Scan barcode
A review by casparb
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
5.0
Possibly the most important book I've read this year? It's been a long journey here. Familiarity with Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud all came in very useful here. I’d highly highly recommend prep reading at least a couple of these.
So it didn't disappoint. Does that mean it's true - or that I agree with it? Probably those questions don't even make sense. It's going to take a couple more reads to clarify, but I was pleased with how much I managed to comprehend. It was immensely satisfying finally understanding the two fearsome diagrams of which I have been aware for months. They're rather bizarre until one reads the text. Perhaps more bizarre then, but comprehensibly so. It's quite possible to spend an hour on 5 pages while reading this text. Indeed precisely that occurred more than once. AO is difficult. It gets less difficult, as D&G seem to believe in reiteration - things clarify as one recognises concepts as motifs. At least it's less dry than Difference & Repetition. Flows etc.
Anti-Oedipus then? Flows and territories. The schizoanalytic affirming what the psychoanalytic negates. Or something like that. Very sexy to play with deterritorialisation, to begin to understand it. The body without organs was different from what I'd expected. As a disjunctive, non-productive break in productive flows, it appeared more like a negative concept than had been expected. But it comes together.
I'm not entirely confident about applying the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework just yet - but something kept coming to mind in the second half of this book. I kept thinking about Candide. To my knowledge, Deleuze never mentions this book in his writings, but it seems so perfect? If the voyage is the schizoid activity, then Candide himself comes into place. It's tempting to think of that novel as a schizophrenic odyssey (complete with violent deterritorialisations, perhaps), though I wonder about the ending: in a sense, does Candide, in settling, accept the Oedipal? No longer is he a beast of disjunction, enacting the interruption of regulative flows. The economics of that text also make me wonder - D&G's analysis of capitalism as the constantly deterritorialising (and subsequently reterritorialising) structure was exhilarating. Capital as a deterritorialised abstraction of the money form makes me wonder w/r/t Candide about his ludicrous wealth in the second half. So - Candide, Ou la Schizophrénie?
There's a much-needed bash at the pacifying assertion from Marx: 'The tendency of the rate of profit is to fall'. I see Marxists of various stripes rhetorically cower behind this dictum. I think D&G have done wonderfully in crushing it as any kind of consolation.
I'm keen to read A Thousand Plateaus, but that won't be for a few months at least.
I also read Deleuze's short essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' a couple days ago. It's really good! I was very impressed. Would highly recommend it as an intro to his work, seeing as it's only ten pages or so. Helps to have read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but is by no means incomprehensible without. The Postscript is a ridiculously powerful essay - he's compressed an awful lot into a short space. It's also where the surfers seem to latch onto him.
A-O? Good.
So it didn't disappoint. Does that mean it's true - or that I agree with it? Probably those questions don't even make sense. It's going to take a couple more reads to clarify, but I was pleased with how much I managed to comprehend. It was immensely satisfying finally understanding the two fearsome diagrams of which I have been aware for months. They're rather bizarre until one reads the text. Perhaps more bizarre then, but comprehensibly so. It's quite possible to spend an hour on 5 pages while reading this text. Indeed precisely that occurred more than once. AO is difficult. It gets less difficult, as D&G seem to believe in reiteration - things clarify as one recognises concepts as motifs. At least it's less dry than Difference & Repetition. Flows etc.
Anti-Oedipus then? Flows and territories. The schizoanalytic affirming what the psychoanalytic negates. Or something like that. Very sexy to play with deterritorialisation, to begin to understand it. The body without organs was different from what I'd expected. As a disjunctive, non-productive break in productive flows, it appeared more like a negative concept than had been expected. But it comes together.
I'm not entirely confident about applying the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework just yet - but something kept coming to mind in the second half of this book. I kept thinking about Candide. To my knowledge, Deleuze never mentions this book in his writings, but it seems so perfect? If the voyage is the schizoid activity, then Candide himself comes into place. It's tempting to think of that novel as a schizophrenic odyssey (complete with violent deterritorialisations, perhaps), though I wonder about the ending: in a sense, does Candide, in settling, accept the Oedipal? No longer is he a beast of disjunction, enacting the interruption of regulative flows. The economics of that text also make me wonder - D&G's analysis of capitalism as the constantly deterritorialising (and subsequently reterritorialising) structure was exhilarating. Capital as a deterritorialised abstraction of the money form makes me wonder w/r/t Candide about his ludicrous wealth in the second half. So - Candide, Ou la Schizophrénie?
There's a much-needed bash at the pacifying assertion from Marx: 'The tendency of the rate of profit is to fall'. I see Marxists of various stripes rhetorically cower behind this dictum. I think D&G have done wonderfully in crushing it as any kind of consolation.
I'm keen to read A Thousand Plateaus, but that won't be for a few months at least.
I also read Deleuze's short essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' a couple days ago. It's really good! I was very impressed. Would highly recommend it as an intro to his work, seeing as it's only ten pages or so. Helps to have read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but is by no means incomprehensible without. The Postscript is a ridiculously powerful essay - he's compressed an awful lot into a short space. It's also where the surfers seem to latch onto him.
A-O? Good.