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When Kurt Vonnegut writes that “[t]he things other people have put into my head… do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head[;]” he isn’t kidding. His 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions from which the above quotation derives is described by many as a ‘schizophrenic’ novel. Robert Tally writes in Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel that “Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s clearest investigation of schizophrenia as a cultural, as well as psychological and physiological, condition.” (Tally 85) Despite this, little has been made of the connections between Vonnegut’s Breakfast and Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 masterwork Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia¹. I here hope to remedy this lacuna by providing an analysis of Breakfast which focuses on the productive and machinic unconscious and takes the postmodern elements seriously, even when Vonnegut himself seems not to.

That Anti-Oedipus is a strange and difficult work of philosophy is undoubtable. As such, I cannot give an exhaustive ‘schizoanalysis’—The name Deleuze and Guattari give to their analytic framework—of Breakfast of Champions. Further, one of the few things Deleuze and Guattari are rather clear about in Anti-Oedipus is that schizoanalysis necessarily has no object. They write: “The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional. In this respect it cannot remain at the level of a still interpretive examination… We have seen in general that pseudo analyses of the ‘object’ were really the lowest level of analytic activity[.]” (Deleuze 322) This is not to say, however, that we cannot use schizoanalytic tools in our reading of Vonnegut, plugging a Vonnegut machine into a Deleuze and Guattari machine, as it were. 

One key schizoanalytic concept which I wish to highlight is the notion of a ‘desiring-machine.’ Giorgio Agamben, writing on the place of definitions in philosophy, states that while “[t]erminological questions are important in philosophy[,] … [t]his is not to say that philosophers must always necessarily define their technical terms. Plato never defined idea, his most important term. Others, like Spinoza and Leibniz, preferred instead to define their terminology more geometrico.” (Agamben 1) Like Plato, Deleuze and Guattari do not provide us with a straightforward definition of the desiring-machine. Rather, they prefer to give properties and examples of desiring-machines in action.  In one of their most provocative instances, they write that:

“The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it… Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.” (Deleuze 1-2)

This notion of machinic desire is one which is not only strictly materialist, but one which (somewhat counterintuitively) opposes an analysis which would posit desire as ‘lack.’ For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is always desiring-production. This materialist focus on unconscious production rather than lack is a key element of their critique of representation throughout the book.

A key instance of desiring-machines in Breakfast of Champions is the moment in which Kilgore Trout is kicked out of an adult theater. Kilgore, as you are likely already aware, is a novelist, who after being invited to speak at an arts festival, goes on a road-trip to Midland City, Ohio. Vonnegut writes: “It intrigued Trout to know that he had only to flick the switch, and the people would start fucking and sucking again. / ‘Good night, Grandfather,’ said the manager pointedly. / Trout took leave of the machine reluctantly. He said this about it to the manager: ‘It fills such a need, this machine, and it’s so easy to operate.’” (Vonnegut 69) In this moment, we can see several desiring machines at work. Specifically we can see what Deleuze and Guattari call the forces of ‘anti-production.’

The forces of anti-production come into effect when desiring-production produces a break in its own production. Drawing a contrast between this notion and the Freudian ‘death instinct,’ Deleuze scholar Eugene Holland writes that anti-production functions “to bring productive desire to a halt, to suspend or freeze the connections it has made, in order that new and different connections may become possible[.]” (Holland 28) Further, “[t]he effect of anti-production on the connective syntheses, then, is to desexualize desire by neutralizing the organ-machine connections, and thereby constitute a surface that records networks of relations among connections, instead of producing connections themselves: it is this recording-surface that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the body-without-organs.” (28)

Thus the manager and the switch instantiate anti-production insofar as they as desiring machines both are both products of desire, and yet break existing connections between desiring-machines, making way for new connections, and constituting the body-without-organs that is the theater. A manager-machine coupled to a switch-machine flows into a Kilgore-machine. When Trout claims that the machine ‘fills such a need,’ he is marveling at the power of desiring-production.

This is all well and good, one may say, but what of value does this turn towards desire add to Vonnegutian discourse? My response is that a proper understanding of desire allows us to properly understand the radical political stakes of the process of schizophrenia on display in Breakfast of Champions, and that the consequences of these political stakes can serve as a corrective to previous scholarship on the novel.

Breakfast of Champions no doubt has a politics—whatever it may be. Andrew Hicks in Matter That Complains So says of its writing: “In so vividly describing the decay, degradation and disintegration of the society that surrounded him, Vonnegut ran the risk of producing a simply (albeit quintessentially postmodern) jeremiad, just as the novel’s many critics had surmised.” (Hicks 53) Hicks then continues to use the framework of the Bakhtinian grotesque to analyze the novel, claiming that “…when Breakfast of Champions is read not only as a reaction to its immediate cultural context but within the long tradition of American grotesque, surprising new inferences may be drawn from this difficult novel.” (Hicks 53) While no doubt a fascinating analysis, Hicks seems to lose sight of the pressing political implications of the novel.  I hold that Hicks is significantly mistaken in posing us a choice between reading Breakfast as either a political jeremiad or a novel of the grotesque.

Centering the schizophrenic processes of desiring-production allow us to see the intricate relation between the novel’s cultural context and its material implications. To read the novel as one of excrement, as Hicks does, is no-doubt a correct analysis, provided one is able to properly situate said excrement in the realm of political ontology. Let us return to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Judge Schreber in the earlier quoted passage. 

When Deleuze and Guattari write that Judge Schreber has “A solar anus[,]” (Deleuze 1-2) they are making reference to the work by that same title by French Nietzschean Georges Bataille. In this work, Bataille writes that the “[c]ommunist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.” (Bataille) Thus  we can see that for Bataille, and thus also for Deleuze and Guattari, the grotesque is immediately political and in need of liberation.

A Deleuzo-Guattarian view of Breakfast of Champions which centers desiring-production also shows the radical implications of Dwayne Hoover’s seeming break with reality. Deleuze scholar Ian Buchanan writes of the process of schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus: 

“Deleuze and Guattari argue that… far from suffering a 'loss of reality', the schizophrenic suffers from 'too much reality', the operative word being 'suffers'. The schizophrenic 'suffers' from 'too much reality' in the sense that this experience can be and often is both painful and distressing; but they also 'suffer' from 'too much reality' in the technical sense that the experience is completely involuntary” (Buchanan 36)

As such Dwayne’s madness and rampage towards the end of the novel does not demonstrate a break with reality as such, but an over-abundance of reality, insofar as reality is a product of desire. I would thus disagree with Robert Tally’s claim that “[a]lthough Dwayne’s ‘bad chemicals’ combined to make the situation particularly explosive… Vonnegut’s message is that all of us are misreading the signs by attempting to graft them onto a larger narrative structure that does not exist.” (Tally 93) To read the story of Dwayne Hoover as a cautionary tale would be, I think, gravely mistaken. This is not to say by any means that Dwayne’s behavior is praiseworthy, but rather, that there exists a seed of radicality and escape within Dwayne’s subject position.

I would therefore agree with Christopher Rubey who, while focusing more on Deleuze and Guattari’s later work, writes in Rhizomatic Narratives and Rhizomatic Meaning, that in Breakfast of Champions “[t]he development of schizophrenia and schizoanalysis is manifested on three layers; first, directly through the narration via ideograms, second, through Kilgore Trout’s interactions with the stream of signs/signifiers, and third, through Dwayne Hoover’s ‘breakdown’ and violent rampage in chapter 23.” (Rubey 36-7) It is important to note that Hoover’s rampage is specifically sparked by the ‘bad idea’ that he himself is the only one exempt from machination. 

Ansu Louis preforms a comparable Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five. Discussing a moment when the protagonist Billy Pilgrim and his fellow soldiers are stuck in a boxcar as a POW of Nazi Germany, Louis writes: 

The image calls to mind a fixed connective synthesis that controls the flow of desire. But Billy’s position in the boxcar with his eyes “on a level with the ventilator” (49) prefigures his release, the decoding of his desire, from the libidinal economy of the war effort. Ten days later, the boxcar opens to let the prisoners out: “They [the guards] knew that it [the people in the boxcar as a whole] was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light.... And the liquid began to flow. Gobs of it built up in the doorway, plopped to the ground” (58). (Louis 8) 

There are two comparable moments in Breakfast of Champions. The first is the story which Kilgore Trout brainstorms in the adult theater, the next is a conversation Kilgore has with a drive while hitchhiking. In the first instance, “…an earthling astronaut… arrive[s] on a planet where all plant and animal life ha[ve] been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.” (Vonnegut 42) When the topic of ‘dirty movies’ comes up between the humanoids and the astronaut, they decide to go see one of these movies, to see if the earthlings or humanoids have ‘dirtier’ movies. It is then revealed that for the humanoids, ‘dirty movies’ are not pornographic in the typical sense, but rather are focused on consumption of food.

In this, we can clearly see the processes of desiring-production at work. While it would be tempting to analyze the humanoids’ fetishism as food solely in terms of their lack thereof, a Deleuzo-Guattarian view reveals the way in which this supposed ‘lack’ of food is in fact a product of an investment of desire into the very field which produces this very lack, namely the pollution, which notably is an excess. Further, this ‘lack’ of food does no subsist on its own, but rather produces its own sexual investment in this fetishistic consumption. The planetary body-without-organs is produced through this recording process, this consumption-consummation. “"It's me, and so it's mine… so it's…” (Deleuze 18-9) etc. 

Next, in a classic instance of desiring-repression, Trout, while hitchhiking to Midland City discusses environmentalism with his driver. 

The driver used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like only a hundred years before. “And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make [”] … Then trout made a good point too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up [.”] … then the truck driver made another good point. He said that he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. “So I’m committing suicide,” he said. (Vonnegut 57-8) 

This notion of suicidality is precisely the sort of desiring-repression Deleuze and Guattari oppose in Anti-Oedipus. The passage begins with the driver expressing his dismay at the process by which desire deterritorializes the social field, and the way in which this desire becomes reterritorialized onto the body of capital. Through dialog with Trout, however, he comes to realize his investment in precisely this process of production. Rather than being moved to militancy, however, this process results in a reactionary fatalism.

Through these analyses, we can see that a view of Breakfast of Champions that centers desiring-production reveals the text’s radicality and subversiveness. This revealed politics of Breakfast stands in opposition to much contemporary scholarship on the novel, and to the sort of politics Vonnegut espouses in his non-fiction works, particularly in A Man Without a Country.  I hope to do more work in the future regarding the nature and implications of Anti-Oedipus, especially with respect to literary analysis.

^{1. While Robert Tally’s chapter on Breakfast is indeed entitled “Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland,” Tally himself notes that the chapter makes little use of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, writing: “My use of ‘Anti-Oedipus’ in the title of this chapter only partially relates to the poststructuralist tour de force that is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project.” (Tally 86)↩}

Works Cited

Agamben Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? : And Other Essays. Stanford University Press 2009.

Louis, Ansu. “The Economy of Desire in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Symplokē, vol. 26, no. 1–2, 2018, pp. 191–205. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5250/symploke.26.1-2.0191. Accessed 14 Dec. 2022.

Bataille, Georges. “The Solar Anus.” The Anarchist Library, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-solar-anus. 

Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Mark Seem et al., Penguin Books, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Eugene W. Holland. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. Routledge, 1999.

Hicks, Andrew John. Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So. Routledge, 2020.

Rubey, Christopher. Rhizomatic Narratives and Rhizomatic Meaning: Kurt Vonnegut’s Lines of Flight and the Schizoanalysis of the Postmodern Unconscious. 8 Apr. 2014.

Tally, Robert T. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. Continuum, 2011.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday! Dial Press trade paperback ed, Dial Press, 2006.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Laurel, 1991.

Dr. Stephen Kershnar, a distinguished philosophy professor at SUNY Fredonia, is recently under fire for several comments he made in defense of pedophilia, or what he calls “adult-child sex.” It is not my aim here to muse whether or not his writing and speech are acceptable (they are not). Nor, in fact, do I wish to call for Kershnar’s head nor his job. I do, however, wish to elaborate my thoughts on the matter and provide a few necessary details. Specifically, I hope to tell my personal story as a philosophy major at Fredonia, and to place this situation in a broader context both academically and politically.

Initially, I came to SUNY Fredonia for their rather prestigious Sound Recording Technology (SRT) program. I arrived in the Fall of 2019 and soon after medically withdrew due to mental health issues, namely gender dysphoria and obsessive-compulsive disorder. After medication, therapy, and a semester at Monroe Community College, I returned to Fredonia in the Spring of 2021. I was eager to return to the SRT program but, despite my best efforts, found that the program most certainly wasn’t for me. In the time between Fall 2019 and Spring 2021, I discovered a passion for philosophy. Specifically, I fell in love with what I would later learn is called “continental” philosophy. Excited to be able to formally study all the perplexing thinkers I had been reading, I decided towards the end of the Spring 2021 semester to switch my major to philosophy. There was only one issue: my academic advisor was listed as one Dr. Stephen P. Kershnar. 

Upon seeing the professor’s official faculty page¹, I was both stunned and appalled. I simply couldn’t believe that someone in a serious academic setting was explicitly defending pedophilia, torture, misogyny, and slavery². As the Fall 2021 semester began I connected fairly early on with my professor for Ethics and Theory of Knowledge, Dr. Neil Feit, and quickly moved to make him my advisor. The semester went incredibly well, though I did learn that Fredonia’s philosophy program is straight analytic, and I was able to move from the academic probation I was previously on to the Dean’s list. Upon advising, Dr. Feit suggested that for the Spring 2022 semester I take a 400 level Specific Topics class with Dr. Kershnar entitled “People.” At this point, I had rationalized Kershnar’s papers as simply him playing devil’s advocate or being an edgy contrarian, so I decided that it would be worthwhile to take the class to complete my major requirements, seeing Kershnar as nothing more than a philosophy twitter in-joke.³

Every once in a while, I would bring up in casual conversations with peers the really creepy dude who was about to be my professor and all the wild papers he wrote; my male friends always found it particularly amusing. Never once, though, did I expect him to receive the amount of attention he’s recently been getting. On February 1st, the Twitter account @LibsOfTikTok shared several video podcast clips and article titles of Dr. Kershnar’s⁴, leading to widespread outrage. On February 2nd, Olivia S created a Change.org petition entitled “Fire Professor Stephen Kershnar from SUNY Fredonia,”⁵ which currently has over 15,000 signatures.

Right now, the Kershnar Situation is blowing up on social media and local news; the entire campus is abuzz with a kind of anxious energy. Fredonia’s President, Dr. Stephen H. Kolison Jr., responded to the Situation, first on February 1^st in a message posted to the official @FredoniaU Twitter page⁶, then more recently in an email addressed to all students assuring us that there is an ongoing investigation and that Kershnar will neither be on campus nor in contact with students until further notice⁷. I am completely in agreement with President Kolison that the views expressed in the clips are reprehensible and absolutely worthy of an investigation. I do, however, think it is worthwhile to share some of my own thoughts and experiences, as I generally think that the voices and experiences of students have been routinely downplayed throughout this.

I had only been a student of Kershnar’s for several weeks when this Situation began, yet there were already a few details worthy of note. The syllabus⁸ of his “People” course explicitly notes that “[s]tudents may not take children to class” (emphasis from original). While this alone is certainly not incriminating, I have never had a professor feel the need to specify such a thing.

 Another strange occurrence is the section in the syllabus labeled “Offense.” This section reads as follows: “This class involves a challenging discussion of controversial ideas. Some of the discussion might offend people. In addition, the instructor uses colorful examples and language and shows graphic videos. If you prefer not to be exposed to such discussion or expression, please withdraw from the class immediately.” While I certainly understand the importance of creating a space in which ideas of any kind can be expressed, his emphasis on colorful language and graphic videos had me quite worried. 

The few weeks of class we had together unfortunately confirmed my anxieties. One particularly noteworthy experience from Dr. Kershnar’s classroom involves the very famous Vietnam war photograph of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém⁹. The slide was from a presentation on theories of time, and an argument against the notion of temporal parts, or how they imply a sort of determinism that goes against most of our intuitions. The implication being that Lém’s summary execution could just as easily have not happened. He then proceeded to ask the class what we would do if we were in the role of the executioner in that photograph. Unfortunately I do not remember any of my classmate’s responses but my memory of responding is quite vivid. I initially responded by somewhat cheekily noting that if I were in the place of the South Vietnamese general, I would have had the totality of his life experiences and therefore would have done the same as him. This attempted nod to Nietzschean perspectivism did not satisfy Dr. Kershnar, and he responded by saying that he meant if I just happened to find myself in that scenario. When I responded that I absolutely would not have summarily executed this man, as I see summary executions as categorically unjust, he repeatedly pushed me with details, saying that he was caught red-handed, and that it was during wartime, and that a fair trial would be a waste of resources. After a while I caved and gave him the answer he so clearly wanted. This was not an instance of Socratic questioning. Rather, he was impressing his contrarian opinion upon me until I agreed to appease him. 

In another classroom instance, during a discussion of material constitution, in which we studied the famous example of Lumpl and Goliath¹⁰, Dr. Kershnar attempted to convince us that the biblical David was not in fact a bold hero, but a slaughterer of the disabled, as the story notes that Goliath was a large man who moved rather slowly. While ordinarily I find bizarre exegesis and re-interpretation to be quite fun, this to me is just another example of Dr. Kershnar’s unrelenting, dull, and fundamentally reactionary contrarianism. Again, his methodology throughout those few weeks of class was not to bring students to sincerely question their beliefs, but rather to aggressively barrage them with contrarian opinions until they cave. 

With respect to the implications of having Dr. Kershnar as faculty, one student of Kershnar’s, who wishes to remain anonymous, stated:

Not only do his actions affect philosophy majors, but it also affects people with a philosophy minor. It means there are less upper-level classes available since he teaches most of them. It also affects the integrity of the university itself, since the actions of professors can mistakenly be viewed as the actions of the college, especially with all the talking and gossiping people do in these types of situations.

Another major concern shared with me by a friend is that Fredonia’s administration has previously floated the idea of cutting its philosophy program entirely. A change.org petition from three years ago states that “[r]ecently, we have learned that the administration of SUNY Fredonia is considering cutting several ‘under-performing’ programs, including its BA philosophy major.”¹¹ Since Dr. Kershnar is one of two tenured philosophy professors at Fredonia, there is significant concern that the University may use this controversy as a pretense to cut their philosophy program altogether rather than address the concerns regarding this particular professor. While this may seem like an unlikely outcome, it is something I am rather worried about. 

A third concern lies in the fact that the story is seemingly exclusively being published by right-wing social media accounts and news sources. Unfortunately, it would seem that this story was unable to escape the draw of partisan politics. I suspect that the adoption of this story by conservatives is largely because it feeds into their narratives about “crazy left-wing college professors indoctrinating the youth,” the implication being that Kershnar is another left-wing weirdo professor and that the problem is to be solved with bans on CRT, destruction of academic freedom, and the abolition of the leftist intelligentsia. The problem with this narrative is that Kershnar himself is incredibly conservative, having written an article in The Observer (a local news station) explicitly defending the events of January 6th and claiming that there was widespread election fraud during the 2020 election¹². His faculty page on the official Fredonia.edu website indicates his teaching interests are also right-leaning, such as his focus on “Property Rights” and “Libertarianism.”

This may seem like a rather trite point to make. I mean, the important thing is the abhorrence of what Kershnar has said: what difference does it make whether the attention comes from the left or the right? While I understand this viewpoint, I think it is absolutely worth correcting the record and doing away with the “leftist college professor” narrative, both to ensure the safety of academic freedom and to prevent the right from having the exclusive say on this matter. 

I’d like to end by commenting on Kershnar’s work itself and the nature of academic discourse. While I understand that academic freedom implies that no topic is off limits, and that research may be done into any topic–there are still standards for what should be considered a meaningful contribution. Kershnar’s work generally does not meet these. In a oft-posted podcast clip, Kershnar makes the claim that in an unidentified foreign culture, grandmothers are known to fellate infants, and uses this to justify his claim about the moral ambiguity of pedophelia. Not only does he fail to provide a citation for this anthropological claim, it also contradicts the entire ethos of his own SUNY Fredonia philosophy department, one seemingly built on outright disdain for any sort of cultural or moral relativism. This to me is more evidence that Kershnar is not making a meaningful contribution to discourse, however controversial. Instead he is willing to say whatever is necessary to advance his contrarianism, a banal contrarianism which has no place in academia. As I stated at the beginning, I do not wish to call for Kershnar’s head, nor his job, I simply am making my contribution to discourse, one I hope will be more meaningful than “The Liberal Argument for Slavery”, and “For Discrimination Against Women”.

<sup>1. https://www.fredonia.edu/academics/colleges-schools/college-liberal-arts-sciences/philosophy/faculty/Stephen-Kershnar↩
2. https://philpeople.org/profiles/stephen-kershnar↩
3. https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1283075409224007680 https://twitter.com/morallawwithin/status/1356407204761530371↩
4. https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1488675032985268228↩
5. https://www.change.org/p/suny-fredonia-fire-professor-stephen-kershnar-from-suny-fredonia↩
6. https://twitter.com/FredoniaU/status/1488726120338006017↩
7. https://twitter.com/FredoniaU/status/1489339982661701633↩
8. https://www.dropbox.com/s/pn1i155jxa6msqu/People%200a%20Syllabus%20December%2029%202021.lec.doc?dl=0↩
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Nguy%E1%BB%85n_V%C4%83n_L%C3%A9m↩
10. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/#:~:text=One%20worry%20for,and%20Koslicki%202018.)↩
11. https://www.change.org/p/students-of-fredonia-save-the-philosophy-department-at-suny-fredonia↩
12. https://www.observertoday.com/opinion/commentary/2021/01/what-calamity-in-u-s-is-worse/↩</sup>