105 of 114 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deleuze's book on Society, February 11, 2003
If you're into sociology, and you're curious about Deleuze, then read this one first. Skim some of the bits on psychoanalysis. But read the opening and the sections on representation closely. This is the book that gives birth to Empire, currently a hot one in the anti-globalism movement. It's in this one that D/G show how any social order requires a means by which to articluate desire. They argue that desire is fundamentally productive, creative. But that it must be harnessed if a society is going to survive it's chaotic impulses and forces.
Anti Oedipus is really a book of anthropology. It shows how "primitive," "despotic," and finally "capitalist" regimes differ in their organization of production, recording (inscription, representation), and consumption. It's also a history insofar as it covers the process by which capitalism ultimately commands all the flows and chains of production, submitting them to a form of organization that is abstract (money is abstract) rather than local and physical.
The oedipal part of it is a critique of the Oedipal complex insofar as the complex articulates a model of society based on the family triangle. They want to show that the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of contemporary society.
Their alternative, to be taken literally, is schizoid: subvertive, resistance, and always escaping capture by slipping in between the categories that organize capitalist society and its way of thinking.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant, important, October 17, 2002
This is, in my opinion, the most important work of theory/philosophy for the latter half of the twentieth century. Although D&G's jargon tends to be weighty at times, it is ultimately playful. there is the tendency, amongst numerous D&G fans, to reduce their philosophy to a text merely about postmodern criticism. i believe this is a mistake. ultimately, Anti-Oedipus (and its companion volume) are about politics--radical politics at best--written by two Marxists who are looking for a new revolutionary theory. indeed, Guattari once said in an interview that postmodernism is "the very paradigm of every sort of submission, every sort of compromise with the existing status quo".
Anti-Oedipus is important for political activists, otherwise it becomes just another piece of "knowledge-capital"...
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37 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
boundaries? we don't need no stinking boundaries!, March 23, 2002
Deleuze (and Felix Guattari)are fasinating, but their prose appeals to only the sophisticated and open-minded. These men test and subsequently abolish the hierarchies on which elitism, superiority, and exclusion are built and return the world to a "horizontality" that has not existed since humans came out of the trees. They begin be striking at the heart of modern psychology, the Oedipus Complex, seeking to destroy what they believe to be the source of dominance and difference. They supplement this radical notion by equating individual desire with social desire and have no use for repression. Superegos and overactive egos have no place in their society of unbridled and unexcused desire. Because desire takes as many forms as there are persons to implement it, its is a constantly changing thoroughly innovative idea seeking new channels and different combinations to realize itself, or as they term it, a "body without organs," the changing social body of desire. This is wild stuff and worth the time it takes decifer it.
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