Ethics of schizoanalysis

Abstract

In this essay I read Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia from an ethical point of view. My main question refers to a claim that Michel Foucault made in his preface to Anti-Oedipus: “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics”. I try to elaborate on this suggestion in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a 1959-1960 seminar published under the same title. This essay responds to Lacan’s formulation of an unconscious desire by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s social-machinic perspective. In my interpretation Anti-Oedipus accounts for an ontological ethics in terms of an unconscious desire that is exteriority. I take the notion of socius as the key element of this exterior desire and therefore as the true site of ethics.