Customer Reviews

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis

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anti-oedipus is one bear of a book. i have wrestled with it numerous times, only to repeatedly concede defeat somewhere around page one fifty. it was about then that i would realize i was in over my head, my knowledge of lacan and klein (and even freud to some extent) too narrow to be able to grasp its deeper significance. for one must have a sound knowledge of psychoanalysis to understand why the oedipus is something that merits a good fight. nevertheless, this book continued to fascinate, with its staggering range of knowledge and peculiar prose style calling me back time and again over the past few years. i could not leave a bookstore without passing a few moments away in the philosophy section, in hopes of finding something to assist in my study. i made an attempt with brian massumi's "a user's guide," but was left a little disappointed, finding it to be almost as difficult as anti-oedipus itself. thankfully, eugene holland's "an introduction" has proved a perfect fit. he has performed a great service to readers such as myself (i know that you're out there, somewhere) by walking one through step by step, with brief interludes explicating those thinkers who influenced the writing of anti-oedipus (such as spinoza and bataille), and illustrating each of it key concepts in relation to the revolutionary praxis it demands. he is the consumate teacher here, demanding but patient. for these are difficult ideas for the uninitiated, but with persistance this book should open up the thinking of deleuze and guatarri for any thoughtful reader. now that i have read it, i am looking forward to giving massumi's book another try, as well as another go around with the bear itself.

thank you mr. holland for this great gift.

I tried unsuccessfully to read Anti-Oedipus last year. I was baffled and felt completley out of my depth. About a month ago I decided to start reading "towards" this text again, based on the unfamiliar references from my last attempt. So, I have read some secondary liturature on Freud, reread Neitzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, brushed up on Marx and Foucault, and am about to start Dor's introduction to Lacan. Also, I am simultaineously reading this book, and Massumi's users guide. This process is working well for me, and I am begining to understand? whats going on in Anti-Oedipus. Hollands book is challenging, but it does provide a strong foundation to walk across while approaching the primary text. One of the best introductions I have come across.

...well not really, but it did help make the hours and hours and hours I spent reading Anti-Oedipus a much more fullfilling, meaningful experience, and for that, I am extremely grateful.



Listen, swallow your pride, even if you do make it all the way through Anti-Oedipus without any help, you are in all likelyhood doing yourself a disservice; there are so many elements at work, that unless you are a genius, and read multitudes of books, you are a not going to get everything you could out of the book.



For instance, have you read Difference and Repeition by Guattari? How about Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty also by Guattari? Because the themes and points made in those books are used in Anti-Oedipus, and, as the author Eugene W. Holland says, it is taken for granted you already know that stuff.



I read a lot to prepare for Anti-Oedipus, but it is practically impossible to have read and comprehended everything that is used by Deleuze and Guattari. For instance you must know Freud cold (especially Oedipus, the death instinct, and stuff on the drives), Lacan, the anti psychiatrists like R.D. Laing, you must know Bataille, you must have read Schreber "Memoirs of my Nervous Illness", Willhelm Reich (such books as The Function of the Orgasm, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism), Herbert Marcuse (such as One Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization), you should have read Levi Strauss, I would recommend reading Gad Horowitz's Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse, you should also be very aware of the themes of post structuralism, such as the de-centered subject, and you must know Marx, I mean really know Marx (if you consider yourself a Marxist, this book is a treat), plus innumerable other books and texts and poets and philosophers.



I just had to admit, although I have read all of what I listed about, I was still not prepared for Anti-Oedipus (though I certainly knew enough to make Anti-Oedipus a real thrill once I got it), which occured somewhere around page 160.



This book brings it all together, in clear exposition, and it is like a breath of fresh air, my friends. It is no replacement for reading the actual book, but it is a necessary supplement. If you finish the chapters in Anti-Oedipus on the Connective Synthesis of Production, the Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording, and the Conjunctive Synthesis of Cunsumption-consummation and still are not so dure what the **** they are talking about, stop right there, cause you need to read this book. It will all be so much clearer afterwards.



I would recommend that you read as much of Anti-Oedipus as you can get through, if you get through the whole thing right off the bat, Bravo! But then get this book and consume it. Then, finish up the book, or just reflect, and you efforts will be greatly rewarded.



I am very thankful to Mr. Holland, and if I weren't an atheist, I'd say, GOD BLESS YOU SIR! I salute you and thank you for making my journey that much more of a victory...



...cause Anti-Oedipus is a real trip, but like the Tibetans after death, you need your guide and guide book (Like the Book of the Dead), and you now have it, to help make sure you don't get lost in the light (because it is so very bright).



Anti-Oedipus is a guide book to non fascist living. In these times, it is greatly needed. Get help, NOW! And then get some Schizoanalysis...

Back in the early 90s when I wrote an MA thesis and wanted to use concepts like "deterritorialization" there were absolutely NO good commentaries on D&G in English (Massumi's "users guide" is great, but it is no users guide). Things have changed, and Holland's book is one of the best commentaries around. And it is specifically on their least accessible of the "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" series.

Oh yeah, and great cover too!

Hi friends, may you think: I can't read the Anti Oedipos!!! Am I right??? I tell you: not are wrong. The book of Deluze and Guattari almost made me crazy. But searching in Amazon I found this wonder: the book of E. Holland. So, when I read this book the things fastly, but very fastly, were clear.
Holland trough his help book gave me the insight necessary to understend Anti Oedipus. If you are in trouble with Deluze and Guattari's work I have to you a little advice: take this Introduction to Schizoanalysis and you can tell me what happened after. If you still can't read the Anti Oedipus call me a lier!!!

This is a pretty good book, but its purport and aim, as well as how its being used, perhaps misses the point. Anti-Oedipus is not an interpretive work, and it needs no interpretation. It was not written to provide a narrative to one's prior education in psychoanalysis or to show how various schools of thought might interact in some kind of critical comparison. This kind of scholarly approach to the book will be of little practical use, even if one' happens to master the terminology. Maybe it could provide much grist for the mill of university's vanity press, but there's already an infinite supply already.

Anti-Oedipus does mention a lot of other thinkers and it tells us some of what they've been up to. Its got plenty of quotations. But these serve as rhizomatic exits/entrances to/from psychoanalysis and the nascent schizoanalysis, rather than serving as a representation of a prior tradition that the book can be superimposed on. I'd go so far as to say that, ideally, you'd go and read Freud after reading Anti-Oedipus. Or Lacan, or Laing, or Reich. It would be better if you'd never even heard of psychoanalysis, and we're using it as an introduction to what would no doubt seem a curious and alien technique for mystification and control.

The point of Anti-Oedipus is that psychoanalysis is a swamp. Its a bog and a mire. It is priestly--and pious after all--by completing the Hegelian negation of the negation of the body: the determinant negation in God. The future of an illusion indeed. The point of the book is that you don't need Freud to tell you who Oedipus is. Freud doesn't know who Oedipus is, so how could he tell you? You say Anti-Oedipus is difficult? Its nothing compared to the obfuscation and esotericism of psychoanalysis itself. Reading Anti-Oedipus will take umpteen months to read and reread; psychoanalysis, conversely, is the science where the more you study the less you know.

You also don't need to have gone to graduate school to master the book's scholarly apparatus either. the scholarly apparatus is meant to be absurd and impossible; it is meant to take it to such an extreme that its roles is transformed from interpretation to rhizomatic connection. Just like a Thousand Plateaus, the book doesn't need the index to back it up and support the arguments. It opens up to the index, and you follow the tracks from there. Its true that you need to be able to connect up to an impressive general background in the whole of western thought, and you have to be prepared to reintepret the intepretations; however, this function is infinitely better served by the tremendously powerful intepretative structure that one can operate by fusing the internet, via Wikipedia, with a good college research library. If you've learned how to read and use the internet, you can follow up ad hoc all the leads you don't understand, and this is much better than having someone teach you the controversies.

The book arrived prior to the date in perfect shape. Also the price was right.