Customer Reviews

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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"...

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.

Extremely dense, muddy prose slung half way between poetic delerium and hardened theory, this vast experiement in writing is fascinating in its ability to have turned over seemingly everything- and liberally shaken. This can be a masochistic experience for any reader, although I think that it is one of the most interesting philosophical texts written this century. Certainly seems essential reading for budding psychoanalysts, intending social theorists and anybody interested in the problem of fascism. 'Dip in and out of it', as has been suggested by another reviwer.

Why am I giving this book a five star rating? Because this work is an effort at a new theory that is systematic and terminologically consistent and must have been a torture for the writers to conjure up in their head.

It certainly is a torture to read this work. Not because I can't understand hard-core philosophy - I have read, understood and liked Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida, considered amongst the most abstruse stylists - but because it is difficult to empathize with writers who characterize themselves and their readers as 'desiring machines' rather than as subjects with consciousness and will.

Is desire the only thing that defines human beings - what about will, thinking, compassion, judgment? And further why am I supposed to be a machine and in what sense? These are the questions that came to my mind. The authors never explain. The question of the subject is dismissed in one sentence.

It is also difficult to agree with writers who dismiss all seeking of power and all active resistance by implication as fascism and preach escape/flight as the most radical ideology of resistance and hope.

And it is difficult to find hope in the vain jargon of molecular vs. molar, in the lines of escape or flight, or in a schizoid approach to life (a schizophrenic has no control over himself - is a machine and hence is the authors' favorite).

The authors fail in their synthesis of Marx and Freud although they come close and fail to understand Nietzsche, one of their favorite philosophers. Marx, Freud and Nietzsche would turn violently in their graves, if they ever know what Deleuze/Guattari did to their philosophies. They speculations on incest, kinship etc., are just too weak, sketchy and merely assertoric to be taken seriously.

I do not endorse the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari. To be sure they offer brilliant insights but their line of argument has as many holes as Swiss cheese.

Yet there are a few things that are brilliant in the work and it certainly remains an original and challenging work. Having, stated my disappointment with the work, now let me also state the better aspects of this work. This work has a very well argued theory of control mechanisms in primitive, barbarian and capitalist societies.

The authors rightly point out that capitalism governs well because it always generates new rules to survive (new axiomatic) and controls because all social codes are 'decoded' (de-codified) into flows (loose, lawlike systems of control) and de-territorialized. (Other writers have explained the same things in simpler jargon, but Deleuze-Guattari need to be given due credit for the brilliance of their analysis of capitalism, although their libidnalization of economics doesn't add anything valueable to the analysis of either libido or economics and seems forced).

The other hallmark of this work is that it offers one of the more interesting critiques of Freud's Oedipal complex, psychotherapy and its role in making humans conformist. They demolish the Daddy-Mommy-Me triangle and its implications in making us conformists quite effectively.

However, it may be borne in mind that there have been better criticisms of Freud's theories and Deleuze/Guattari are in some respects more Freudian than Freud with their libidinal interpretations of human beings as desiring machines and of economy as investment of desire (libidnal economy).

To sum up, this work is worth reading for its analysis of capitalism, and to some extent for its critique of psychoanalysis. However this is not a work that offers hope for the oppressed or an agenda for political action although followers of Deleuze/Guattari like Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou take their philosophy in a more positive direction. The best portion is the third section, followed by second. The least satisfactory portions and the last and the first, although they are essential to read in order to understand the relevant middle portion of the work.

And of course human beings are not desiring machines no matter what Deleuze/Guattari say. Beyond a metaphor, machinism is delusory. We are what we are. Happy to be human and animal rather than machines. Much as post-structuralist and post-modernists dismiss the question of the subject, the question remains - alive and active and kicking.

An amazingly distilled discussion exploring the fascistic roots of psycholanalysis, Marxism, and capitalism. Certainly not for the timid of heart, Deleuze-Guatarri weave a tapestry than unravels soon after reading. A must for anyone interested in post-structural discussions of power.

Although Deleuze and Guattari are usually invoked as part of a "postmodernist" litany, this work is refreshingly different from most postwar French theory. Derrida and Foucault, for all their revolutionary ambitions, are fairly traditional *maitre-penseurs*: the expectation is that you have a tip-top understanding of Hegel and other historical heavyweights, the better to appreciate their reversal. By contrast, *Anti-Oedipus* resembles nothing so much as the "philosophical" part of a work of hip science fiction: the line of argument is neither dialectically nor formally elaborated, but asserts only its plausibility in the context of the world being evoked.

I say this as a form of praise: in fact, unless you are (somewhat foolishly) expecting that an "intimate" knowledge of this book will advance your academic fortunes, your reading doesn't have to be especially careful to get something useful out of the book. As for its relation to thinkers who are properly venerated in the academy, it is (for all its contrariness) more accepting of Freud and Marx than most contemporary discourse is, so it actually isn't all that devastating a critique of them. But the enthusiasm they display for new hypotheses about these two is infectious: this is a book that makes you want to read *more* economics and psychology, not slam your head against the wall in protest against the impossibility of all understanding.

In the theory of schizophrenia advanced here, the "clinical" schizophrenic is carefully marked off from their treatment of schizophrenia as a process, so the anti-psychiatric implications of the book are only of the most general kind. Furthermore, a great deal of this process is elaborated with respect to imaginative literature by eccentric writers, not case studies of the clinically ill. But this means the results are not fundamentally incompatible with a contemporary understanding of psychotic illnesses: what opposes their resituation of schizoid desire as located at the most basic levels of work and social interaction are the normative intentions of those who study and control (or simply detest) the mentally ill, not scientific findings per se.

A thought-provoking book requiring no "theory" masochism to enjoy.

I'm not entirely sure where I quit reading it -- I read at least the first 222 pages -- but I had to stop.

At a certain point, toward the middle, it becomes torturous. Ironically, that the book becomes unreadable is in some respects a victory: it presupposes a reader be steeped in Freudian and Marxist works, but given the fact that Freud and Marx are largely discredited and unpopular these days, it makes for difficult reading, which, as I said ironically, might please the authors posthumously, if they were aware. Oedipus as a hypothesis *is* dead, but the death knell comes more from Darwin than Deleuze.

It becomes apparent that the authors wished to see psychoanalysis unravel, and it has. So, again, they might, were they alive, have much to rejoice over. But it's uncertain how much value the book has. It *has* value, it has moments of brilliance: but these are, more often than not, instances of reference, as when they refer to Nietzsche, Artaud, Miller, or Lawrence. Occasionally they bring up Jaspers and Lang, favorably. Lacan gets some praise too. In my opinion, you're better off reading any of the above, more or less in the order I mentioned them (apart from Artaud) than this obscure, terribly difficult book.

I realize that calling a book difficult is more or less an endorsement of it in philosophical circles. So be it. I sat through more than half of it, and the last eighty pages or so were a sheer exercise of will.

Again, I don't wish to say the book has no value at all, I would just much sooner see a person read The Genealogy of Morals. Or re-read it for that matter: better writing, better content; and a hundred years from now, it will still be relevant. I venture that Anti-Oedipus is in its last generation of printing.

While studying philosophy at university, I was fortunate enough to have read this book. Some years hence, I am now middle management at a Fortune 500 company (it's very strange to me), and have just recently re-read it. The ideas about egalitarian models of leadership in this book are almost solely responsible for allowing me to remain a fundamentally good person. Without this book, I know there would have been instances where I would have done things unthinkingly and in error.

Published in France in 1972, Anti-Oedipus was the first of several collaboartions between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A few years later they would go on to write the even larger and more complex A Thousand Plateaus, perhaps Deleuze's most famous work. Zizek argues that Deleuze's collaborations with Guattari represent his weakest work, and that his best books are actually The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, works written in the years prior to Anti-Oedipus. Since I have not yet read these latter two books, I cannot judge their merits, but I must say I was very impressed with Anti-Oedipus, though I think A Thousand Plateaus is the better book.

Whereas A Thousand Plateaus ranges through the disciplines, Anti-Oedipus is more narrowly focused upon psychoanalysis and its relationship to capitalism. Provocatively, they argue that schizophrenia is embedded in capitalism, a sort of by-product of its axiomatic political metabolism. The schizophrenic out for a walk, they point out, is a better model for their 'schizoanalysis' than the neurotic stretched out on the psychoanalytic couch. The schizophrenic is immune to neurosis, they insist, because he has already transcended it: the desiring machines within him link him to the outer world in a series of assemblages and flows that it is normally the job of psychoanalysis to repress.

Deleuze and Guattari substitute polyvocality and multiplicity for unity: not the Id or the ego, but machines and many of them. Their model for the unconscious is that of a factory of production, as opposed to the Freudian theater enacting the tragic dramas of Oedipus. The individual is not a true individual but a multiplicity of desiring machines, which are always coupled with other desiring machines: the breast machine, the anal machine, the phallic machine, and so forth. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari imagine the body to be full of organ machines motivated by desire, and it is precisely such desire that gets repressed in capitalist society as well as in Freudian analysis, which attempts to reduce all psychological problems to the mommy-daddy-infant triangle.

This is also where they first flesh out their interesting idea of the Body Without Organs. The BwO is no mere metaphor, they insist, but actual matter, a sort of virtual phase space that the actual body presupposes as a zone of potentialities across which flows are directed. Indeed, it is not all that dissimilar from Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields or Waddington's chreodes. In A Thousand Plateaus, they will call the outer correlate to this idea in the physical world the 'plane of immanence,' which is a zone of zero intensities upon which all flows are played out. The partial organs of Lacan and Freud constitute the degrees of the Body Without Organs.

Heidegger may have pronounced metaphysics dead and philosophy to be over, but Deleuze and Guattari proceed to build an ontology with a very complex cosmology built up out of metaphysical planes and strata of varying degrees of intensity. We have to imagine them thinking and inhabiting a mental field that would be the equivalent of a Paul Klee painting: that is to say, they see through reality to a formative realm of self-organizing metaphysical singularities that are at work to shape matter everywhere. In this respect, Deleuze is closer to Aristotle than to Heidegger, who wasn't interested in ontology, since that very thing had been bracketted by his mentor Husserl.

But the main insight of Anti-Oedipus is its sketching out of what they call three distinct regimes of representation that civilization has passed through: the primitve territorial representation; the despotic imperial representation; and the capitalist representation. Each of these regimes constitutes an internally complete structure that very much reminds one of the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser's structures of consciousness: the primitive territorial mode codes flows on the full body of the earth (which, note, is not the full body without organs, but a differentiated socius, now, upon which social production is recorded and played out); the imperial representation, which is more or less equivalent to the rise of the first city states and empires, overcodes flows on the full body of the deterritorialized despot; while in the capitalist regime, flows are not coded at all, but rather decoded and deterritorialized on the full body of capital.

In each of these structures, there is a different medium of communication, a different form of paranoia and a different mode of synthesis. In the primitive regime, for example, which is dominated by the voice, it is not that writing does not exist but rather that it exists in the form of inscriptions on the body in the form of tattooes, scarification, mutilation, initiations, etc. Writing is not aligned with the voice until the next regime, the despotic regime, in which inscription shifts to the media of clay tablets, stone and other surfaces, all of which receive their authority from the deterritorialized body of the despot himself. By the time of the rise of the capitalist regime, however, Deleuze and Guattari (rather originally, I think) insist that writing is now an archaism, despite the printing press and McLuhan's Gutenbergian Galaxy, for it is something that capitalism as such no longer needs.

In A Thousand Plateaus, these three regimes will be expanded to five, and in this respect, Deleuze reminds me of a sort of French equivalent of Jean Gebser, a neglected Swiss philosopher who modelled history in terms of internally consistent structures of consciousness. But it's all in the discourse: whether you call them 'structures of consciousness' in the old-fashioned style of the German master narrative, or 'sign regimes' in the French philosophical schools of the 1960s depends on whether you are in or out of po-mo theory. Gebser's out; Deleuze is in. A shame, because Gebser in his way is just as brilliant.

In the concluding section of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari insist that schizoanalysis, by contrast with psychoanalysis, does not try to interpret the subject's neuroses, dreams and images, but rather the task is to find and identify his or her particular desiring machines, find out what they want, why they want it, and help to clear a path for them. Their vision of the unconscious is analogous to abstract art; Freud's unconscious to Symbolist art. "A pure abstract figural dimension" composed of "flows, schizzes" as opposed to statues, images, dreams and signifiers. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari recall James Hillman's famous insistence in Revisioning Psychology not to interpret the images of the unconscious, since to interpret them is to pin down and kill them with a pre-fixed meaning.

The book is Anti-Oedipus because it is, of course, a thorough critique of Freudian psychoanalysis which is far too restrictive, repressive and dogmatic for their taste. The psyche is much more polyvocal, alive and full of desiring machines attempting to forever link the psyche of the individual to one assemblage or another in the outer world around him. Capitalism, with its bourgeois ethos, merely serves to repress these desires and keep the individual in line, manipulable and in servitude to the machine.

Of course, their vision of the body as a kind of desiring machine, a plenitude of micromolecular structures that go to make up the molar aggregation of the social machine (or "megamachine" as they term it, borrowing from Mumford) is mechanistic, but it is mechanistic not in an unpleasant way, but rather in the way that William Gibson in his novels see the body as one machine that is inserted as a component amongst many other technical and electronic machines. Indeed, Anti-Oedipus is almost the philosophical equivalent of cyberpunk. Everything, for Deleuze and Guattari is a type of machine: there are social machines, celibate machines, miraculate machines, organ machines, etc. Everything is flowing and producing, motivated by desire, and it is the social machine of capitalism that checks and dams all the flows.

The schizophrenic, for Deleuze and Guattari, is an ideal only because of the multiplicitities, the many egos and machines, that inhabit him, and not because of any romantic idea that the madman is more truly sane than the rest of us. The schizophrenic is more interesting than the neurotic simply because he is plugged in to so many more assemblages than the neurotic, who is too blocked up to plug into anything.

Admittedly, I cannot pretend, on a first reading, to have understood all the subtleties and complexities of Deleuze and Guattari's arguments. I don't think anyone can. The writing is so dense and complex that each page would have to be examined with a magnifying glass, like a page of Finnegans Wake, in order for all its meaning to be wrung out.

But if you like complexity, and enjoy moving about in a mental phase space that is dazzling with fresh ideas, you might wish to try Anti-Oedipus. Save A Thousand Plateaus for later, for it is even more forbidding and complex.

SEE ALSO MY YOUTUBE VIDEO "GILLES DELEUZE'S DIFFERENCE & REPETITION DISCUSSED BY JOHN DAVID EBERT"

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" (McFarland Books, 2011) and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons" (Praeger, 2010)