Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 37

 

as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud 

attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal be-

coming-wolf or -wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the 

hysteric character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole 

motor, the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a 

counter-Oedipal apparatus—incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love 

with "people of inferior station"; and anality, homosexuality?—all that 

Freud sees only as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In 

truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a 

libidinal assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the 

multiple loves.

 

Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka's story, 

"Jackals and Arabs," is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you 

can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs 

are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother; 

between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the 

rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed, 

organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an 

intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines of flight or 

deterritorialization ("they are madmen, veritable madmen"); between the 

two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. And aren't those big 

scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases jackal-particles, both to accel-

erate their mad race by detaching them from the mass and to bring them 

back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them around? 

Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus: 

kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the 

problem well: it is not that of castration but of "cleanliness" (proprete, also 

"ownness"), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass territoriality 

or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the entire desert, the body 

without organs on which the drama is played out.

 

There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is 

the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents 

of enunciation (take "collective agents" to mean not peoples or societies 

but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an 

individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multi-

plicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation 

of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. 

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The 

proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a 

field of intensity. What Proust said about the first name: when I said 

Gilberte's name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body 

naked in my mouth. The Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first

 

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8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

name linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied 

and depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about 

multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand 

dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand 

holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries the 

psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a 

dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are wild mul-

tiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected 

Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are to a certain extent 

part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could serve as correctional 

indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are criticizing psychoanalysis for 

having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would pro-

duce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own 

name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk 

as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even 

listen; he glances at his dog and answers, "It's daddy." For as long as that 

lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it cracks, it's psychosis. The Wolf-Man 

will receive the psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the 

cause, and even disabled veterans' benefits. He could have spoken in his 

own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular 

statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that 

in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or 

she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived 

of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking, 

and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the 

famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six 

wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How inter-

esting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it's your 

father ... That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he's left lying there 

with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all 

those libidi-nal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the 

wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated 

by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, 

polite, and resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He 

gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological 

vision: "Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of 

nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular 

zoology."

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