This paper is an introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of schizoanalysis through the use of Russian literature, particularly Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Andrey Platonov’s Dzhan. The process of schizoanalysis is detailed in a notoriously obfuscating style in Deleuze and Guattari’s

two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Schizoanalysis is a process both incorporating and opposed to psychoanalysis designed to escape patterns of neurosis and fascism in the individual and society. The Russians have been almost entirely overlooked in schizoanalysic studies, despite the ventures of many schizoanalytic scholars into feminism, cinema, and genre analysis. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes of an aristocratic society that is limiting and despotic at every level and of characters who are either trapped by their illegitimate desires or who struggle to actualize new desires on their own terms. In Dzhan, Platonov writes of a tribe on the fringe of early Soviet Russia that has no society: their desires cannot be actualized in any legitimate or illegitimate fashion; they are stuck in the virtual. A schizoanalysis of Anna Karenina and Dzhan will outline an understanding of desire and how it assembles and disassembles within two disparate lines of flight, one charted through the narrow confines of a restrictive state society, and the other a dying / rebirthing flight that is on the cusp of either Oedipus or utopia.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari are keen to make a distinction between the illness and the

process of schizophrenia. The illness is a debilitating disease that one cannot escape in which the subject cannot distinguish between hallucination and reality, endlessly falling into perceiving himself as other than he is; the process is something learned from the schizophrenic patient that can be applied as a cure to neurosis, psychosis, and as a political antidote to fascism.¹

¹ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. [Henceforward referred to in footnotes as “A-O”] Pg. 26.

Schizoanalysis works independently but may best be understood by way of contrast to psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is so deeply entrenched in how many institutions perceive the world. Psychoanalysis interprets what is seen as an already structured unconscious, a hierarchical “arborescence”, vertically inclined and rooted.² Lacan, for instance, argued that the unconscious is

structured like a language. Schizoanalysis is the purposeful construction of a rhizomatic unconscious, or as Deleuze and Guattari call it, the body without organs.³ Whereas psychoanalysis gets stuck in

interpreting what a thing means, becoming bogged down in the problem itself, schizoanalysis sees everything as desiring-machines, and, in doing so, skips interpretation right to analyzing the function of the desiring-machine: Not what does it mean, as in psychoanalysis, but what does it do?⁴ Anything can be

a desiring-machine, also known as a partial object, be it a lamp, a car, Anna’s pearl necklace, Chagataev’s camel’s eyes, or commonly, an image.⁵ Psychoanalysis calls what Deleuze and Guattari have termed

desiring-machines symbols, becomings, metaphors, and further, psychoanalysis claims that any symbol or metaphor can be representative of a greater whole.⁶ Deleuze and Guattari argue that the symbol and

metaphor are dead things. They are signs. They cannot leave the virtual space of the body without organs

(what in psychoanalysis is most similar to the unconscious). They lead back to Oedipus, to structures of limit, by way of the five paralogisms of psychoanalysis, which repress new desiring-production by extrapolating the symbol to be the entire thing (e.g., the flag is the state). “If we don’t have Oedipus as a crisis, we have it as a structure.”⁷ The desiring-machine elicits a desire. If the function of the

desiring-machine is to repress further desiring-production, which Deleuze and Guattari hold as

² Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1984; Pg 18.

³ Stivale, Charles J. “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Schizoanalysis and Literary Discourse.” SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 4, Issue 29. University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.

⁴ A-O 36.

⁵ A-O 42-47.

⁶ A-O 47.

⁷ A-O 82.

fundamental to living, it can be escaped by way of destroying the specific desiring-machine that is blocking the flows of other desiring-machines.

Deterritorialization is the process of extricating illegitimate processes of desiring-production from the body without organs, and the act of deterritorialization is performed by the three tasks of schizoanalysis:⁸

The Three Tasks of Schizoanalysis

The first is the negative task. It is finding and destroying Oedipus in all of its forms: lack, castration, limit, the ego, the superego, guilt, law, limit. “Oedipus” is destroyed in Anna Karenina when Tolstoy creates characters such as Levin or Anna who, through encounters with other characters, proliferate deterritorialized desire into actualization: Anna in her affair with Vronsky, for instance, or Levin embarking on a new life with Kitty. Desire proliferates in Dzhan as Platonov depicts a small society that lives on the fringe of the state, outside of the structure’s territorializing mechanisms. Cancerous desiring systems of lack in which desire ceases to be produced are destroyed in these scenarios, as characters act on their desires that come to them naturally and independently of external mechanisms such as the state. Rather than repressing these desires, they act on them.

The second task of schizoanalysis is the first positive task, discovering and determining the functions of a desire. When Anna begins to desire an affair with Vronsky, she would be wise to question the functionality of the desire: This desire’s function is to live a happier life in which more desires can be produced, beyond the limiting challenges presented by the restrictiveness of societal conditions and marriage laws.

The third task of schizoanalysis is the second positive task: distinguishing whether a desire is informed by a preconscious class interest or by an unconscious interest by a structure outside the subject. It is important to distinguish between interest and desire. “Desire can never be deceived. Interests can be

⁸ A-O 322-344.

deceived, unrecognized, or betrayed, but not desire.”⁹ If the desire is not informed by a class interest or by

a structure outside of the subject, the desiring process is legitimate. In Anna Karenina, Karenin has a preconscious class interest when he attempts to force Anna to quit her affair with Vronsky, or to at least be discreet. If Anna is caught, society will laugh at Karenin for being a cuckold, and his ministerial work will not succeed in the passing of government bills. It is not necessarily Karenin’s desire that causes him to fret over his wife’s affair, but rather the interests he holds in maintaining his reputation in society. In Dzhan, Chagataev has an unconscious familial interest in helping the Dzhan nation because even though he has grown up in Soviet society, it is this tribe that he originates from, and he sets about, in part, to discover his “roots”. It is not a legitimate process of desire that can lead him into new spaces and new territorialities, but instead a limiting and illegitimate process that can only point to, “Oh, this is why I became who I am” – Any time the process leads to an end-point where further desires cannot be produced, the process is an illegitimate one. After the three tasks of schizoanalysis have been performed, new desiring-production can begin. The trouble is that desiring-production is itself the repressing agent of further desiring-production, and is thus always in danger of succumbing to reterritorialization.¹⁰

Dzhan and the Body Without Organs

Whereas it is the goal of psychoanalysis to understand the unconscious (which leads to becoming trapped in its extrapolating, double-binding, applying, fictitious-desiring signs and symbols), it is the goal of schizoanalysis to build a body without organs. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari have renamed the unconscious the body without organs to better manifest the feeling of its nature. However, it is not merely newly named. The body without organs’ nearest parallel in Freudian psychology is the unconscious, but it is not the unconscious when applied through schizoanalysis. The points on the map of the BWO do not

⁹ A-O 257.

¹⁰ A-O 144.

preexist the subject, they are formed by the conjunctive synthesis of desire that creates the subject as a way of navigating life.

The body without organs is not only parallel to Freud’s unconscious, it is also the social structure that produces itself. It is difficult if not impossible for a person to imagine what he has not seen, and therefore, the body without organs is both in an individual mind as a whole and in a socius as a whole.

But to call the body without organs a sort of unconscious that is produced by the socius would still be reductionist. It is the absence of fantasy, which psychoanalysis has held as a gateway to meaning – but fantasy is one more illusion to schizoanalysis.¹¹ The body without organs is free of illusions except for the

ones that are put into it. The body without organs is desire, and it is also made of what is desired, and it is also what is desired itself.¹²

The body without organs is exactly what it sounds like. It is an empty space. Whether it is the BWO itself or the socius that we are speaking of makes no difference; they are one in the same. The Body Without Organs is desire. It is the task of the schizoanalyst to fill it with, and alternately remove it of, partial objects, desiring-machines. David Isaacson concludes in his review of Dzhan, “Chagataev realises that souls need to be filled by the will to live.”¹³ In this sense, we can say that the protagonist of Dzhan,

Nazar Chagataev, is a schizoanalyst. Chagataev’s journey into the desert to bring civilization and

collectivization to the Dzhan tribe is exactly what building a body without organs is about. The desert is an empty space which needs to be filled with points of reference to have its potential realized.

As it happens, it is not so easy to construct a body without organs with purpose. The BWO exists without construction of course, but it may be filled with illegitimate desiring processes. The “goal” is not so much a goal as a “horizon” to aim for, but it must be one that can never be reached. It’s like aiming for Nirvana. If you “arrive,” the state of being in Nirvana is impermanent. The process must continue, and the

¹¹ ATP 151.

¹² ATP 165.

¹³ David Isaccson. “Deep, Complex Misery – Even for a Russian.” The Observer, 2003.

schizoanalytic process is to empty the body without organs of reterritorializing desiring-machines to bring it to its natural state of emptiness so that the positive tasks of schizoanalysis can be applied, those of creating a healthy BWO with many freely chosen installed points of reference to create new lines of flight, new discovery. Desiring-production is always at work though, and so the next goal is to fill the body without organs with the legitimate processes of desiring-production. This can be tricky. There are the five paralogisms of psychoanalysis to address. Oedipal desiring-production masquerades as the paranoiac avatar. Fascists are at the micro-political level of desiring-machines as well as at the macro level of the socius. A reterritorialized desiring-machine will function as anti-production, repressing the natural formation of new, legitimate desiring-machines.

The Dzhan nation is devastated, a lost tribe cut off from Stalinist Russia of the late 1920s; the lost son of this lost tribe, Chagataev, is sent to bring civilization and collectivization to them. Chagataev is the hybrid son of a Russian military officer and an impoverished woman of the Dzhan nation.¹⁴ He is a

bastard child, left by his father before his birth, and abandoned to the city by his mother who, apparently

dying, had wanted a better life for him. Because he is without parents, he is not as susceptible to the traps of psychoanalysis as others: Chagataev’s desires cannot be interpreted as, “It’s because your father did so and so;” “it’s because your mother did so and so.” Although his mother plays a prominent role in the novel, it is more to show Chagataev the orphan than it is to show Chagataev the son. There is no family for him to interpret through. By contrast, his mother, Gyulchatay, with her body without organs almost empty before he arrives, immediately forms paranoiac avatars of desiring-machines as soon as she sees her son.

Chagataev is amazed when he returns to the desolate land of his tribe to find that his mother, who he has not seen since he was a small child, is still alive. At least, like all of the Dzhan tribesmen, she is alive in the physical sense. Seeing her son sparks new desiring-production. “Gyulchatay was trembling

¹⁴ Andrey Platonov. Soul: and Other Stories. Translated by Robert Chandler, Olga Meerson, and John Berger. New York Review Books Classics, 2007; Pg 1.

from age or from love for her son, but there was nothing she could say to him. She just ran her hands over his body, fearfully sensing her happiness and not believing in it, afraid it would pass.”¹⁵ Already the

paranoiac avatar takes shape in Gyulchatay. Her body without organs normally all but empty, for there are a scarce few partial objects in the desert to desire, she is suddenly overwhelmed with all that she suddenly has to desire in the form of her son, seeing the partial objects, the desiring machines, of his person, and not believing in their reality. Already, she is afraid to lose it; she feels lack even in the moment she possesses (for possession and lack are opposite sides of the same coin, the same problem).

The Dzhan’s souls have long all but extinguished. The Dzhan tribesmen are not alive enough to desire anything more than the most basic things, and what they do desire, they desire dimly. Warmth.

Sustenance. Sleep. As victims of trauma must first work through their feelings before they can work through to decide the nature of their values and ethics, the Dzhan tribesmen can only think in terms of basic motor functions. In short, they are traumatized. Tamsin Lorraine offers insight into a schizoanalytic approach to understanding the formation of trauma through a schizoanalytic lens:

“Trauma can relate to the dissonance of a minoritarian orientation or disequilibrium in subjectivity experienced as painful – a deterritorialization of the subject that makes social living difficult. This demands attention to affects, intensities, and subtle nuances of meaning in defiance of common sense and representable forms of experience. This, in turn, entails a process of self-transformation that resists majoritarian forms of subjectivity and invites new ways of understanding what it means to be human. The subject is not a thing with an ego that can be damaged, but rather a process that is sustained through social, psychic, and physiological processes. On this view, trauma sets off a shift in the sustaining patterns of those processes that block the ability to develop and extend one’s capacity to affect and be affected. What is needed to resolve trauma is to find the points of intensification and connections that might

unblock the flows causing the problem”.¹⁶

Gyulchatay is at an extreme disadvantage in trying to build a body without organs that can process legitimate syntheses of desiring-production. The trauma that she endures has been with her for most of her life.

“Her thin and rapacious face had become rapacious and angry from constant sorrow or from the effort of staying alive when there’s nothing to live for and nothing to live on, when you must force your heart to work, when you must keep remembering your heart for it to go on beating. Otherwise death may come at

¹⁵ Platonov 41.

¹⁶ Tamsin Lorraine. Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics. State University of New York Press, 2011. Pg. 130.

any moment – if you forget or fail to understand that you are alive, that you must keep trying to want something and not overlook your own self.”¹⁷

The Dzhan tribesmen are dilapidating machines. The camel that Chagataev finds in the desert on his way to them is more alive than they. The people of the Dzhan nation eat tasteless blades of grass. They have managed to subsist on blades of grass for decades. They have no will left in them to become something other than what they are. Chagataev must take into account their trauma, their inability to affect intensities that might help them unblock their flows of desire. Chagataev comes to put the full force of his capable and abundant desiring-production into kick-starting theirs to create a body without organs. It may not be enough.

Chagataev has it in him to try because he is without ego. Mark Seem quotes Henry Miller in his translator’s introduction to Anti-Oedipus: “Everybody becomes a healer the moment he forgets about himself.”¹⁸ Chagataev’s sense of identity is not so fixed, perhaps because he has never had family into

whom he could divest his social interests and his desires. A rigidly fixed sense of identity is the kind of familial mentality that the Oedipal state normally synthesizes. Chagataev is an orphan. He has no father to project onto each recorded partial object. He does work for the state, but he does not see everything they want him to see, he only executes his own desires in the social field, and for a time, it seems to align with the objectives of the state. For Chagataev though, the state is irrelevant. He desires to help the Dzhan people. As improbable as filling the body without organs of the Dzhan is, selfless Chagataev is best equipped for the job. Chagataev is his desires, and the socius of the state cannot influence him with its propaganda past Chagataev’s own will and desire to affect positive change for the Dzhan people.

The Three Passive Syntheses of Desire

Desiring-production forms the body without organs, and desiring-production is governed by the three passive syntheses of desire: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. The connective synthesis is the

¹⁷ Platonov 41.

¹⁸ A-O xxiii.

production synthesis, and it occurs when one desiring-machine connects to another and forms an intensity, for instance a passion, such as when Vronsky and Anna first match eyes.¹⁹, ²⁰,²¹ This intensity could also

be a rage or an anxiety, such as Anna experiences later in the book when stuck in her double bind of choosing between a passionate affair with Vronsky outside the state and a dull but fulfilling life with Karenin and her son sanctioned within the state. The disjunctive synthesis is the recording synthesis, and it occurs (records, reterritorializes, overcodes) when the connective desiring-machines bounce back and forth between coordinates and points of reference or partial objects on the body without organs²²,²³, ²⁴,

such as when Anna takes leave of her spousal affiliations to dance with Vronsky: Anna disconnects from the point of reference, the coordinate of her marriage, to connect her desire to dance with Vronsky to reality, that is, to actually making it happen. The conjunctive synthesis is the consumption or consummation synthesis, and it is the only synthesis in which a subject arises – Anna and Vronsky do not experience subjectivity when the first two passive syntheses of desire are moving but only in a final moment of intensity when the conjunctive synthesis occurs. The conjunctive synthesis is that moment of Aha! That’s it! I understand! or I love her! I love him! I love it! I hate it! It essentially means: This thing now constitutes part or all of my identity.²⁵ “The conjunctive synthesis takes place under the aegis of the

previous two syntheses; it is the reward that falls to ‘us’ for assenting to an interpellation by the

desiring-machines (all the while forgetting there was a choice involved).”²⁶ It is the conjunctive synthesis

that leads to obsession, to fetishism, to nationalism, to jealousy, to anxiety.²⁷ It makes the absolute

something ‘encompassing,’ something totalizing that overcodes the earth [the body without organs] and

¹⁹ A-O 70-71.

²⁰ Steven Shaviro. “The Connective and Disjunctive Syntheses.” The Pinocchio Theory, July 8, 2008.

²¹ Buchanan 58-59.

²² A-O 78

²³ Shaviro. “The Connective and Disjunctive Syntheses.”

²⁴ Buchanan 61.

²⁵ A-O 86-87

²⁶ Buchanan 64.

²⁷ Steven Shaviro. “The (Third) Conjunctive Synthesis.” The Pinocchio Theory, July 14, 2008.

then conjugates the lines of flight in order to stop them rather than connecting them in order to create.”²⁸ The conjunctive synthesis stops the connection that began the desiring process and crystalizes a subject, putting a halt to the becoming. In short, the conjunctive synthesis is the ever-present emotion inside of a concept or construct.

The passive operation of the three syntheses can be referred to as the micro-politics of desire. The three passive syntheses carry themselves out passively, without a person’s awareness, and there is both a legitimate and an illegitimate formation of the syntheses. The illegitimate, which arrives by way of the five paralogisms, is conformist, neurotic, sedentary, exclusive, restrictive – desire is aborted when an illegitimate synthesis occurs. The legitimate is nonconformist, schizo, nomadic, nonrestrictive, inclusive.²⁹ Desire is multiplied in a legitimate synthesis. One purpose of schizoanalysis is to find ways to

aid the legitimate syntheses of desiring-production.

Anna Karenina and the Trouble of Affecting a Legitimate Synthesis of Desiring-Production

As it happens, Levin and Anna meet, not only close to the end of the novel, but close to the end of Anna’s life. It is also therefore close to the end of her relationship with Vronsky. Although Levin is dazzled by her charm, Anna is only concerned with why her charms no longer dazzle Vronsky. The following narration of Anna’s thoughts is Tolstoy’s; the parts in brackets are my schizoanalytic translation of her thoughts: “[The first desiring-machine that occurs in Anna’s thoughts is concerned with pleasing others in societal gatherings…] If I have such an effect on others, on this loving family man, […connects to the second desiring-machine, her passion for Vronsky] why is he so cold to me? [Anna is extrapolating, getting stuck in a double bind] … or not really cold, he loves me, I know that. But something new separates us now      I can’t do anything, start anything, change anything [the double-bind]. I restrain

²⁸ ATP 510.

²⁹ Buchanan 72.

myself, wait, find amusements for myself . . . but it’s all really only a deception, the same morphine again [Anna is conscious of falling into these traps]. He ought to pity me,’ she said, feeling tears of self-pity come to her eyes [but still falls back into the trap, desiring the repression of a desiring-machine that would function by pulling her out of her depression and into a new state of being]”.³⁰ Desire operates in fits and

starts.³¹ It often appears that nothing is happening, when in fact, a desiring-machine is forming that will

induce a new becoming. Instead, Anna is beginning an illegitimate process of desiring-production that will conjoin with other illegitimate processes of desire, which will lead to her death beneath the wheels of a train (death too, is a becoming); her death is the psychoanalytic stopping of castration.

Levin, on the other hand, after this meeting does indeed allow himself to wonder about what a match between he and Anna would be like, but with Levin, this legitimate process of desiring-production will meet with resistance because of the commitments he has already made. “Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to,” and when Levin had responded to her, “Never had anything intelligent that Levin had said given him so much pleasure”.³² A conjunctive

synthesis is formed, and so he desires; were he to follow it, he would start down a new “line of flight”. It is not however, a desiring-machine that has formed out of pressure from a structure or socius external to Levin. In this, Levin has already begun forming a legitimate process of desire: He is not thinking within the limits of the structures of his marriage; he is desiring without limit.

Later, when Kitty witnesses how overcome with desire Levin is for Anna (he means to hide it and is ashamed, but as Deleuze and Guattari say, desire always overspills), she becomes angry: “You’ve fallen in love with that nasty woman. She’s bewitched you. I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can come of it? It took Levin a long time to calm his wife down.”³³ A disjunction takes place in Levin’s process of

³⁰ Tolstoy 704.

³¹ A-O 1.

³² Tolstoy 698.

³³ Tolstoy 703.

desiring-production and records the image of his wife’s suffering because of the former conjunctive, passionate desire for Anna. Levin’s processes of desire thus pass from a legitimate process of desire to an illegitimate process. Before the first group of syntheses have completed (and they will too), a new cycle begins; a new connective synthesis forms that desires the repression of the original desire in order to satisfy his (also legitimate) desire to safeguard his marriage and respect the desires of his wife. This new desiring process is itself legitimate because Levin desires freely of any external structure for Kitty to be happy. Every interaction, and every thought up to this one is evidence of his desire for her happiness, including his reluctance to “sanctify” their love with the church – Levin finds religion unnecessary, and like Tolstoy, who became later in life a Christian anarchist in a philosophy of his own design, is weary of state involvement in private matters. In Levin’s new desiring process to make Kitty happy, a disjunction occurs that makes the connective synthesis of the previous cycle in which he desired Anna, and a conjunctive synthesis is realized that resolves both cycles: It is the formation of a desiring-machine whose function is to resolve the conflict between all the connective and disjunctive syntheses. Levin experiences a moment in which his identity is happily wrapped up in his marriage to Kitty. This moment of identity (Ah, this is it! This is me!) is the synthesis of conjunction.

There seems to be a contradiction because the conjunctive synthesis arrives from two syntheses,

one legitimate and one illegitimate. In fact, understanding the nature of desiring-production eliminates the perception of a paradox. “In truth, there are never contradictions, apparent or real, only degrees of humor.”³⁴ One must use laughter, whose function is to ease discomfort (in this case, the discomfort of a

seeming paradox) to feel at ease with apparent contradictions. We see how desiring-production is a messy affair. Contradictions imply paradoxes, which are splits. Truth is indivisible and can’t be split. When we perceive something to be contradictory, we are really seeing two or more parts of the same thing. The appearance of separateness is comical. At its heart, the thing remains resolute and whole. Humor allows

³⁴ A-O 68.

us to acknowledge different parts of the outer aperture so that we can put them together in our split-perceiving minds to see the whole.

It may be difficult to understand the three passive syntheses in action because psychoanalysis is so deeply embedded in our culture; we seek answers. It undoubtedly offends some that Levin could love a woman other than his wife even for an instant, but marriage is not an answer to the problem of infidelity, it is only the fulfillment of a desire and a becoming itself. Desiring-production continues after the marriage, but the marriage becomes a territorializing desiring-machine with a function of repressing the formation of new desiring-machines that would threaten the marriage territoriality. There are no answers in desiring-production, only becomings.

Lest an ideological conclusion be made, Levin is not wrong when he does not take his desires for Anna from the virtual and into actualization. It would be an ideological shift to interpret Levin’s desires as right or wrong. The function of the passive syntheses within schizoanalysis is to avoid slipping into discussions of ideology.³⁵ It is about the process of desire, which Tolstoy has delineated so thoroughly

throughout Anna Karenina. Tolstoy does not place Levin and Anna within the same chapter for the

purpose of pointing out that all the characters calculated the wrong actions to find the answers they sought. Anna and Levin meet in this one chapter because it affords an opportunity to see how desiring-production forms at the micro level of scene interactions to affect desiring-production at the

macro level of plot, which is itself a structure. In structures (which are part of the fundamental nature of desire and territoriality), disjunctions (which the psychoanalyst might interpret as “problems”) will always occur in the lines of flight that desiring-machines produce.

Another instance of desiring-production from the same chapter in which Anna and Levin meet: Oblonsky, Anna’s brother and Levin’s childhood friend, a mid-level government bureaucrat and aristocrat who spends too lavishly but doesn’t worry about money, is conditioned to think in terms of power and

³⁵ A-O 105

lack, of have and have-not. His desires generally run in illegitimate formations. He admonishes Anna that in spending so much time tutoring a young English girl, she will “end by loving her more than [Anna’s] own [newly born daughter by Vronsky]”.³⁶ Because Oblonsky thinks in terms of the problem, in terms of

the state that forms his desiring-processes, he imagines that Anna will also automatically desire in illegitimate formations.

Oblonsky cannot know this because he is not conscious of his desiring-production. Anna replies,

“There is no more or less love. I love my daughter with one love and her with another.”³⁷ Love flows

from desire, and as long as Anna desires to love her own children and whomever else she chooses, she will go on loving. “Once we forget about our egos a non-neurotic form of politics is possible,” translator

Mark Seem remarks in his introduction to Anti-Oedipus.³⁸ Anna’s desire flows legitimately because it is

not hampered by the same structures that limit Oblonsky; in fact, her pursual of her affair with Vronsky signals her disjunction from the coded norms of the state that impel one to remin in confined structures that limit legitimate desiring processes. .

Levin inquires of Anna why she only expends her effort in tutoring Russian to a young English girl rather than extending her efforts to teach many Russian children in the school village. She informs Levin and her brother that Vronsky claims this would increase the effects of her efforts by one hundred percent, and she answers to this problem, “Energy is based on love. And love can’t be drawn from just anywhere, it can’t be ordered,” by a social institution such as a school or otherwise.³⁹ Tolstoy’s purpose in

writing the preceding lines might have been to show that helping one person with devotion is equally or more important than divesting one’s energy into too broad a field so that one is helped greatly rather than many being helped a very little. The real difference for Anna is that teaching in a school would give her notoriety and respect in society, in the structure, whereas teaching the little girl satisfies her own desires.

³⁶ Tolstoy 699

³⁷ Tolstoy 699

³⁸ Seem A-O

³⁹ Tolstoy 699

Love is born of desire, but were Anna to subvert the energy of her love into the structure of the school, her desiring-process would cease to be legitimate. Anna is a special character in literature. She is conscious of her desiring processes and is affected by their nature.

It is possible to stipulate why Anna would desire to teach only the English girl, but it is irrelevant to this argument, which is only to show that Anna desires, and so do we all, freely of institutions. It is only that desires come to serve the needs of institutions, in the same way that organs serve a body, that the issues of Oedipus, the ever-present myth and illusion, comes into play. Anna however, dances past the limits that society would impose on her until the Oedipalizing moment of her death.

Until her death (and even after), Anna’s “energy,” her desires, make up the movement of the novel. The novel weaves and dances in and out of itself like the dancers at the ball in which Anna and Vronsky first court one another. A movement is a line of flight, a departure from one state of existence into another. Taking the line of flight as far as it will go is another function of schizoanalysis. There comes a point where the line of flight, too, may have to be deterritorialized, but the line is always there, traced into existence. The function of literary schizoanalysis is to trace new lines of flight that are unseen in a literary work’s line of flight. A look at this dance and the movements of desire that occur within it can offer an idea of the movement of desire in the rest of the novel.

The Movement of Desiring-Machines

The dance is seen principally from Kitty’s perspective, and in this Tolstoy plays off the desires of three main characters at once:

“Anna smiled and her smile passed over to [Vronsky]. She lapsed into thought, and he too would turn serious.

Some supernatural force [already it is evident that Kitty’s desiring-production is governed by illegitimate syntheses] drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting that beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.”⁴⁰

⁴⁰ Tolstoy 82.

Kitty notices the parts of Anna and assimilates them into her body without organs as a whole body comprised of organs, partial objects, desiring machines (desiring machines are not only the desires one has, but the partial objects themselves that often elicit desires). Every part of Anna inflames her desire for Vronsky, of which Anna is another part, another desiring machine in Kitty’s body without organs. She sees the pearls, the arms, the bracelets, the smiles, and these things inform her desire to both hate and admire Anna, and furthermore, they inform her desire for Vronsky, and further still the desire to be betrayed.

Deleuze and Guattari posit schizoanalysis as a means in art to discover how anyone can come to desire their own suffering or the repression of their desires. For Kitty, it happens when she inscribes by faculty of the primitive territorial machine the inscribing of the partial objects of and in Anna’s person onto her own body without organs. “The capture of a fragment of the code [the partial object inscribed], not the reproduction of an image,” deterritorializes the partial object discussed.⁴¹ Kitty takes these partial

objects and deterritorializes her desire for Vronsky and reterritorializes a new desire for the repression of

the original desire. The socius has conditioned her to believe that she can have but one love and that he too can have but one love. She has been conditioned to conceive of love as limited. She makes a choice based on familial concerns (her mother wants her to marry the societally prominent Vronsky; her father would prefer Levin, the safe bet, despite his awkwardness within rituals of societal niceties such as the ball in which Vronksy’s dance with Anna causes Kitty to feel betrayed). She does not think of her future or of her best interests when she rejects Levin, she thinks of her place in society. She loves Levin, and she she also loves Vronsky, but she chooses Vronsky because society has informed her that this is the proper decision.

A couple days after the ball, in her suffering, Kitty speaks heatedly and hatefully to her sister Dolly about Dolly’s own betrayed desires (Dolly’s husband is Oblonsky, Anna’s brother and Levin’s best

⁴¹ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Les Editions Minuet, University of Paris, 1975; University of Michigan, 1986. [Hence forward to be referred to as K: AML]. Pg. 18

friend). Because of Kitty’s rash words push away Dolly, who had intuited the matter already, but quickly a reconciliation happens, and Tolstoy affords the reader with Dolly’s point of view, which succinctly details Kitty’s desire: “Kitty’s grief, her incurable grief [the result of a disjunctive, unfulfilled desire], was precisely that Levin made a proposal and that she had refused him, while Vronsky had deceived her, and she was ready to love Levin and hate Vronsky”.⁴² Kitty’s desires are betrayed as they are raised to their

peak. Her desires bring her pain because of their illegitimate processes. “The very existence of [Karenin and Anna’s son] Seryohza makes Anna’s attempts to live happily with Vronsky an exercise in

self-forgetting.”⁴³ Anna cannot flow on through the partial flight she has laid for herself with Vronsky

because she has a responsibility to tend to her child. Ian Buchanan has cited some who accuse Deleuze and Guattari of being misogynistic, suggesting that the lines of flight and escape that Deleuze and Guattari discuss are only accessible to men, because women must stay home with the child. But it is society that makes this so, not the line of flight itself. It is the Russian high society that will not allow Anna to keep her son while dissolving her marriage. Even Karenin is ambivalent about whether or not Anna loves Vronsky; he sees jealousy as a petty vice; he cares only for what society notices and how an affair would damage his reputation and the way others perceive him.⁴⁴ In Anna’s historical moment,

Russia does not allow the dissolution of a marriage unless there is a cause such as adultery, and the offending party will not be granted custody of children. If Anna is to leave her marriage for Vronsky, she must leave society and thus leave Seryohza. Her line of flight is restricted by society, not her sense of love for her child. On the contrary, if Anna were allowed to love in the way that she sees fit for herself, all obligations to Vronsky, Seryohza, and even Karenin, who doesn’t care a wit what Anna does except for what others speak of him, would be satisfied.

⁴² Tolstoy 125

⁴³ Bloom 240.

⁴⁴ Tolstoy 146.

Thinking Beyond the Problem: The Displaced Limit

When Anna is cut off from her son, this effects a traumatization. But when Anna falls in love with Vronsky, this does not mean that her love for Servoyozha is extinguished; instead, it is a new avenue for the love that occurs spontaneously and naturally in Anna to express itself. It does not even mean that her love for Karenin should change – and Anna does love Karenin in a familial if not in a romantic way.

Tolstoy does not venture to stipulate through Anna’s actions whether or not romantic love of more than one person is possible, but he does not need to, the question is implicit in the action of love. In fact, by showing that the love between Anna and Karenin that can be described as kinship, Tolstoy does away with the necessity to distinguish between familial and romantic love. Anna’s loyalties to Alexei Karenin and to Servoyhza can still be satisfied while attending to a romantic love with Alexei Vronsky. (There can be more than one Alexei!). Anna has no shortage of love. She becomes confused however when the constructs imposed on her by aristocratic society impose limits on her love. This is where her trauma begins. As Anna births Vronsky’s daughter, she now not only has two Alexeis but two families. She

begins to question. Since her love for Karenin is more familial than romantic, she begins to worry whether her love for Vronsky will become the same now that she has a child. Tolstoy has affected a “split”; where there was one, now there are two. Anna’s desires become reterritorialized, overcoded, and she feels trapped in a double bind between escape with Vronsky and her daughter and staying with Servoyoza. “If a given feminist abstract machine is one of ‘overcoding’ and so blocks available lines of flight and replicates or even amplifies the ‘molar’ the question would be how to remove such blockages and create a feminist plane of consistency or abstract machine of mutation that would allow creative resolution of such conflicts”⁴⁵. If the daughter were Karenin’s baby, Anna would not have a problem. Since it is Vronsky’s,

though, it exacerbates the choice that society forces her to make.

⁴⁵ Lorraine 16

Anna cannot feel as one conjoined subject after the birth of Vronsky’s daughter. She empathizes with the baby – The baby is born in wedlock and is a bastard child and a dishonor. Anna loves her daughter, but when she begins to see the baby girl as representative of her own plight, she hates her. As it is with Anna, the daughter can only be saved if Anna severs her ties with Vronsky and pretends that Karenin fathered the baby girl. But the church limits Karenin’s love: He speaks with offerings of forgiveness, but he only speaks them conditionally; he forces the same split onto Anna because the church demands that the bind of marriage be honored as a sanctimony higher than unlimited love. To Karenin, love is scarce. It can only be given within the bounds of the family, and the family is a representative miniature of the state and the church (which are doubles for one another). Love with limit forces its producers to think in terms of lack and limit. I only have enough love to fit within the bounds of my family – The state only has enough resources to care for its constituent peoples. “The traumatized subject is a subject who cannot live in the chronological time of dominant reality.”⁴⁶ Anna’s dominant reality is

the one that the Oedipal Russian-aristocracy imposes. She cannot step into this reality because it does not allow her to love freely, and without being able to love freely, Anna is unable to live freely. Anna can conceive of a reality without her brother and his family, without Karenin, without friends, but not without her son, even if by his loss she gains a daughter. Anna loves without condition, and she goes mad when

conditions are placed upon her love.

A Russian Desire Revolution

Levin contemplates suicide after he is wed. Before his marriage to Kitty, though between the first and second proposals she had, to his mind, betrayed him in seeking Vronsky’s hand instead of his own, Levin had maddeningly desired Kitty. At times it occupied him to the extent that nothing else could be done.

Nothing else had any meaning. Psychoanalysis seeks to entomb the text in meaning, and yet in this text, nothing had meaning for Levin when he desired. He later seeks to find happiness in the meaning-full texts

⁴⁶ Lorraine 135.

of philosophers but to no avail. It is only in the final pages of the novel that Levin comes to realize that he is happy when he desires, that is, when he lives and does not think about what living means. “This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed”⁴⁷. In the last

paragraph of the novel, Levin goes on to say that he will continue doing all the “good” and “bad” that he does, but he will continue to live with feeling, and to love. Levin will cease searching for a meaning to live; he will live by process of life itself. By desire and thus by an ever-ongoing process of becoming.

Any legitimate synthesis of desiring-production must be inclusive. New writers are essential to an enterprise of creating new desiring-production, but arguably, the best novelists in international history come from Russia. If a desiring-production revolution is to be successful, it must be inclusive. The rest of the world loves Russia’s classics as much as Russia does, and for good reason. Desiring-production is everywhere in the novels of Tolstoy. People sense it. Platonov’s desert must be filled and brought to life. Anna must live and love freely.

As Chernyshevsky famously asked, “What is to be done?”

In all that we do, we must affect the continual process and liberation of desire.

⁴⁷ Tolstoy 817