As sínteses passivas do desejo: o inconsciente maquínico segundo Deleuze e Guattari

Abstract

This research proposes to present the notions of passive syntheses present throughout Deleuze and Guattari's (2010) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, focusing on the first chapter of the work, which articulates the idea of a machinic unconscious. The challenge of this concept lies in the conception of a political unconscious through the concept of desire, whose dynamics are based on productive syntheses independent of a subject to actively exercise them. Conceived through the categories of the productive circuit proposed by Marx (1857), with a view to considering the immanence between desiring production and social production, these syntheses can be engineered according to two distinct biases, moving either toward a liberation and emancipation of their own productive forces or toward their closure—the opening or confinement of the unconscious. To this end, we present a thorough reading of the textual sections of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, also supported by articles that address the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari or that may be illuminating regarding the related conceptual framework of syntheses and the emphasis on their uses, considering them as: the affirmation of difference and the opening of the unconscious, according to a legitimate use, or the standardization of desire and the hegemonization or gentrification of the unconscious, through an illegitimate use. For further clarification, we turn to scholars who have also addressed the topic as proposed in Anti-Oedipus itself, that is, according to conceptual blocks constituted by mutually implicating concepts. These conceptual blocks are: the connective synthesis of production, with its global and specific or partial and nonspecific uses, the "and..." as its form of expression, the libido as its corresponding energy, and its paranoid machine as the first moment of desire; that of disjunctive synthesis, with its limiting and exclusive or unlimited and inclusive uses, the "or…," its numen, and its miraculous machine; and that of conjunctive synthesis, with its segregative and bi-univocal or nomadic and plurivocal uses, its "then it is…," voluptuousness, and the celibate machine. Scholars who have already addressed these conceptual blocks are: Cardoso Júnior (2007), Buchanan (2008), Guéron (2020), and Sibertin-Blanc (2022). This study then launches a synthesis of a certain theoretical body that encompasses what Deleuze and Guattari call schizoanalysis, which aims to present itself in the most didactic and, ironically, organized way possible, based on the above excerpt. In addition to the synthesis, now, of the understanding, updated around the present theme, such a conceptual exposition demands its own contextualization. Therefore, before we delve into the operation of assembling the understanding of passive syntheses and their concepts, we will first contextualize their epistemological origins, which date back to Kant, Marx and Spinoza.