In the previous chapter we saw the way in which Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire provided a means by which the dominance of Oedipus might be criticised. In this chapter I would like to broaden the scope of analysis to show the necessary interrelation between desiring-production and social production. This analysis will allow us to reinscribe Oedipus within the larger history of capitalism and thus show the limits of Oedipus.

In pursuing the relation between Oedipus and capitalism Deleuze and Guattari place themselves at the nexus of psychoanalysis and Marxism. What they want to avoid in their account, however, is either the reduction of psychoanalysis to Marxism – desire is the manifestation of the forces of economic production – or the reduction of economic production to psychoanalysis – social structures are psychic structures writ large. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring production that is mere fantasy on the other’, and ‘desiringproduction is one and the same thing as social production’. As we saw in the previous chapter it is desiring-machines that are real, and both the social and the psychic are manifestations of the same processes of connection, disjunction and conjunction.