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Anti-Oedipus
Author	Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Original title	Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Oedipe
Translator	Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
Country	France
Language	French
Genre	Philosophy
Publisher	Les Éditions de Minuit
Publication date	1972
Media type	Print
Pages	496
ISBN	2-7073-0067-5
OCLC	255453227
Followed by	Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975)

Anti-Oedipus (1972) is a book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second volume of which is A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Anti-Oedipus offers an analysis of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first section outlines Deleuze and Guattari's "materialist psychiatry" and its modelling of the the Unconscious and its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of "desiring-production" (which interrelates "desiring machines" and a "body without organs"). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and its Oedipus complex in particular. The third section re-writes Karl Marx's materialist account of the history of society's modes of production as an historical development through "primitive", "despotic", and "capitalist" societies and details their different organizations of production, "inscription" (which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange"), and consumption. Anti-Oedipus argues that capitalism channels all desires through an axiomatic money-based economy, a form of organization that is abstract, rather than local or material. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call "schizoanalysis".

Fascism, the family, and the desire for repression

In a preface written for the English-language edition, Michel Foucault described Anti-Oedipus as a contribution towards the fight against contemporary fascism—he calls it "an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life." The book attempts to track down "all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives". Thus, it is concerned "not only [with] historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini," he stresses, "but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploit us."^[1]

Deleuze and Guattari address a fundamental problem of political philosophy: the contradictory phenomenon in which an individual or a group desires their own repression. The contradiction had been briefly mentioned by Spinoza: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?"^[2] That is, how can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? Wilhelm Reich discussed the phenomenon it in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism:^[3]^[4]

the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?"

To address this question, Deleuze and Guattari examine the relationships between social organisation, power, and desire, particularly in relation to the Freudian "Oedipus complex" and its familial mechanisms of subjectivation ("daddy-mommy-me"). In the family, Foucault explains, the young develop in a "perverse" relationship, insofar as they learn to love the same person that beats and oppresses them. The family therefore constitutes the first cell of the fascist society, as the child will carry this love for oppressive figures into his or her adult life. Later in the book Deleuze and Guattari explain how the nuclear family is an agent of psychic repression, under which the sexual desires of the child and the adolescent are psychologically repressed and perverted.^[5]^[6] Such psychic repression forms docile individuals that are easy targets for social repression.^[5] Deleuze and Guattari's critique of these mechanisms seeks to promote a revolutionary liberation of desire:

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! — and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.

Schizoanalysis

Deleuze and Guattari's "schizoanalysis" is a political response to the apolitical and reactionary psychoanalysis: it is a militant political and social analysis.^[7] Its goal is to analyze how the economic and political spheres invest the libido of the individual, showing how "in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression—whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere."^[7]

Desiring machines and social production

Deleuze and Guattari argue against the traditional conception of desire, which assumes that there is a choice between production and acquisition, and as a result causes us to have an idealistic view of if as primarily a lack.^[8] They track such theory back since Plato,^[8] and later they will also say that the capitalist society trains us to believe in it and in consumption as the solution for desire.^{[citation needed]} Freud and psychoanalysis also embraced this traditional view, and considered a productive aspect of desire only as a 'production of fantasies,' empathizing even more the lack-centric view.^[8] Deleuze and Guattari argue instead that desire is a process of production, of "industrial" production.^[8] As a productive force, "It is not a theater, but a factory".^{[citation needed]} The opposition to the notion of lack is one of the main criticisms Deleuze and Guattari make both to Freud and Marxism.^{[citation needed]}

Deleuze and Guattari introduce the category of desiring-production, and say that desire immediately invests the social field (the productive forces, the relations of production) and make of it its historically determined product; and "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire."^[9]

Like their contemporary, Ronald D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, they link personal psychic repression with social repression. In such a framework, Deleuze and Guattari describe the productive nature of desire as a kind of Desiring-Machine that functions as a circuit breaker in a larger "circuit" of various other machines to which it is connected. And the Desiring-Machine is at the same time also producing a flow of desire from itself. Deleuze and Guattari imagine a multi-functional universe composed of such machines all connected to each other: "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale." Thus, they opposed Freud's concept of sublimation, which led to a necessary dualism between desiring machines and social production, which had trapped Laing and Reich. Their book is hence both a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, and also of Freudo-Marxism.^{[page needed]}

They oppose an "inhumane molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary sexuality: "making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand." Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the connectivity of just male and female gender roles, but by the multi-gendered flows that a "hundred thousand" Desiring-Machines create within their connected universe.^{[page needed]}

Reframing the Oedipal complex

The "anti-" part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society^{[clarification needed]} based on the family triangle of father, mother and child.^{[page needed]} Criticizing psychoanalysis "familialism", they want to show that the oedipal model of 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 society.^{[page needed]} Instead of conceiving the "family" as a sphere contained by a larger "social" sphere, and giving a logical preeminence to the family triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be opened onto the social, as in Bergson's conception of the Open, and that underneath the pseudo-opposition between family (composed of personal subjects) and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production.

Furthermore, they argue that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself^{[page needed]} and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. It must be noted, however, that they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as deterritorialization to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" (i.e. they never intended to romanticize "mental disorders"; instead, they show, as Foucault, that "psychiatric disorders" are always second to something else... maybe to the "absence d'oeuvre"?).

Body without organs

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari begin to develop their concept of the BwO - body without organs, their term for the changing social body of desire.^{[citation needed]} Since desire can take on as many forms as there are persons to implement it, it must seek new channels and different combinations to realize itself, forming a BwO for every instance. Desire is not limited to the affections of a subject. They say:^[10]

The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.

In their later work, Mille Plateaux (1980), Deleuze and Guattari eventually differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty BwO is the BwO of Anti-Oedipus. This BwO is also described as "catatonic" because it is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive. The full BwO is the healthy BwO; it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization. The cancerous BwO is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern.

Charges of fascism to psychoanalysis

Deleuze and Guattari take the cases of Gérard Mendel, Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, prominent members of the most respected associations (IPa), to show how traditionally psychoanalysis enthusiastically embraces a police state:^[11]

“

As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side!—never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement of social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm. [...] notice of the dominant tone in the most respected associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs Stéphane, the state of fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the thought that someone might try to escape the Oedipal dragnet. Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests.

”

Dr. Bela Grunberger and Dr. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel were two psychoanalysts from the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPa). In November 1968, disguising themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane, they published L’univers Contestationnaire, in which they assumed that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and psychoanalyzed them saying that they were affected by a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father.^[12]^[13]

Notably, Lacan mentioned this book with great disdain. While Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel were still disguised under the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that for sure none of the authors belonged to his school, as none would abase themselves to such low drivel.^[14] The IPa analysts responded accusing the Lacan school of "intellectual terrorism".^[12] Gérard Mendel, had instead published La révolte contre le père (1968) and Pour décoloniser l’enfant (1971).

Capitalism and the political economy of desire

Territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation

Although (like most Deleuzo-Guattarian terms) deterritorialization has a purposeful variance in meaning throughout their oeuvre, it can be roughly described as a move away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical, arborescent context, which seeks to package things (concepts, objects, etc.) into discrete categorised units with singular coded meanings or identities, towards a rhizomatic zone of multiplicity and fluctuant identity, where meanings and operations flow freely between said things, resulting in a dynamic, constantly changing set of interconnected entities with fuzzy individual boundaries.

Importantly, the concept implies a continuum, not a simple binary - every actual assemblage (a flexible term alluding to the heterogeneous composition of any complex system, individual, social, geological) is marked by simultaneous movements of territorialization (maintenance) and of deterritorialization (dissipation).

Various means of deterritorializing are alluded to by the authors in their chapter "How to Make Yourself A Body Without Organs" in A Thousand Plateaus, including psychoactives such as peyote. Experientially, the effects of such substances can include a loosening (relative deterritorialization) of the worldview of the user (i.e. his/her beliefs, models, etc.), subsequently leading to an antiredeterritorialization (remapping of beliefs, models, etc.) that is not necessarily identical to the prior territory.

Deterritorialization is closely related to Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts such as line of flight, destratification and the body without organs/BwO (a term borrowed from Artaud), and is sometimes defined in such a way as to be partly interchangeable with these terms (most specifically in the second part of Capitalism And Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus).

The authors posit that dramatic reterritorialization often follows relative deterritorialization, while absolute deterritorialization is just that... absolute deterritorialization without any reterritorialization.

Relationship to physics

For their analysis of society, Deleuze & Guattari borrow the concept of forces acting on a field; they speak of the "social field," making several analogies between the role of desire in a society and fluid dynamics, the branch of physics which studies the phenomena of how a fluid flows throughout space. Another borrowed concept is that of inductor.^[15]

References

^ Foucault's preface to the English-language edition of Anti-Oedipus, pp.xiv-xvi.
^ In Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface. Original Latin quote: "ut pro servido, tanquam pro salute pugnent". For a discussion (in French) of Spinoza text and argument, see Laurent Bove La stratégie du conatus: affirmation et résistance chez Spinoza
^ Anti-Oedipus, section I.4 A Materialist Psychiatry
^ Wilhelm Reich (1946) The Mass Psychology of Fascism, section I.3 The problem of mass psychology, originally published in 1933
^ a b Section II.7 Social Repression and Psychic repression, pp.123-32
^ Holland (1999) p.57
^ a b Section 2.5 The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation, pp.98, 105
^ a b c d pp.25-6
^ p.29
^ Section 1.3 The Subject and Enjoyment
^ section 2.4 The disjunctive synthesis of recording p.89
^ a b Jean-Michel Rabaté (2009) 68 + 1: Lacan's année érotique published in Parrhesia, NUMBER 6 • 2009 pp.28-45
^ André Stéphane [Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasselet-Smirguel], L’Univers Contestationnaire (Paris: Payot, 1969).
^ Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI D'un Autre à l'autre, 1968-9, p.266
^ Section 2.5 The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation

Sources

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1972) Anti-Œdipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476953.
---. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945.
Foucault, Michel Preface to the American edition of Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Œdipus, pp. xiii-xvi.
Holland, Eugene W. (1999) Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge.

v t e Gilles Deleuze – Félix Guattari
Concepts and theories	Affect Arborescent Assemblage Body without organs Desiring-production Deterritorialization Difference Erewhon Event Haecceity Immanent evaluation Individuation Line of flight Minority Molar configuration Multiplicity Plane of immanence Reterritorialization Rhizome Schizoanalysis Societies of control Socius Subjectification Transcendental empiricism Univocity of being Virtual
Works by Deleuze and Guattari	Capitalism and Schizophrenia Anti-Oedipus A Thousand Plateaus Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Rhizome Nomadology: The War Machine What Is Philosophy?
Works by Deleuze	Empiricism and Subjectivity Nietzsche and Philosophy Kant's Critical Philosophy Proust and Signs Nietzsche Bergsonism Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty Difference and Repetition Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza The Logic of Sense Spinoza: Practical Philosophy The Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault Dialogues² Superpositions Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Cinema 1: The Movement Image Cinema 2: The Time-Image Foucault The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet Negotiations Essays Critical and Clinical Bartleby, la formula della creazione Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 Two Regimes of Madness
Works by Guattari	Psychanalyse et transversalité Molecular Revolution Desire and Revolution L'inconscient machinique. Essais de Schizoanalyse L’intervention institutionnelle Les années d'hiver Pratique de l'institutionnel et politique Communists Like Us Molecular Revolution in Brazil The Three Ecologies Cartographies schizoanalytiques Chaosmose Chaosophy Soft Subversions The Guattari Reader The Anti-Œdipus Papers Chaos and Complexity
Related topics	L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze La Borde clinic Deleuze and Guattari A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity