Anti-Oedipus II

2 Psychoanalysis and Familialism: the Holy Family

P52 neurosis 神经机能症
psychosis 1.精神病，精神错乱
2.精神极度紧张

P49 For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man. The auto-production of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the subject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence from an indefinite parental regression. To quote Artaud once again: “I got no/papamummy.”

pp. 62-63 It became evident that group fantasy was inseparable from the “symbolic” articulations that define a social field insofar as it is real, whereas the individual fantasy fitted the whole of this field over “imaginary” givens. If this first distinction is drawn out, we see that the individual fantasy is itself plugged into the existing social field, but apprehends it in the form of imaginary qualities that confer on it a kind of transcendence or immortality under the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo destiny: what does it matter if I die, says the general, since the Army is immortal? The imaginary dimension of the individual fantasy has a decisive importance over the death instinct, insofar as the immortality conferred on the existing social order carried into the ego all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of “superegoization” and castration, all the resignation-desires (becoming a general; acquiring low, middle, or high rank), including a resignation to dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our own ranks!). The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity….. There results a third difference between group fantasy and the so-called individual fantasy….subject

P63 If we must still speak of utopia in this sense, a la Fourier, it is most assuredly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. In his recent works Klossowski indicates to us the only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx: by discovering how social production and relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself. For they are part of it, they are present there in every way while creating within the economic form their own repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression.

P67 We are not saying that Oedipus and castration do not amount to anything. We are oedipalized, we are castrated; psychoanalysis didn’t invent these operations, to which it merely lends the new resources and methods of its genius. But is this sufficient to silence the outcry of desiring-production: We are all schizos! We are all perverts! We are all libidos that are too viscous and too fluid – and not by preference, but wherever we have been carried by the deterritorialized flows.

P70 We are statistically or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense. That is why Proust, the first to deny….

P73 This common, transcendent, absent something will be called phallus or law, in order to designate “the” signifier that distributes the effects of meaning throughout the chain and introduces exclusions there (whence the oedipalizing interpretations of Lacanism). This signifier acts as the formal cause of the triangulation – that is to say, makes possible both the form of the triangle and its reproduction: Oedipus has as its formula 3+1, the One of the transcendent phallus without which the terms considered would not take the form of a triangle. It is as if the so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves nonsignifying – of polyvocal writing and detachable fragments – were the object of a special treatment, a crushing operation that extracted a detached object from the chain, a despotic signifier from whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each link triangulated. There we have a curious paralogism implying a transcendent use of the syntheses of the unconscious: we pass from detachable partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by an assigning of lack. For example, in the capitalist code and its trinitary expression, money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of stocks and lacks.

pp. 74-75 Everywhere, in this reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion….This conversion is therefore promoted by psychoanalysis first of all by making a global and specific use of the connective syntheses. This use can be defined as transcendent, and implies a first paralogism in the psychoanalytic process. For a simple reason, we again make use of Kantian terminology. In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics – its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution – this time materialist – can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis.

P86 there is no ego that identifies with races, peoples, and persons in a theater of representation, but proper names that identify with races, peoples, and persons with regions, thresholds, or effects in a production of intensive quantities. The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of “effects”: effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs….History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect – all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

P88 It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in unconscious forms, thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in delirium entire civilizations, races, and continents, and intensely “feeling” the becoming of the world. There is no signifying chain without a Chinamen, an Arab, and a black who drop in to trouble the night of a white paranoiac….

pp. 105-106 We define the reactionary unconscious investment as the investment that conforms to interest of the dominant class, but operates on its own account, according to the terms of desire, through the segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus is derived: I am of the superior race. The revolutionary unconscious investment is such that desire, still in its own mode, cuts across the interest of the dominated, exploited classes, and causes flows to move that are capable of breaking apart both the segregations and their Oedipal applications – flows capable of hallucinating history, of reanimating the races in delirium, of setting continents ablaze. No, I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the deterritorialized, “I am of a race inferior for all eternity….I am a beast, a Negro.”
There again it is a question of an intense potential for investment and counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its very conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the thread. For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force. The exclamation “So it’s …!”, or the meditation of Igitur on race, in an essential relationship with madeness.

P114 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. There we have a typical paralogism – yet another, a fourth paralogism that we shall have to call displacement. 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. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty.

P119 Psychic repression is delegated by the social formation, while the desiring-formation is disfigured, displaced by psychic repression….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. The Oedipus complex, the process of oedipalization, is therefore the result of this double operation. It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives. In this way the family/drives relationship is substituted for the relationship between the two orders of production, in a diversion where the whole of psychoanalysis goes astray.

P121 No, psychoanalysis invent nothing, though they have invented much in another way, and have legislated a lot, reinforced a lot, injected a lot….It is the recording of desire on the increate body without organs, and the familial recording on the socius, that are in opposition throughout the two groups. The innate science in psychosis and the neurotic experimental sciences. The schizoid excentric circle and the neurosis triangle….On a more general level, it is the two kinds of use made of synthesis that are in opposition. On the one hand there are the desiring-machines, and on the other the Oedipal-narcissistic machine.

P126 (family, 2 functions) In short, Oedipus is strictly undecidable. It can be found everywhere all the more readily for being undecidable, and in this sense it is correct to say that Oedipus is strictly good for nothing….For in any case desiring-production is the cause, the ultimate cause of both the psychotic subversions that shatter Oedipus or overwhelm it, and of the neurotic reverberations that constitute it. Such a principle takes on its full meaning if it is related to the problem of “actual factors….The following choice is imposed on us: either the actual factors is conceived in a totally exterior privative fashion (which is an impossibility), or it descends into an internal qualitative conflict that is necessarily understood in relation to Oedipus. (Oedipus, the fountainhead where the psychoanalyst washes his hands of the world’s iniquities.).…In an altogether different direction, if we consider the idealist deviations of psychoanalysis, we see in them an interesting attempt at giving the actual factors a status other than ulterior or privative. (Jung)…The actual factor is desiring-production insofar as it is caught up in this relationship, this conflict, and these modalities.

P128 We maintain that the cause of the disorder, neurosis or psychosis, is always in desiring-production, in its relation to social production, in their different or conflicting regimes, and the modes of investment that desiring-production performs in the system of social production. The actual factor is desiring-production insofar as it is caught up in this relationship, this conflict, and these modalities. Nor is this factor either ulterior or privative. Being constitutive of the full life of desire, it is contemporary with the most tender age, and it accompanies this life with every step. It does not arise after Oedipus, it in no way presupposes an Oedipal organization, nor a pre-oedipal pre-organization. On the contrary, it is Oedipus that depends on desiring-production, either as a stimulus of one form or another, a simple inductor through which the anoedipal organization of desiring-production is formed, beginning with early childhood, or as an effect of the psychic and social repression imposed on desiring-production by social reproduction by means of the family. The term “actual” is not used because it designates what is most recent, and because it would be opposed to “former” or “infantile”; it is used in terms of its difference with respect to “virtual.” And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. It is indeed in this sense that the idea of the afterward seemed to us to be a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations, but that on the contrary will be applied to the underlying Oedipal constellation defined by reaction, or else will exclude this constellation from the field of investment constituting their activity. Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactionary (reactionnel), such is Oedipus. It is only a reactionary formation, a formation that results from a reaction to desiring-production. It is a serious mistake to consider this formation in isolation, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

Michael Hardt’s Reading Notes:

1. Expression vs. Production At the end of the very first paragraph of the book D&G warn us against metaphors. "Something is produced: effects of a machine, and not of metaphors" (p. 2). Why are they so worried about metaphors, and why are metaphors the alternative to machinic production? I think these questions refer to a general problematic that is elaborated throughout the second part of the book in terms of the alternative between production and expression. Schizoanalysis declares itself for production and against expression -- but what exactly is expression? In his book Spinoza and the Problem of Expression written a few years earlier, Deleuze posed the concept of expression as the key to his entire reading of Spinoza. It was an unconventional concept to choose because Spinoza never uses the terms and it had never played an important role in the long history of Spinoza interpretation. In that work Deleuze gave "expression" a very precise definition. Spinoza's being, he said, which is one and universal, is expressed through the attributes of thought and extension. What is important in this expression is that being and the world have the same essence, being is not something outside of or separate from the world. Deleuze highlights the fact here that there is an immanent notion of causality at work in this expression, in which the cause is immanent to (rather than separate from) its effect. To say then in this framework that being is expressed in the modalities of the world means that being causes or creates these modalities but not in any exterior way; being remains always within these modes, as immanent cause. Expression is thus used to mark a certain kind of production--specifically, a production in which the producer remains immanent to what is produced, in which producer and produced share a common essence. (It is interesting to note that in that book Deleuze used this notion of expression in opposition to and as a critique of semiology, in the sense that signs and sign systems are external to what they represent or signify.) Now in Anti-Oedipus D&G use the term "expression" very differently, in fact almost in the opposite sense. (I don't have any good explanation to this change of usage nor do I attach any great significance to it. In fact this later usage might be closer to our everyday usage of "expression." In any case I only want to clarify how the term is used.) In Anti-Oedipus, expression is related to representation and signification, and thus it designates precisely what is not immanent to the term or thing. Expression poses a meaning outside of and detached from the real process and hence blocks the process. As such expression is the primary enemy of production. This is what Oedipus and psychoanalysis do: substitute representation or expression for process or production. "... the reproduction of desire gives way to a simple representation, in the process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself--express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream" (p. 54). The expressive unconscious is what destroys the productive unconscious: "The unconscious ceases to be what it is--a factory, a workshop--to become a theater, a scene and its staging" (p. 55). (And I should probably add, only to be obstinate, that factory, workshop, theater are not metaphors here but real forms or functions of the unconscious.) Expression destroys production, or displaces it, or takes away its power. D&G's preference for production over expression is posed not even in ethical terms (production is good, expression is bad) but in properly ontological terms: the being of the unconscious is production; expression is an alienation or falsification of that essence -- "the unconscious ceases to be what it is ...." This is not just a question of the unconscious or the being of the unconscious. D&G claim that reality itself, being itself is the product of desiring machines, or more precisely it is the process of their producing. I want to flesh out further this distinction and conflict between expression and production. D&G give a rather practical key to this difference when they maintain that analysis should regard the problems of the unconscious not in terms of meaning (sens) but in terms of usage. "The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not "What does it mean?" but rather "How does it work?"" (p. 109). Consider this rule of practice in the example of the boy who puts the train in the tunnel. If we analyse this as an expression and ask what does this mean, we get the answer (at least in the oedipal framework) that he wants to have sex with his mother. On the other hand, reading this act (putting the train in the tunnel) as a production, as a machine, and asking how does this work takes us in a completely different direction--how does this machine connect to other machines, etc. Such an analytical practice is proper to the factory (questions of production and usage) rather than the theater (questions of expression and meaning). From this practical perspective it might be useful to pose this distinction as the difference between materialist and idealist conceptions and practices. "Oedipus is the idealist turning point" (p. 55). Or even more clearly, Oedipus is an idea: "Oedipus is not a state of desire and the drives, it is an idea, nothing but an idea that repression inspires in us concerning desire" (p. 115). Here we have a textbook example of the contrast and conflict between idealism and materialism. The idealist perspective poses an idea or a system of ideas as primary over and determinate of the material state of things. (In this case the idea of Oedipus is posed over the state of desire and drives.) The materialist perspective, in defense or reaction, reverses the priority such the state of things (in this case the state of desire and drives) are primary over or prior to any ideas. Compare this to the classic reference for this in Marx: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Preface to CPE). It's interesting to me, and I think important, that each of these propositions of materialism come in reaction to idealism, as an inversion or reversal of the causal process. In any case, this is the sense in which schizo- analysis is a materialist psychiatry in contrast to the idealism of Oedipus. A materialist psychiatry recognizes the state of desire and its production as primary and determinant whereas an idealist psychiatry rests on ideas and their expression. In other words, the distinction and conflict between production and expression corresponds to that between materialism and idealism along with that between usage and meaning. In fact, I think these correspondences make more clear the practical implications of the distinction. To understand the distinction between production and expression in a more general and complex way, though, we have to link it to the parallel distinction between immanence and transcendence (just as Deleuze did earlier to explain the notion of expression in the Spinoza book)--a distinction that has played a central role in the history of metaphysics and the history of the critique of metaphysics. This is the fourth set of correspondence. What we have so far is
production expression usage meaning materialism idealism immanence transcendence
Last class in reference to part 1 of AO I spoke of immanence in rather straightforward ontological terms. Being is immanent in the sense that it inheres in the world; the essence of being is identical to the essence of the modalities of the world. Being is not elsewhere, in some other world, beyond. In that way, I wanted to say that the notion of reality or being as constituted by machines is an immanent rather than a transcendent notion of being. Here in the second part of the book, D&G's use of immanent and transcendent is more difficult and refers specifically to the terminology of Kant's critique. They explain these terms in two passage, p. 75 and 109. "In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to the understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics" (p. 75 top). What they are taking from Kant here is the principle that a legitimate use of a synthesis is defined by the immanence of the criteria to the field of the synthesis (the understanding or the unconscious). If the criteria are external or transcendental to the understanding or the unconscious then the use is illegitimate. The confusing part is that Kant then goes on to define transcendental philosophy by this immanence of criteria, and in its name denounce metaphysics because of its transcendent use of syntheses. I'm not so concerned with really understanding Kant here. All I want to point out is that transcendental philosophy operates on immanent criteria and critiques transcendent uses of syntheses. It is with this in mind that D&G pose their materialist psychiatry and schizoanalysis in terms of a "transcendental unconscious," which means precisely that it is "defined by the immanence of its criteria" (p. 75). Now, you should be asking, if it is defined the immanence of criteria what is transcendental about transcendental philosophy or about this transcendental unconscious? In this case I would say that the principles or logic or schema of the syntheses by which the unconscious functions (and their legitimate usage) are what transcend that functioning itself. In this specific usage, "transcendental" (not transcendent) is not contested by D&G but affirmed. In the later passage, D&G make more clear how this question of immanence and transcendence relates to the other distinctions I've been pointing to: production and expression, usage and meaning. Then Malcolm Lowry who wants his novels to be regarded as machines. A novel can be anything you want it to be as long as it works. "But [that is true] on condition that meaning be nothing other than use, that it become a firm principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of determining the legitimate uses, as opposed to the illegitimate ones that relate use instead to a hypothetical meaning and re-establish a kind of transcendence. Analysis termed transcendental is precisely the determination of these criteria, immanent to the field of the unconscious, insofar as they are opposed to the transcendent exercises of a "What does it mean?" Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis" (p. 109). The search for meaning points outside the unconscious and thus establishes a transcendence; the analysis of use, on the other hand, involves the determination of criteria immanent to the unconscious. Following Kant you can call the first metaphysics and the second transcendental analysis. Or, more in our framework, relate the first to expression and meaning and the second to production and use. This entire discussion about expression and production, which involves distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of the various syntheses, revealing and attacking paralogisms or false logics, began from an ontological or methodological imperative, but it comes down eventually to ethical consequences for D&G. There is a paralogism that corresponds to each synthesis (plus two extra), each paralogism or illegitimate usage leads to an error, and each error brings with it an ethical condition. "The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious" (p. 111 mid). (We should discuss later how lack results from extrapolation, law from the double-bind, and the signifier from application.) It is clear once again that the cause of the errors is a methodological error, an idealist rather than a materialist conception of the unconscious, transcendent rather than immanent criteria, a focus on expression rather than production. From these three errors, then, follow what D&G call their theological cortege: "insufficiency of being, guilt, and signification" (p. 111). Elsewhere in the text D&G characterize the ethical situation of schizoanalysis as joy and innocence. This seems to me the final payoff in the contrast between expression and production. It's true that they affirm production over expression because production is true to being (being is desiring-production) whereas expression distorts, displaces, and depotentializes being, but also and maybe more importantly the liberation of production rather than its repression in expression leads to joy. Before leaving the question of expression, I want to point to the fact that we already have in this second part the kernel of a theory of literary interpretation and evaluation. Literature (or maybe only good) literature is like schizophrenia in that it is really about production not expression; it's not important what it means but what it does, how it works. "That is what style is, or rather the absence of style--asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode--desire" (p. 133 mid-bot). Production is what is important in literature--not literary production in the sense of the socio-historical conditions of the writer and so forth, but the production of desire in or through literature. Literary interpretation, then, should only be about revealing these desiring-machines in literature: "reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine ..." (p. 106 top). Literary interpretation, like a materialist psychiatry and probably all other disciplines, should involve revealing the desiring-machines at work and putting them to use productively. This is a way to conceive of an immanent literary criticism, an interpretation that remains immanent to the text in the sense that it takes up the very desiring-machines that the text creates and sets them up to work. This isn't very clear yet, but I think we'll have an opportunity later, in coming weeks, to see some examples and get a more concrete idea what such reading would do, how it would operate.

2. Liberation / revolution D&G insist on using several concepts that many might think today discredited and antiquated--in fact, discredited precisely by arguments such as D&G's. I'm thinking for example of the concepts of alienation, universality, and totality. I want to say something briefly about totality. Actually, they don't use the term totality but I think it is implicit in the argument when they are contrasting two notions of the social field, 3+1 versus 4+n. They introduce the discussion by recalling Bergson's notion of a completely open movement in the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Now, 3+1 is the formula of Oedipus, because it traps all social phenomena in the triangle (mommy, daddy, me) and then subsumes that triangle into a single transcendent notion of order. This is a closed notion of the social totality twice over -- first because of trapping all phenomena in the triangle and second because the triangle is subsequently reduced to a unity. They oppose to this closed notion of the social totality what I would call an open totality. This alternative notion "opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n)" (p. 96 mid-top). Now, one should object here that earlier, in part 1, D&G denounced totality in the name of multiplicity (p. 42). I would say, however, that what they denounced there was a specific kind of totality that reduces the heterogeneous parts to a transcendent unity. They affirm instead an immanent notion of totality constituted by multiplicities and by parts that never reduce to a homogeneous and transcendent whole. The antiquated and discredited concepts that I am really interested in, though, are repression, liberation and revolution. These are the explicit goals of the entire book. Desiring-machines themselves, the point of departure for the book, lead to revolution or rather they are the revolution -- or rather, that the liberation of desire is revolution. "no desiring-machine can be posed without demolishing entire social sectors .... desire is revolutionary in its essence ... and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised" (p. 116 mid-top). And later on that same page: "Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants" (p. 116 mid-bot). Let me read a little farther on this same page because they quickly explain at least a little more clearly how in what sense desire is revolutionary. "From the beginning of this study we have maintained both that social production and desiring-production are one and the same, and that they have differing régimes, with the result that a social form of production exercises an essential repression of desiring-production, and also that desiring-production--a "real" desire--is potentially capable of demolishing the social form" (p. 116 bot). There is a lot to understand in that sentence. First of all, how are social production and desiring-production the same thing but belonging to different régimes. This question of régime is one we will have to confront seriously before too long, but I don't think we have the tools to do so yet. The second part of the sentence is equally difficult: repression involves the dominance of the social form over desiring-production and inversely the liberation of desiring-production from that repression destroys the social form, that is, it is revolution. I want to pose all this now as a question for the future, and instead of confronting the general theoretical claim I want to turn rather to three examples or axes of repression and liberation that they refer to, even if briefly, in this second part: with respect to sexual difference, sexuality, and race.

3. Invisible concepts Finally I want to point to a few concepts that I find interesting here but that are invisible because of translation difficulties. The first involves their use of the word "quelconque": any, whichever, whatever. They use it either as "nature quelconque" or "valeur quelconque." Here is the first example: "Whence the idea that the stimuli are not organizers, but mere inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of indifference [de nature quelconque]" (p. 91 mid). Another example: "Yes, the family is a stimulus--but a stimulus that is qualitatively indifferent [de valeur quelconque], an inductor that is neither an organizer nor a disorganizer" (p. 98 bot). Ok. I don't exactly think the translation is wrong but I think that this notion of "quelconque" might not really have to do with indifference. I would like to relate it to the term I pointed out last week in part 1, "la vie générique" which was translated as species- life. I sense that "quelconque" and "générique" are both hinting at a technical concept that is not really indifferent. I have to keep working on this but I think it's a way to rethink the concept of "the general." Second: survol, overflight. This is a rather straightforward concept, or at least it doesn't pose any real translation problems. I just want to point it out and highlight its use. The origin is in a note that refers to Jean Oury: "In his presentation, Jean Oury calls Jayet 'the non-delimited," "in permanent flight [survol]" (p. 386 n.20). Then they take the term up in the text to explain the "or" of the schizo: "The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides [qu'il survole en glissant]" (p. 76). "He is and remains in disjunction: he does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of elaboration; instead, he affirms it through a continuous overflight [survol] spanning an indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transexual" (p. 76-77). Trans- here refers to the continuous overflight between the two. And from here on overflight will always be accompanied by indivisible distances. One final example: "But if the body without organs is indeed this desert, it is as an indivisible, non-decomposable distance over which the schizo glides [survole] in order to be everywhere something real is produced ..." (p. 86-87). Curious concept -- both for its maintaining together the disjunction and also for its distance from the plane over which it flies.