Anti-Oedipus

Overview

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) is the first volume of the two-part work that Gilles Deleuze wrote with the psychoanalyst and political militant Félix Guattari, and it is one of the most explosive books in twentieth-century French philosophy. Published in 1972 by Les Éditions de Minuit, the book arrived in the aftermath of May 1968, when the French intellectual world was convulsed by the question of what had gone wrong — and what had been made possible — by the failed revolution. Anti-Oedipus is many things at once: a polemic against psychoanalysis, a theory of desire, a critique of capitalism, and a proposal for a new form of analysis ("schizoanalysis"). Michel Foucault, in his preface to the English edition, called it "a book of ethics" and "the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time."

The book's title announces its two enemies. "Anti" — against the Oedipus complex, the concept at the center of Freudian and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to which human desire is structured by the family triangle of mother, father, and child. The thesis of the book is that this triangular structure is a myth: a way of domesticating desire, of forcing it back into the family, of refusing to hear what it is actually saying. Desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is not a lack that seeks to be filled but a machine that produces: it connects, assembles, and creates. Oedipus is the name of the trap into which psychoanalysis has led us.

Author

The collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari was itself an experiment. Deleuze (1925–1995) was a professor of philosophy who had written major studies of Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, and Bergson and had published the two masterpieces of his own philosophy, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). Guattari (1930–1992) was a psychoanalyst who had trained with Jacques Lacan, a political activist connected to the militant left, and an experimenter at the clinic of La Borde, where he had developed practices of institutional psychotherapy. Their meeting in 1969 produced a partnership in which two quite different languages — the philosophical and the clinical, the conceptual and the political — were forced into a single machine. The book presents itself as written by "several" voices: "Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd," as the authors put it in the opening of A Thousand Plateaus.

Historical Background

Anti-Oedipus is unthinkable outside the double context of 1968 and the Lacanian ascendancy. The events of May 1968 — the student revolt and general strike that nearly brought down the French government — had revealed the limits of the orthodox Marxism that dominated the French left, and they had raised the question of desire in politics with a new urgency: the revolutionaries of 1968 were not only demanding better wages but a different life. At the same time, Lacanian psychoanalysis had become the dominant intellectual force in France, and its central doctrine was that desire is structured by lack — that the human subject is constituted by an irremediable gap, an absence at the heart of being. Deleuze and Guattari attacked both orthodoxies at once. Against the Marxist reduction of everything to class and the party, they insisted on the primacy of desire; against the Lacanian reduction of desire to lack, they insisted on desire's productivity. The result was a book that the left found too psychoanalytic and the psychoanalysts found too political — which is to say, a book that moved beyond both.

Key Ideas

Desire as Production

The book's central thesis is that desire is productive. Against the entire tradition that defines desire as lack — from Plato's myth of the origin of love in the Symposium to Lacan's account of the subject as constitutively incomplete — Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a machine: a process that connects organs, flows, and intensities to produce reality itself. "Desiring-machines" are their name for these processes. The claim is not metaphorical. Just as a machine works by connecting parts and transmitting flows, desire works by assembling and connecting — and the connections it makes do not represent a pregiven reality but produce new realities. This is why the famous formula of the book runs: "Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire."

The Critique of the Oedipus Complex

If desire is production, then the Oedipus complex is the great mystification. The Oedipal triangle — child, mother, father — is presented by psychoanalysis as the universal structure of human desire. Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is instead a territorializing machine: a way of taking the flows of desire and forcing them into a family drama, so that every desire is reinterpreted as a desire for the mother or against the father. Oedipus, they write, is not the discovery of the unconscious but its reduction: "Oedipus is the figure of the despotic signifier, the one that subordinates the entire field of desire to the family." The critique extends to the social function of psychoanalysis: by interpreting social and political conflicts as family conflicts, psychoanalysis depoliticizes desire and trains subjects to accept the existing order.

Schizoanalysis

Against psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari propose schizoanalysis: a practice that does not interpret desire but follows it. Where psychoanalysis asks what a symptom means, schizoanalysis asks what it does — what connections it makes, what flows it sets in motion. The "schizo" of the title is not the clinical schizophrenic but the figure of a desire that has escaped the Oedipal trap: the schizo, as they conceive it, is the one who has refused to be decoded by the family, who has plugged desire directly into the social field. Schizoanalysis is the method that listens to this refusal and helps it find its lines of flight.

Capitalism and Desire

The book's subtitle — Capitalism and Schizophrenia — names its most ambitious claim: that capitalism and the schizophrenic are two sides of the same process. Capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, decodes and deterritorializes: it dissolves every traditional code — religion, kinship, community — into flows of abstract value. In this it resembles the schizophrenic, who also decodes everything. But capitalism immediately recodes what it has decoded, reterritorializing the flows in the form of the commodity, the state, the family. The schizophrenic is thus the limit toward which capitalism tends and the figure of what escapes it. The political task is not to make the revolution in the name of the family or the party but to follow desire where it is genuinely productive — to push the decoding further than capitalism wants to go.

Important Passages

The book opens with one of the most famous scenes in modern philosophy: the description of the body without organs. "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks." The passage introduces the desiring-machines and the body without organs — the surface on which the machines record their connections — and it establishes the book's deliberately unacademic tone. Equally famous is the passage on the paranoiac and the schizo, and the definition of the schizoanalytic task: "To make a schizophrenic of oneself, in order to escape the neurotic identifications and the paranoiac identifications that the analyst proposes." And the book's closing pages develop the account of the "revolutionary machine" that is neither the party nor the state but the collective assemblage of desire.

Influence

Anti-Oedipus was an immediate sensation and has remained a permanent point of reference. It made the concept of desire central to post-structuralist thought, influenced the theory of political economy in thinkers such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (whose Empire is explicitly Deleuzian), and shaped the development of queer theory and the philosophy of the body. Its critique of the family and of psychoanalysis became a reference point for the anti-psychiatry movement and for later debates about the politics of mental health. It has also attracted intense criticism: from psychoanalysts who defend the clinical value of the Oedipal model, from Marxists who argue that the book dissolves politics into flows and intensities, and from readers who find its rhetoric exhilarating but its argument underdeveloped. Like its authors, the book resists summary verdicts: it is best approached as a machine that works — a text that connects the reader to new problems, new questions, and new desires.

Sources

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Gilles Deleuze" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Gilles Deleuze" (iep.utm.edu/deleuze)