Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera (1934)
The French word délire, turned into a concept by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) has something that its English equivalent, delirium, does not have: its status to be simultaneously a noun and a verb. As we will see in this article, this is an important shade of difference and I will use the French verb délirer instead of its imperfect English version ‘to go into delirium”. Deleuze summarizes the argument of Anti-Oedipus as the fundamental distinction between the unconscious interpreted as a representative form (Sigmund Freud’s argument) and the unconscious interpreted as a production of desire. In other words, this distinction is the same there is between a theater and a factory. This changes anything as the realms of representation involves a phenomenology that activates itself through symbols and a sort of cultural semiotics whereas, the notion of production involves universal operations of material manipulation and transformation. This is why Freudian psychoanalysis tends to focus (or at least to start from) the familial realms as the Oedipus complex suggests and why an anti-oedipus argument starts from the universal. In the second part of Anti-Oedipus calls the Freudian totalitarian obsession for the family, familialism and talk about The Imperialism of Oedipus:
Oedipus restrained is the figure of the daddy-mommy-me triangle, the familial constellation in person. But when psychoanalysis makes of Oedipus its dogma, it is not unaware of the existence of relations said to be pre-oedipal in the child, exo-oedipal in the psychotic, para-oedipal in others.
