Anti-Production, or the Irreducibility of Power (original) (raw)

12th Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy, Braga, PT, 2022

Abstract

Foucault’s general praise of Deleuze & Guattari in the foreword to the English translation of 1977 is remarkable not only for its characterisation of Anti-Oedipus as an aesthetico-ethical practice (“Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politico” (Foucault 1977, 13)), but also for the more mundane fact of its publication date. In 1977, Deleuze engaged in a critique of Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge, published as Désir et plaisir in 1994, in which he distances himself clearly from Foucault’s analytics of power and notion of dispositif in favor of the conception of agencement that will play a crucial role in A Thousand Plateaus. After Désir et plaisir, the once amicable relation between Deleuze and Foucault cooled down significantly and basically came to a halt. Given these circumstances, Foucault’s praising foreword seems at least surprising. So what is it that Foucault finds in Anti-Oedipus and that seems to transcend even their profound conceptual differences around 1977? Generally speaking, Foucault’s interest concerns the theory and analytics of power in Anti- Oedipus and less the critique of so called Freudo-Marxisms or Deleuze’s & Guattari’s Nietzscheo-Spinozist philosophy of desire, as the identification of Anti-Oedipus’s major enemy with the “fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault 1977, 13) indicates.1 The inquiry of the conditions and processes of the subject’s complicity with power and the general excessiveness of power in the 20th century as indicated by fascism and stalinism (see Foucault 1994b, 400–401), is something that Foucault seems to understand as a common ground with Deleuze & Guattari that subsists even beyond their split regarding the respective conceptualizations of power. I would like to follow this Foucauldian trace in my contribution by understanding the often neglected notion of anti-production primarily as a thesis of the autonomy of power. Anti- production, as will be argued, is Deleuze’s & Guattari’s general term of a domain that determines the allocation of society’s flows of matter and energy independent of and irreducible to production. Anti-production means not the consumption or destruction of production, but rather its necessary counterpart that guarantees the constant re- territorialization of de-territorialized flows of matter and energy. Societies in general are systems consisting of production, anti-production, and reproduction; capitalism and despotism in the schematics of the so called “universal history” (Deleuze & Guattari 1977, 139) develop a form of anti-production that can be called power proper, that means in the sense of potestas, so called primitive societies instead realize anti-production by a rigid code that is effective without a central authority of enforcement. The revolutionary question in Deleuze’s & Guattari’s sense would then be, how a potential forth societal form could realize anti-production without appealing to power.

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