In the previous chapter, we situated the collaborative works of Deleuze and Guattari theoretically. For Deleuze, who had been building up his own philosophic thought in the context of 1960s France, structuralism was in the air as a revolutionary theory, opening up unprecedented ways of thinking about hitherto unexplored fields. Yes Deleuze had realised that structuralism was beset by numerous difficulties; but perhaps due to this theory's radical novelty, he had been unable to find a way out of them. It is precisely this complicated relationship between Deleuze and structuralism that can be read between the lines in his 1972 essay ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’ From the perspective of this essay, one can discern that a strong structuralist element pervades Difference and Repetition as well, which gives rise to the infelicitous consequence of a theoretical inconsistency (the conflation of the serial and minute perception models of the unconscious).

It is none other than this inconsistency that was overcome through the collaboration with Guattari. Lacanian psychoanalysis was held high in Deleuze's esteem as one of the pinnacles of structuralist achievement; Guattari for his part had absolute command of this theory's subtleties and intricacies, and moreover had instinctively recognised its problematic aspects. When Deleuze learnt of this, he set off on the work of turning Guattari's intuitions into fully-fledged concepts. Through this collaboration, Deleuze arrived at a new psychoanalysis (schizoanalysis) which no longer sought to explain all things from the hypothesis of primal repression, instead explaining repression itself from a wider social vantage point. Both the object of study and the way of studying it have undergone an irreversible change. In technical terminology, we are no longer interested in ‘the’ global-molar ego and id, but in a multiplicity of local-molecular egos and desires; and this no longer according to an idealised scene of primal repression and castration, but henceforth through socially constituted repressions in the indefinite plural. What is thus allowed to appear is an entirely new theoretical domain, emerging out of the union of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist political economy: a philosophy which sees the world in terms of desire. The problematic that lies at the foundation of this new philosophy is formulated by Deleuze-Guattari as follows: ‘[w]hy do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ (AO, 29/36–37; emphasis removed).