ANTI-OEDIPUS

We have long known that any sense of measure, for opportunistic reasons, in our long opposition to the outside world will only backfire on us. This is why we want to link our historical revolutionary position to our revolutionary position against nature, thus favourably re-establishing the necessary relationship between desire and the universe, considered from a cosmological point of view.

Now more than ever we realise that any class revolution must be concretely mirrored by a revolution against nature.

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The necessity to discover the love which, unhindered, might overthrow social and natural obstacles leads us to a non-Oedipal position. The existence of birth traumas and Oedipal complexes, revealed by Freudian theory, constitutes the natural and mnemonic limits, the unfavourable unconscious wrinkles, which, unbeknownst to us, control our attitude towards the outside world. We have formulated the problem of the complete release of man (Gherasim Luca, L'Inventeur de l'amour), adding as its condition the destruction of our initial Oedipal position.

Thanks to the revolutionary movements, the situation of the father has been soundly shaken, as much in its direct as in its symbolic forms. But the castrating vestiges of birth traumas nonetheless still persist within them, supported moreover by the favourable position of brotherhood maintained by political movements; this too is simply one of the forms covered by the initial complexes.

The painful defeats of love, all tainted by romantic idealism and humanity's incapacity to objectivise itself, find their first form in the mnemonic fixity of the mother and in the primitive other we carry within us.

The qualitative transformation of love into a general revolutionary method, and the possibility of going beyond the unconscious image of love in one giant leap, are prevented by this primordial theoretical defeat maintained within us by the Oedipal position. Freed of the mortal anguish acquired at birth, freed of the limitations of complexes deriving from our unconscious Oedipal attitude, we are finally trying to find the specific paths of our liberation and to go beyond the "endless cycle" implied by our erotic attitudes in their biological or psychic forms.

Considered in the light of a non-Oedipal position, the existing states of love are merely stages we must cross, and the concrete absurdity of objective love can only be unleashed by this imperious Hegelian negation, turned aphrodisiac to the point of paroxysm.

The necessities of revolution require the non-Oedipal attitude to be extended on a general level relating to the infra-psychic situation of revolutionaries in their immediate struggle.

Excerpted from "The Dialectic of the Dialectic"
Gherasim Luca & Trost, Bucharest, 1945

in Michael Richardson & Krzysztof Fijałkowski (2001) eds, Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts & Declarations, Pluto Press