Forcing the Syntax of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia contends that Oedipus-based psychoanalytics remain within a closed familial/capitalistic system and argues instead for a non-hierarchical, inclusive desystemizing process called schizoanalysis.

At the beginning, psychoanalysts could not be unaware of the forcing employed to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious. (56)

In a book largely concerned with dislocations and non-origins, the first word “At” locates an originary moment precisely at a specific time or space, a moment or a location. There was an instance or a set place “at the beginning” of psychoanalysis, I presume (but the sentence doesn’t tell me), when or where the practitioners of the fledgling field “could not be unaware”—a contrived construction deliberately overdetermined for our unraveling. The modal “could” points to an ability—to “be unaware”—that is located only “at the beginning,” then the negating word “not” removes the possibility of locating this ability in the past; “not” de-locates the ability that has not yet been given to us by the sentence, the “be unaware” which follows “could not.” Before unawareness even creeps in, the sentence presents the possibility of this (in)ability, negating the possibility and thereby dislocating it; once the forecasted and foreclosed ability “be unaware” is given, it’s given in the negative. The whole thing could have been simplified had the sentence been written, “psychoanalysts were aware of the forcing,” so why the syntactic gymnastics?

The phrase “could not be unaware” argues that psychoanalysts “at the beginning” must have been aware of how forced the Oedipal complex was because it was impossible for them to not be aware; said another way, it was outside of the realm of possibility that they could be so senseless as to not feel themselves “forcing . . . Oedipus . . . into the unconscious.” Placing the burden of proof on unawareness renders a much different argument than one which places the burden of proof on awareness. Just as the remainder of the paragraph offers no proof that proto-psychoanalysts turned a blind eye to their own obvious awareness of forcing Oedipus, neither does it offer proof that they remained blissfully ignorant of their forcing. Either way (or… or another way), Deleuze and Guattari are gesturing toward a prototypical psychoanalysis machine operated by formative psychoanalysts, which they blame/credit with knowing all along what they were doing because they couldn’t not know.

So far, psychoanalysts have been asserted into the sentence but only to have foreclosed on the possibility of awareness; next, the analysts themselves will disappear, so that by the end of the sentence, only their actions will remain, and even then, only at the level of the unconscious. The prepositional phrase “of the forcing employed” demands an object to answer the question, “by whom?” Its passive construction covers over the psychoanalyst’s presence as the one forcing the introduction of Oedipus, forcing the injection of Oedipus into the unconscious. Why would the authors make such a bold move “at the beginning” of forcing psychoanalysts into the subject of the sentence as generators of the entire Oedipal paradigm, only to strip them first of their own (un)awareness then of their position as actors and agents? The psychoanalysts who employ these dual forces are eclipsed by the enumeration of those very forces: “to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious.” These two prepositional phrases, set off by the sentence’s sole repetition of “to,” delineate the twin purposes of psychoanalysis using an economics metaphor; once introduced into the economy of the therapeutic situation, the Oedipal currency injects itself (because there’s no psychoanalyst in this part of the sentence to do so) into the libidinal economy and is taken up as Law. This sentence, in moving from the agents-psychoanalysts to the producing-production of the libidinal economy, illustrates the movement from the psychoanalytic—hierarchized, fathered, and located blame, guilt, and association—to the schizoanalytic—flows and ruptures, orphans, nomads. It simultaneously represents the movement from the individual to the socius by its movement away from psychoanalysts to a more general (capitalist?) Oedipal economy. This way of thinking might help address one final question: Why do Deleuze and Guattari italicize “could not be unaware”? Later in the paragraph, they claim to have borrowed the phrase from Marx who said the same thing about early capitalists. Dis-locating Oedipality from the unconscious and moving it first through psychoanalysts and then into society recasts the Oedipal-machine as like any other machine, capable of being dis-located from its incorporation in the unconscious and properly introjected.