterate the necessity of a recording surface. The BwO presents itself as a recording surface for the desiring-machines to record themselves onto. Social production has the recording surface of the socius, but it needs an agent “capable of acting on, of inscribing the surface of desire” (AO, 120).
So … what performs the displacement of desire? The family itself: “an unparalleled repression of desire commencing with the earliest age of the child” with social production delegating the family to a normative psychic repression (AO, 120). We must remember that Oedipus is not made by the family, but rather, the family is constituted by the terms of Oedipus. And as the family is Oedipalizing, Oedipus gets constituted — psychic and social repression are one and the same, but differ in regime type.
“The desiring-experience is treated as if it were intrinsically related to the parents, and as if the family were its supreme law” (AO, 120).
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Citation:
- Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
