Capitalism & Schizophrenia Part V: Thanatos in the Age of Pandemics

In my last outing in this series (which I promised, improvidently, to be the last, against my prolix nature), I argued that we have crossed a Babel Horizon: the left and right superstructures in American political life have become mutually unintelligible, each importing an entire catalogue of signs and signifieds that render communication across the divide functionally impossible. In a companion piece, The Mother’s Mask and the Father’s Fist, I examined the gendered topology of this unintelligibility — the way conservatives selectively code government authority as tyrannical or legitimate based on whether it wears the face of the mother or the fist of the father. Because these disparate strains of thought occurred to me at different times, I did not see how they might be melded, but in doing so, I felt I had to revive my series on Capitalism & Schizophrenia for a new part… of what I am sure will be many more to come, because I am nothing if not incessant.

Today, I want to go deeper into the engine room, because neither piece fully explains the mechanism — the force that carries people across the Babel Horizon in the first place. To do that, we need to return to Freud and psychoanalysis one more time, not to the Oedipal drama we examined in the Mother’s Mask, but to his darkest, most speculative, and most terrifyingly prescient concept: Thanatos, the death drive, which we touched on in Part IV.

1. The Drive Toward Unbinding

In 1920, shaken by the carnage of the First World War and puzzled by patients who seemed to compulsively repeat traumatic experiences, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle and introduced the concept of the “death drive.” It was not well-received.1 Even many of his followers thought he had finally lost it. But let me explain what Thanatos actually is, because it is not simply a wish to die.

The death drive, as Freud developed it, is a tendency toward unbinding — toward dissolution, the reduction of tension to zero. It is the psychic force that resists Eros, the drive toward connection, binding, and civilization. Eros says: bind yourself to the social body, form connections, create structures, build. Thanatos says: dissolve. Unbind. Return to inorganic stillness. In less psychoanalytic terms, we might call these principles something along the lines of Henri Bergson’s “élan vital” and the concept of entropy from thermodynamics.

Of course, Freud himself described this in terms that were almost thermodynamic — the organism’s tendency to return to an inorganic state, to reduce excitation to zero. And he was more right than perhaps he knew, because what he was describing is, at bottom, the second law of thermodynamics restated as psychology. Entropy — the tendency of closed systems toward maximum disorder, toward equilibrium, toward heat death — is the physical law that underwrites Thanatos. The universe, left to itself, runs down. Structures dissolve. Complexity dissipates into noise. The warm body cools. The signal degrades into static. That is entropy, and that is, at the most fundamental level, what the death drive is: the psyche’s participation in the universal tendency toward dissolution.

But if entropy is the whole story, we should all be dead already. The universe is fourteen billion years old and yet here we are, improbable concatenations of matter that somehow organized ourselves into cells, organisms, societies, civilizations, and philosophy departments. Something pushes back against entropy, and this is where we need to bring in Bergson, a philosopher Deleuze knew very well — well enough to write an entire book about him (Bergsonism, 1966) before he ever met Guattari.

Bergson’s great contribution was the concept of the élan vital, the vital impulse — a creative, anti-entropic force that drives toward greater complexity, differentiation, and novelty. For the scientific/materialist establishment of his day, and even today, the generally accepted explanation is that élan vital is pseudoscientific, that purely molecular reactions are capable of explaining life, birth, creation, evolution, etc.

But for Bergson, life is not merely matter arranged in an especially complicated pattern. Life is a force that resists the mechanical, resists reduction, resists the tendency toward equilibrium. It is what pushes matter uphill against the thermodynamic gradient, toward ever-greater complexity and ever-more-improbable forms of organization. It is why a seed becomes a tree rather than simply decaying. It is why consciousness emerges from chemistry rather than chemistry simply dissipating into heat.

In other words, élan vital is not meant to give the mechanistic explanation of how molecular reactions and chemical processes result in the phenomenon we call life; it is meant to give an organizing principle as to why those things happen at all, in seemingly greater and greater spirals of complexity (e.g., evolution) that run contrary to the accepted thermodynamic principles of entropy. And this is what I think physics, not being of course metaphysics, will always struggle to explain. But we should not think that entropy alone exists. There must be a contrasting principle, a drive for connection, otherwise the first fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms would never have begun.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The élan vital is Eros in a lab coat. It is the creative, connective, binding force at work in the physical universe, the thing that Freud intuited but lacked the metaphysical vocabulary to fully articulate. And — this is essential — it is the direct ancestor of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire as a positive, productive force. When Deleuze and Guattari tell us that desire is not a lack but a real and motive power, they are channeling Bergson’s élan vital through the psychoanalytic tradition. Desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the anti-entropic force operating at the level of psychic and social life: it is what drives machines to connect, to produce, to create new assemblages, new flows, new forms of organization.

So we have our two poles, and they are not merely psychological. They are cosmological. Eros/élan vital/desire-as-productive-force on one side: the drive toward connection, complexity, novelty, life. Thanatos/entropy/dissolution on the other: the drive toward unbinding, equilibrium, repetition, death. And the entire drama of human civilization — including, as we are about to see, the political catastrophe of the last half-decade — plays out in the tension between them.

Crucially, Thanatos manifests not merely as self-destruction but as aggression, repetition compulsion, and resistance to connection. This is why Freud saw it at work in the trenches of the Somme: not because soldiers wanted to die (though many did), but because entire civilizations had seemingly chosen to unmake themselves, to dissolve the very structures of connection and cooperation that had taken centuries to build, and to do so with what can only be described as enthusiasm.

That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’

— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

If you have been reading this series, your ears should be perking up right now. Deleuze and Guattari quoted this passage for a reason. The question of why people desire their own repression is the central question of Anti-Oedipus, and the death drive is the psychoanalytic mechanism they inherited — and then transformed — to answer it.

2. Your Uncle’s Desiring-Machines

Now let us consider a specific case. I suspect most of us have at least one connection that fits this description: any person — a relative, a friend, a coworker — who, sometime around 2020 or 2021, went off the deep end. Maybe it started with skepticism about masks. Then it was the vaccines. Then the election. Then QAnon or PizzaGate, or something adjacent to it. And along the way, this person burned through friendships, alienated family, lost or quit jobs, and emerged from the process angrier, more isolated, and more committed to a political stance that seems, from the outside, to offer them nothing but continued misery.

I took up this theme in Mother’s Mask (supra). A social media interlocutor replied that twenty years from now, there will be fascinating psychological studies about what happened to these people. My thesis, restated simply, was that we could understand it in psychoanalytic terms related to the death drive. But now, let’s make a bridge.

Let’s think about this in Deleuzian terms. Remember: everything is machines. Your uncle is a complex of desiring-machines, engaged in flows, powered by desire. Before 2020, those machines were more or less integrated into a functioning network: family machines, work machines, friendship machines, all connected through flows of affect, communication, and social exchange. His desire — that positive, motive force we discussed in Part I — was invested in maintaining those connections. His libidinal economy, to use the psychoanalytic term, was broadly Erotic: oriented toward binding, connection, and the social.

Then the pandemic hit.

And here is where Deleuze and Guattari’s insight about breakdowns becomes critical. Remember from Part II: you only learn what a machine does when it breaks. The pandemic was, in schizoanalytic terms, a massive interruption of flows. Social flows, economic flows, even the literal flow of bodies through physical space. Suddenly, the machines that your uncle relied on to maintain his libidinal economy — the barbecue with the neighbors, the office banter, the Sunday football ritual — all of it ground to a halt.

Now, for many people, this interruption was painful but navigable. They adapted. They found new flows, new connections, new ways to invest their desire. They Zoomed, they baked sourdough, they checked in on each other. They reterritorialized, in Deleuzean terms, around new structures of connection.

But for others — and this is the crucial part — the interruption activated something else. The unbinding that the pandemic forced upon them did not merely cause suffering; it was met with a strange and terrible enthusiasm. The masks and lockdowns were not just inconvenient; they were experienced as an existential threat to the self. Not because the restrictions were genuinely that onerous (we are talking about wearing a piece of cloth on your face and staying six feet from strangers, not the Gulag) but because they demanded something specific from the psyche: submit to a care-based, Erotic demand to bind yourself to the social body for collective preservation.

And something in these people said: no. Not just “I’d rather not,” but “I would rather risk dissolution than submit to the demands of connection.” That is Thanatos. That is the death drive in action. Bridging back to Deleuzean terms, it was a breakdown of desire, its abandonment. And if everything is machines, and desire powers machines, this particular destructive impulse runs contrary to the entire metaphysic of social structure. But for Deleuze and Guattari, this metaphysical structure simply cannot be; desire cannot just be turned off like that. How do we make sense of it?

3. Jouissance at the End of the World

Now, if this were merely about discomfort or political disagreement, you would expect a rational response: grudging compliance, agreeing to disagree, compartmentalization of political opinion from personal relationships. Normal political behavior. What you would not expect is the compulsive, even ecstatic quality of the defiance. But that is exactly what we got.

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek — a Lacanian with sniff Marxist characteristics, or possibly the other way around — has written extensively about what we called jouissance, a Lacanian concept that does not translate neatly as either “pleasure” or “enjoyment” but refers to a kind of excessive, transgressive satisfaction that often manifests as suffering. Think of the person who picks at a wound because the pain itself has become satisfying, or the ideologue who derives more pleasure from being persecuted for his beliefs than from having those beliefs validated.

This is what we observed during and after the pandemic in the radicalization cohort. The defiance was not joyless or stoic; it was ecstatic. There was a jouissance in refusing the mask, in posting the memes, in “doing your own research,” in telling the doctor to go to hell. The persecuted identity — “they’re trying to control us” — became self-sustaining because it provided a perverse enjoyment that the subject could not get from ordinary Erotic connection.

Think about this in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation of desire. In classical psychoanalysis, desire is a lack: I want what I don’t have. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a positive, productive force. It doesn’t seek to fill a void; it seeks to produce, to connect, to subsume and integrate. So when we see desire redirected toward self-destruction and social dissolution, we are not seeing a desire frustrated or unfulfilled. We are seeing desire at work, producing exactly what it is oriented toward: unbinding, dissolution, the destruction of the Erotic network. Thanatos is not the absence of desire. Thanatos is desire producing death. This is a Hegelian moment; not mere abstract negation but a second moment in the unfolding of the dialectic that takes us from standpoint A (Deleuzean desire) to standpoint B (Thanatoptic desire-toward-death). The question is how does this unfold?

It is worth pausing to appreciate the logic of what is happening here, because it is not mere contradiction. In Hegel’s dialectic, negation comes in two forms. Abstract negation is simple cancellation: A is negated, and we are left with nothing, mere absence. But determinate negation — the kind that actually drives the dialectic forward — is something far more interesting. In determinate negation, A does not simply vanish; it turns against itself, producing from within its own logic something that opposes it and yet could not exist without it. The negation is determined by the thing it negates. It is not destruction from without but self-overcoming from within.

This is exactly what happens when Deleuzian desire — productive, connective, Erotic — undergoes its Thanatic negation. Desire does not simply stop. It does not go quiet. It cannot; that is the whole point of Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation. Desire is not a faucet you turn off. It is a force, like Bergson’s élan vital, like gravity, like entropy itself. It is always producing something. The question is never whether desire will produce but what it will produce.

So here is the mechanism of the unfolding. The pandemic interrupts the flows — the social, economic, and affective channels through which productive desire had been connecting, building, and binding. Desire, suddenly deprived of its Erotic objects, does not dissipate. It cannot. Instead, it does what any force does when its usual channels are blocked: it finds new ones. And the path of least resistance, the channel that requires the least psychic effort to open, is the entropic channel. Dissolution. Unbinding. Attack.

Why the path of least resistance? Because entropy is the default. Remember our cosmological poles from Section I: Eros/élan vital pushes uphill, builds complexity, resists equilibrium. That takes effort. It takes sustained investment. It takes the ongoing presence of the objects and connections and flows that give desire its Erotic orientation. Remove those — as the pandemic did — and desire slides downhill, thermodynamically speaking. It follows the gradient toward dissolution not because the subject chooses destruction but because destruction is what desire produces when it has nothing else to produce with.

This is the determinate negation: desire-as-productive-force, deprived of its connective objects, produces disconnection. Desire-as-binding-force, denied its bonds, produces unbinding. And crucially — this is the Hegelian point — the product of this negation is not formless or empty. It is structured. It carries within it the entire logic of the productive desire it has negated. The aggression is purposeful. The destruction is targeted. The unbinding follows specific patterns, attacks specific connections, destroys specific bonds. Your uncle did not become randomly chaotic; he became precisely, systematically destructive, as if guided by an inverted blueprint of the very social architecture he was tearing down.

That precision, that determined quality of the negation, is what distinguishes Thanatic desire from mere apathy or breakdown. Your uncle is not depressed. He is not disengaged. He is ferociously engaged — but his desiring-machines are now running the blueprint in reverse, producing the negative image of every connection they once maintained. The question, then — the third moment of the dialectic, the Aufhebung or sublation — is whether this negation can be overcome, whether some synthesis is possible that preserves the productive power of desire without returning to the naive Erotic investment that was so easily disrupted. We will return to this question at the end, but for now, hold it in mind.

This is the paranoiac pole at full tilt. In Part IV, I described the paranoiac pole as the drive to code, to territorialize, to impose order on chaos. But here we see its dark twin, its shadow: the paranoiac who codes destruction itself as order. The person who burns every bridge and calls it freedom. Who tears apart every relationship and calls it integrity. Who embraces isolation and calls it independence.

The flow of desire has been reterritorialized around Thanatos itself.

4. The Repetition Compulsion, or: Why It Didn’t Stop When COVID Ended

If the pandemic were merely the cause of the radicalization, we would expect the radicalization to subside as the pandemic receded. The masks came off, the lockdowns ended, the restrictions were lifted. By 2022 or so, COVID was essentially over as a matter of public policy. And yet the radicalization not only continued but intensified. The people who started with anti-mask sentiment progressed to election denial, to QAnon, to cheering political violence, and now to applauding the very forms of state authoritarianism they swore they opposed.

This is where the Freudian concept of repetition compulsion becomes essential. One of the defining characteristics of the death drive is its compulsive quality — the subject repeats the traumatic or destructive behavior not because it is rational or pleasurable in the ordinary sense, but because the drive demands repetition. The masks and lockdowns were the occasion, not the cause. Once the psychic door opened — once Thanatos was activated and given a political vocabulary — the drive found new objects. Vaccines. Elections. Institutional legitimacy as such. The content shifted; the structure remained identical.

This is also precisely what Deleuze and Guattari predicted about the capitalist machine. Remember from Part II: capitalism functions by connecting deterritorialized flows of capital and labor to extract surplus. But it also reterritorializes — it captures and recodes every act of resistance, every line of flight, every deterritorialization, and turns it into fuel. The media machine that captured your uncle’s radicalization — Fox News, then OANN, then Telegram channels, then whatever came next — did not merely report on his Thanatic impulse; it monetized it. It provided new objects for his drive to attach to, new enemies to hate, new stories of persecution to enjoy. His desiring-production was captured and reterritorialized within the media-capitalist machine, which extracted surplus value (attention, engagement, ad revenue, political power) from the very destruction of his social bonds.

It is very important for it that the limit of this production be displaced, and that it pass to the interior of the socius... in such a way that desire is caught in the trap of a familial psychic repression that comes to double the weight of social repression.

— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Your uncle’s machines are still running. They are still producing. They are just producing death now — the death of relationships, the death of community, the death of shared meaning. And the capitalist media apparatus is still extracting surplus from that production. The machine has not broken. It has been repurposed.

5. Community Through Shared Aggression

Here is the final and perhaps cruelest irony: the anti-binding impulse creates its own binding, but one organized around Thanatos rather than Eros. It subverts Eros’s vitalistic impulse in service of its own destruction. It is, in the very literal sense, a metaphysical cancer.

Wilhelm Reich — who Deleuze and Guattari cite approvingly throughout Anti-Oedipus — spent his career trying to understand the libidinal economy of fascism. His central insight was that fascist movements do not merely appeal to rational self-interest or even to fear; they capture frustrated libidinal energy and offer it a mode of discharge through aggression. The fascist rally, the two-minutes hate, the ritualized fury at the designated enemy — these are not merely political events. They are libidinal events. They provide the subject with a discharge of psychic energy that feels, in the moment, indistinguishable from satisfaction.

The pandemic created an enormous reservoir of frustrated libidinal energy. People were isolated, frightened, bored, and furious. That energy needed somewhere to go. And the right-wing media ecosystem offered the most readily available channel: discharge through aggression. Hate the mask-wearers. Hate the vaccine-takers. Hate the government. Hate the libs. Hate, hate, hate — and in hating together, find a perverse, Thanatic community.

This is the community of the cancerous body without organs, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology from Part III. Remember: they distinguished between the “empty” BwO (pure undifferentiated chaos), the “full” BwO (de-stratified but intensified, capable of new creative connections), and the “cancerous” BwO — too stratified, too bound by the majoritarian impulse, ultimately a parody of freedom that recreates domination in new forms. The post-pandemic right is a textbook cancerous BwO: it has the form of liberation (we will not comply!) but the content of subjection (now comply with this instead).

And so your uncle, who screamed about tyranny when asked to wear a mask to protect his elderly mother, now cheers as masked federal agents drag legal residents off the street. This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies a contradiction the subject is aware of but conceals. This is something worse: it is a contradiction that the subject cannot perceive because the two phenomena are coded on entirely different registers, bringing us back to the Babel Event prophesied in Part IV. He no longer inhabits a shared metaphysical substratum with you. Communication is not only impossible, it will diverge further and further from this point because you are not at cross-metaphysical odds. No amount of linguistic bridging is going to bring you back, unless you find a way to forge new connections between the disparate Babel spaces.

Picking up an earlier thread, the mask mandate was coded as maternal, as care, as Erotic binding — and therefore as castrating, as we discussed in the Mother’s Mask. The immigration raids are coded as paternal, as punitive, as the Symbolic Father restoring order — and therefore as legitimate, as gratifying, as jouissance. This is the vitalistic explanation for the Babel Event, something my theory was previously lacking. I wondered why there was a need to engage in the binary so thoroughly as to reject the basic metaphysical foundations upon which cooperation and society might be based, and I believe I have found it: the wedding of a perverted Eros into Thanatos with the jouissance at seeing the Other punished in place of a psychoanalytic sibling. It is the ultimate revenge and validation of the narrative divergence that preceded the Babel event in the first place.

The subject does not see the contradiction because, within his reterritorialized sign system, there is no contradiction. Maternal authority is always illegitimate. Paternal authority is always legitimate. That is the entire structure. Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.

6. Schizoanalysis of the Catastrophe

So what is to be done? If we take schizoanalysis seriously — and I think we must, given the explanatory power it demonstrates here — then the answer is not to argue with your uncle. You cannot win an argument against a drive. You cannot reason someone out of jouissance. The Babel Horizon is real: you and your uncle are no longer speaking the same language, even when you are using the same words.

But recall the schizoanalytic method from Part IV. The four theses tell us that every unconscious libidinal investment is social, that these investments are primary over preconscious identifications like class or self-interest, and that they are distinguished according to two poles: the paranoiac reactionary pole and the schizoid revolutionary pole.

The task is not to defeat the paranoiac pole. It is to refuse its terms. To become, as far as one can, the full body without organs — not the empty BwO of pure chaos, and not the cancerous BwO that merely inverts domination, but the full BwO that is capable of provisionally adopting and discarding structures as needed, that invests its desire not in narrative conflict but in the underlying desire for connection itself.

In pragmatic terms, this means what I argued in Part IV: rhizomatic organization at the local level. Mutual aid. Community gardening. Libertarian municipalism. Direct, embodied connection that bypasses the media-capitalist machine’s reterritorialization of your desire. It means starving the Thanatic machine of its fuel by refusing to make the libidinal investments it demands — refusing the rage, the doom-scrolling, the ecstatic hatred, all of it. Not because those feelings aren’t real, or aren’t justified, but because they are the product, and as long as you are producing them, the machine wins.

This is not quietism. This is not giving up. It is a strategic redirection of desire away from the paranoiac pole and toward the construction of something new. Deleuze and Guattari knew that you could not simply argue people out of fascism, because fascism is not an argument. It is a libidinal structure. You can only build something that channels desire differently — something Erotic in the deepest sense, something that binds and connects and creates without dominating.

“What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?”

— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Ask yourself that question. Look at where your desire is being invested. Is it producing connection or dissolution? Is it Eros or Thanatos? And if the answer disturbs you — if you find that you, too, have been feeding the Machine — then perhaps the first step toward becoming a body without organs is simply to stop.

Stop scrolling. Stop raging. Stop performing your politics for an audience of algorithms. Go outside. Talk to your neighbor. Plant something. Build something. Connect.

That is the revolutionary act. Not because it will change the world overnight, but because it refuses the terms on which the world-destroying machine operates. It may sound trite that love can conquer all, but in this case, the love of which we speak is the love of connection itself, the life-affirming principle of Bejahung, that provides us the surest footing to escaping the clutch of the present dialectic. We cannot simply negate Thanatos; that brings us back to the dialectical ping-pong/paranoiac coding that got us here in the first place. We must escape the dialectic altogether by refusing the dialogue as given. We must dictate new terms.

And that, our humble theoreticians would tell you, is the beginning of schizoanalysis.

Post-Script (because, really this time, I am not going to prophesy an end to this series, as I always seem to find something I want to add to it):

Next time: I am going to attempt to further apply these concepts, and to think about what A Thousand Plateaus offers in terms of the smooth versus striated spaces, the war machine, and nomadic resistance. Because once you see the machine, you cannot unsee it — and the question becomes not whether to resist, but how.