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.41 The smallchild lives with his family around the clock; but within the bosom of this family,and from the very first days of his life, he immediately begins having an amazingnonfamilial experience that psychoanalysis has completely failed to take intoaccount.Lindner's painting attracts our attention once again.It is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the loveattachment of children to their mothers and fathers.It is a question of knowingwhat the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, ratherthan doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines tofit within (rabattre tout le jeu des machines desirantes dans) the restricted codeof Oedipus.How does the child first come to define the places and the functionsthat the parents are going to occupy as special agents, closely related to otheragents? From the very beginning Oedipus exists in one form and one form only:open in all directions to a social field, to a field of production directly invested bylibido.It would seem obvious that parents indeed make their appearance on therecording surface of desiring-production.But this is in fact the crux of the entireOedipal problem: What are the precise forces that cause the Oedipal triangulationto close up? Under what conditions does this triangulation divert desire so that itflows across aTHE DESIRING-MACHINES « surface within a narrow channel that is not a natural conformation ofthis surface? How does it form a type of inscription for experiences andthe workings of mechanisms that extend far beyond it in every direc-tion? It is in this sense and this sense only that the child relates the breastas a partial object to the person of his mother, and constantly watchesthe expression on his mother's face.The word "relate" in this case doesnot designate a natural productive relationship, but rather a relation inthe sense of a report or an account, an inscription within the over-allprocess of inscription, within the Numen.From his very earliestinfancy, the child has a wide-ranging life of desire a whole set ofnonfamilial relations with the objects and the machines of desire thatis not related to the parents from the point of view of immediateproduction, but that is ascribed to them (with either love or hatred) fromthe point of view of the recording of the process, and in accordance withthe very special conditions of this recording, including the effect of theseconditions upon the process itself (feedback).It is amid partial objects and within the nonfamilial relations ofdesiring-production that the child lives his life and ponders what itmeans to live, even though the question must be "related" to his parentsand the only possible tentative answer must be sought in familyrelations."I remember that ever since I was eight years old, and evenbefore that, I always wondered who I was, what I was, and why I wasalive; I remember that at the age of six, on a house on the Boulevard dela Blancarde in Marseilles (number 29, to be precise), just as I was eatingmy afternoon snack a chocolate bar that a certain woman known as mymother gave me I asked myself what it meant to exist, to be alive, whatit meant to be conscious of oneself breathing, and I remember that Iwanted to inhale myself in order to prove that I was alive and to see if Iliked being alive, and if so why."42 That is the crucial point: a questionoccurs to the child that will perhaps be "related" to the woman known asmommy, but that is not formulated in terms of her, but rather producedwithin the interplay of desiring-machines at the level, for example, ofthe mouth-air machine or the tasting-machine: What does it mean to bealive? What does it mean to breathe? What am I? What sort of thing isthis breathing-machine on my body without organs?The child is a metaphysical being.As in the case of the Cartesiancogito, parents have nothing to do with these questions.And we areguilty of an error when we confuse the fact that this question is"related" to the parents, in the sense of being recounted or communicatedto them, with the notion that it is "related" to them in the sense of afundamental connection with them.By boxing the life of the child upwithin the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal48 ANTI-OEDIPUS mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand theproduction of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms thathave an immediate bearing on the unconscious: in particular, the entireinterplay between primal psychic repression, the desiring-machines, andthe body without organs.For the unconscio us is an orpha n, andproduces itself within the identity of nature and man.Theautoproduc-tion of the unconscious suddenly became evident when thesubject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when thesocialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within theprocess of production, and when the cycle discovers its independencefrom an indefinite parental regression.To quote Artaud once again: "Igot no/papamummy."We have seen how a confusion arose between the two meanings of"process": process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacalwithin nature, and process as social production of desiring-machineswithin history.Neither social relations nor metaphysical relationsconstitute an "afterward" or a "beyond." The role of such relations mustbe recognized in all psychopathological processes, and their importancewill be all the greater when we are dealing with psychotic syndromesthat would appear to be the most animal-like and the most desocialized.It is in the child's very first days of life, in the most elementary behaviorpatterns of the suckling babe, that these relations with partial objects,with the agents of production, with the factors of antiproduction arewoven, in accordance with the laws of desiring-production as a whole
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