Chaosophy - autonomous learning

through the unlimited expansion of a delirium or a drift." The commentator
is not entirely correct: there are better and more complete
desiring-machines. But as a general rule, perverse machines have the
advantage of presenting us with a constant oscillation between a
subjective adaptation, a diverting of a technical social machine, and
the objective setting up of a desiring-machine-yet another effort,
if you want to become republicans ... 3 In one of the finest texts ever
written on the subject of masochism, Michel de M'Uzan shows that
the perverse machines of the masochist, which are machines in the
strict sense of the term, cannot be understood in terms of phantasy
or imagination, just as they cannot be explained in terms of Oedipus
or castration, by means of a projection. There is no phantasy, he
says, but-and this is something totally different-a programming
which is "essentially structured outside the Oedipal problem
complex" (at last a little fresh air in the house of psychoanalysis, a
little understanding for the perverse).4
2. The desiring-machine and the Oedipal appal'atus: l'ecurrence
versus repression regression.
Desiring-machines constitute the non-Oedipal life of the unconscious-Oedipus
being the gadget or phantasy. By way of
opposition, Picabia called the machine "the daughter born without
a mother." Buster Keaton introduced his house-machine, with
all its rooms rolled into one, as a house without a mother, and
desiring-machines determine everything that goes on inside, as in
the bachelors' meal (The Scarecrow, 1920). Are we to understand
that the machine has but a father, and that it is born like Athena
fully armed from a virile brain It takes a lot of goodwill to believe,
along with Rene Girard, that paternalism is enough to lead us out
of Oedipus, and that "mimetic rivalry" is really the complex's other.
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