A review by ralowe
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze

5.0

i'm coming away from this pretty sure... uh, well questioning, actually, that since desiring machines produce production, whether the form of desire can be altered. following what is given here i don't really know. what barely sustained my thin interest throughout reading this: sensing the stylistic ancestral traces of what would later proudly become the ad busters-sounding graffito on subsequent oscar grant "riots." it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that this was a book i read simply so i could let other people know i've read it. for at least four hundred pages the authors sustain a tone of irritation that would induce me to want to scream: "if freud bothers you so much, then stop reading him." i guess i have no idea how big a thing freud is in theory, because leo bersani (fucking prick) does the same thing. knowing that others who read theory dismiss this as gibberish also adds a kind of rock star appeal to these guys for me. a friend of mine said that he preferred pasolini's take on oedipus-- the two aren't mutually exclusive. besides it's occurred to me (and i've been just waiting to say this) that theory is just long-form poetry that forgets to not take itself seriously. what can you argue makes this any less legitimate than anything else. i fivestarred this because of its historical importance, and for feeling that i was witnessing the methodological roots of what would inspire the ideological destabilization of the west that i really dig in this heat and kathy acker.