Desire and Schizoanalysis

Desire is often thought of as a hunger for something we don’t have - the missing object we long to possess. But philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari insist in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, that this picture is misleading. Desire is not a gap waiting to be filled; it is a production, an arrangement, a flow. We never simply desire an object in isolation - a shirt, a career, a lover - but the constellation in which that object takes on meaning. The shirt is not desired by itself but as part of a scene: my body wearing it, the event I am going to, the gaze of others, the mood of the evening. Desire moves through this whole arrangement. It organizes and re-organizes contexts, making and unmaking connections. This shift - from lack to production, from isolated object to arrangement - is the starting point of what they call schizoanalysis.

The book was written in the aftermath of the May ’68 uprisings in France, born out of a dissatisfaction with both Marxist orthodoxy and classical psychoanalysis. Politics at the time seemed trapped between party dogma on the one hand and family melodrama on the other. For Deleuze, a philosopher, and Guattari, a psychoanalyst and activist, something more radical was needed: an approach that could grasp how desire itself was shaped by capitalism, and how desire might also become revolutionary.

The trap of Oedipus

For Freud and much of psychoanalysis, desire was defined by lack. We want what we do not have. Our unconscious, it was said, is haunted by family dramas - by the wish for the mother, the rivalry with the father, the Oedipal triangle of mom-dad-me. Everything, in the end, was traced back to this primal scene.

Deleuze and Guattari thought this was a trap. They argued that psychoanalysis functions like a church: it teaches us to interpret all of our impulses through the same narrow myth, and then to feel guilty for them. You dream about a wolf? That’s your father. You feel anxious? It must be castration anxiety. By forcing every sign into the Oedipal grid, psychoanalysis didn’t liberate desire, it tamed it.

But what if desire doesn’t begin in the family? What if it begins in the wider social field? Think about a child watching their parents work long hours, or hearing political slogans on TV, or sensing racial divisions at school. Desire is already caught up in money, politics, religion, and history. The family is not the origin, but the relay - a place where these larger forces get translated into personal terms. By reducing everything to the family drama, psychoanalysis blinded itself to the more explosive, political dimension of desire.

Desire as production

Against the idea that desire is a lack, Deleuze and Guattari propose that desire is production. Whenever we desire, we make something real. We build connections, invent scenarios, generate energy. Desire is not about what is missing; it is about what comes into being.

Think of desire as a machine: not a metaphorical machine but a literal one. A machine works by connecting flows and making cuts. A mouth cuts the flow of milk, a hand interrupts and redirects a gesture, a factory channels workers and raw materials into goods. Desire, they argue, operates in the same way. It couples and decouples, produces and interrupts, always creating new flows.

These “desiring-machines” are everywhere, running through our bodies and our societies. They are not about wholeness or unity, but about partial connections - fragments, pieces, encounters. A wasp pollinates an orchid: two partial beings connect, each transformed by the other. Desire operates through such assemblages, indifferent to whether they make sense in a family romance.

To call desire productive is to insist that fantasy, dream, and hallucination are not escapes from reality but parts of how reality is produced. A daydream about another life is not just a private illusion; it reshapes how you see your job, your relationships, your possibilities. Desire is real, because it makes things happen.

In Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, a factory turns the rhythmic clatter of machines into music, showing how desire itself works machinically - coupling flows of sound, labor, and fantasy so that even industrial noise becomes a site of desire-production.

Capitalism and schizophrenia

Why, then, schizoanalysis? Why invoke schizophrenia?

Capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is the system that has most fully unleashed the flows of desire. Unlike feudalism, which tied people to rigid codes of land and duty, capitalism breaks codes apart. It dissolves hierarchies, mobilizes labor, money, images, and subjects, sending them flowing across borders. It decodes everything - only to recode it again in new forms of control.

This double movement, they suggest, is schizophrenic. On one side, capitalism liberates flows: money rushes across the globe, fashions change overnight, identities are fluid. On the other, it constantly reinscribes them: borders are redrawn, debts enforced, identities fixed for marketing categories. The system thrives on a controlled instability.

Schizophrenia, in their deliberately provocative sense, names the point where this decoding process goes too far - where the flows break free of reterritorialization. It is not just a clinical condition but a figure of what happens when desire outruns the codes that try to contain it. In this sense, schizophrenia reveals the truth of capitalism: that it both needs and fears the boundless productivity of desire.

Deleuze and Guattari warn against romanticizing madness. Their point is not that we should all “become schizophrenic” in a clinical sense, but that the schizophrenic process - the way desire proliferates and connects without regard for the family myth or the market category - shows us a glimpse of another way to live.

What schizoanalysis offers, then, is a practice of listening to desire differently. Instead of treating every symptom as a clue to a hidden lack, it looks at how desires actually work: what they connect to, what flows they set in motion, what arrangements they create. The task is not to interpret but to map. Where does this current lead? What other currents does it intersect with? What blockages interrupt it, and what escapes are possible?

This is why Deleuze and Guattari speak of the unconscious not as a theater, as Freud imagined, but as a factory. It doesn’t stage dramas, it produces connections. The unconscious is not busy rehearsing family romances, it is busy coupling machines: lungs and air, eye and image, hunger and labor, sexuality and ideology. The work of schizoanalysis is to trace these couplings without forcing them back to Oedipus.

Here we can see why their critique is not just psychological but political. If desire is productive, then every social order depends on capturing and channeling it. Fascism is not powered by obedience alone, but by libidinal investment in its rituals, parades, and images. Capitalism is not sustained only by exploitation, but by the way we desire its commodities, its lifestyles, even its endless novelty. To dismantle these systems, one cannot appeal only to reason or justice; one must understand how desire itself has been arranged and how it might be arranged otherwise.

Take advertising. On the surface, it tells us what to buy. But more deeply, it fabricates arrangements: a car is not just a car but freedom on the open road, masculinity proven, family belonging secured. What is being sold is not the object but the constellation it inhabits, the desire-machine it plugs into. This is why schizoanalysis is interested less in consumption itself than in the networks of meaning and affect that consumption produces.

And yet, Deleuze and Guattari are equally suspicious of revolutionary groups that try to claim desire for themselves. Too often, they argue, movements that begin by liberating desire end by reterritorializing it under new dogmas and hierarchies. The lesson of May ’68 was not only that desire can erupt in mass revolt, but also that it can be recaptured in the name of order, discipline, or even revolution itself.

For them, the challenge is to keep desire moving - to keep it experimental, multiple, unowned. This is what they mean by schizoanalysis: an analytic that resists closure, that follows the lines of escape rather than policing them. To practice schizoanalysis is to notice where desire leaks out of its prescribed channels, where it improvises new connections, where it produces more than the system wants it to.

In this sense, desire is not only a problem for psychoanalysis or for philosophy; it is a problem for all of us living under capitalism. Every day, our longings are mobilized - in advertising, in digital platforms, in politics - and every day they are recaptured. We desire freedom, and it is sold back to us as a holiday package. We desire community, and it appears as a brand. We desire difference, and it is churned into a market niche. The power of schizoanalysis is to remind us that desire does not belong to these categories. It is not reducible to objects or markets. It always exceeds them, always risks creating something new.

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