Doruk Kaynak
This article argues that marriage functions as a regulatory dispositif that overcodes desire and normalises intimacy so as to reproduce patriarchal and capitalist hierarchies. Replacing repression models with a Foucauldian account of productive power, and mobilising Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of capture and rhizomatic assembly, I show how the marital couple operates as an arborescent template that monopolises recognition and channels care. Against this, I reconstruct relationship anarchy as a political ethics of non-proprietary attachment that pluralises legitimacy, secures care through design rather than status, and resists hierarchies without evacuating commitment. The contribution is threefold: a genealogy of monogamy as normalisation; an ontological and normative defence of rhizomatic forms of association; and a sketch of prefigurative infrastructures that enable reliable, accountable networks of care. The upshot is to reorient debates on kinship and intimacy toward forms-of-life that can be exited without forfeiting recognition.