Overview
desiring-production
Quick Reference
The term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L'Anti-Oedipe (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977), for the process of desire. In spite of the title of their book, Deleuze and Guattari are not anti-*psychoanalysis—as they put it, their goal is to renovate psychoanalysis by re-engineering its principal conceptual mechanisms. From this perspective then, desiring-production may be seen to replace the Freudian concept of the id and thereby render the instincts productive. Similarly, it also replaces the Lacanian conception of lack as the principal motor of desire with the notion that desire is a productive, assembling force. But they also use the notion of desiring-production to infuse some Marxism into psychoanalysis and argue that society could not function as it does if desire was not the synthesizing force it is. Borrowing from Kant, Deleuze and Guattari develop a kind of ethics of desire by distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate syntheses of desire.
Further Reading:
I. Buchanan Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (2008).
