This talk considers how the positivization of libido inspires Deleuze and Guattari’s account of capital as “surplus value of flow” in Anti-Oedipus. I reconstruct the complex metaphysical framework within which this definition of capital unfolds and examine how the relation between desiring production and social production is successively determined by the coding, overcoding, and decoding of flows.
The upshot is that Anti-Oedipus’s ironic universal history culminates with the deterritorialization of the social replacing social revolution and schizophrenia replacing communism. I conclude by critically assessing the political ramifications of Deleuze and Guattari's "speculative leftism."
Ray Brassier is author of the influential Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and the upcoming Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx (Verso, 2027) as well as translator of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux.
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