This article analyzes how two theories, both emerging in the
nineteenth century—Fourierism and marginalism—influenced the economic views of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Despite the fact that explicit recourse to those theories in
Capitalism and Schizophrenia is merely sporadic, the implicitly inherent
interrelation between these ideas and a schizoanalyst view of
economics turns out to be rather substantial. First, marginalism is
concerned with a “logic of the (pen)ultimate,” within the
framework of which a distinction between a limit and a threshold
is introduced. This distinction is important for understanding
how the “apparatuses of capture,” which subjugate desiring-
production to the despotic, and later to the capitalist regime,
function. Second, Fourier’s “gigantism,” mentioned by Deleuze
and Guattari, turns out to be an anticipation of their own theory
of the “desiring machine” synthesis not only as to its general
intention, but also as a detailed social mechanics, built upon the
engagement of “distributive passions.”