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Deleuze and Guattari think that the schizophrenic can teach us to resist the psychoanalytic association of desire and lack. It is this association, Deleuze and Guattari contend, that prevents desire from becoming an essentially productive faculty. For these authors,  “[d]esire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object” (26). Indeed, “[t]he objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself”. These assertions are paradoxical because they criticize psychoanalytic theory using its own technical language. Within the context of psychoanalytic language, the idea that desire produces the Real is completely ridiculous. If the clinical schizophrenic acts as if desire produces the Real for psychoanalysts it is only because s/he is delusional and completely isolated from the Real. ²
Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a productive unconscious has value if one moves outside the strictures of psychoanalytic theory. In contemporary society, there are political actors who embody Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of the radical schizophrenic. Who are these schizos? Or as Deleuze asks elsewhere, “Who are our nomads today, our real Nietzcheans?” (Deleuze 20). Three groups, I believe, practice a desire that is divorced from the concept of acquisition and lack: contemporary queer activists and theorists, Slackers, and postmodern artists. I conclude by evaluating these movements in particular, and schizophrenic politics in general

The final schizophrenic subject I will address is the postmodern artist. According to Martha Rosler, these artists produce “quotational work” that appropriates material from diverse sources often based on advertising images from the dominate popular culture (Rosler 73)