Anti-Œdipus
Encyclopedia
Anti-Oedipus 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 being A Thousand Plateaus
(1980).
Anti-Oedipus analyses the relationship of desire
to reality and to capitalist
society in particular; it addresses questions of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first outlines Deleuze and Guattari's "materialist
psychiatry
" and its modelling of the unconscious
in its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of "desiring-production
" (which inter-relates "desiring machines" and a "body without organs
"). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud
's psychoanalysis
that focuses on its theory
of the Oedipus complex
. The third section re-writes Karl Marx
's materialist account of the history
of society's modes of production as a development through "primitive," "despotic
," and "capitalist
" societies and details their different organisations of production, "inscription" (which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange"), and consumption. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call "schizoanalysis
."
The book draws on and criticises the ideas of a vast range of thinkers; as well as Marx and Freud, these include Althusser
, Foucault
, Lacan
, Reich
, Laing, Cooper
, Jung
, Klein
, Oury
, Jaspers
, Hjelmslev
, Peirce, Bateson
, Clastres
, Lévi-Strauss
, Klossowski
, Lyotard
, Monod
, Mumford
, Turner
, Wittfogel
, Fourier
, Kant
, and Spinoza
. Deleuze and Guattari also draw on a wide range of creative writers and artists during the course of their argument; these include Artaud
, Beckett
, Büchner
, Butler
, Kafka
, Kerouac
, Kleist
, Lawrence
, Miller
, Proust
, Schreber
, and Turner
. Foremost among its influences, however, stands Nietzsche
—Anti-Oedipus may be considered a kind of sequel to The Antichrist
.
Some of Guattari's diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004).
" is a militant
social and political analysis that responds to the reactionary
tendencies of psychoanalysis
. It proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments
of desire—whether revolutionary or reactionary—in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical.
Deleuze and Guattari develop four theses of schizoanalysis:
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido
does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated
, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors; for "the truth is," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie
fucks the proletariat
; and so on. [...] Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." In the terms of classical Marxism
, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural "base" of society, they argue, not an ideological
, subjective "superstructure."
Unconscious
libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious
investments made according to the need
s or ideological interests
of the subject
(individual or collective) who desires.
Schizoanalysis seeks to show 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." Desire produces "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction."
throughout its history and stretches from Plato
to Freud
and Lacan
—understands desire through the concept of acquisition, insofar as desire seeks to acquire something that it lacks. This dominant conception, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a form of philosophical idealism
; the importance that it gives to the notion of "lack," Foucault
explains, places desire under the category of the Negative. Alternative conceptions, which treat desire as a positive, productive force, have received far less attention; the ideas of the small number of philosophers who have developed them, however, are of crucial importance to Deleuze and Guattari's project: principally Nietzsche's
will to power
and Spinoza's
conatus
.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality. On the basis of three "passive syntheses" (partly modelled on Kant's
syntheses of apperception
from his Critique of Pure Reason
), desire engineers "partial objects, flows, and bodies" in the service of the autopoiesis of the unconscious. In this model, desire does not "lack" its object; instead, desire "is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it." On this basis, Deleuze and Guattari develop their notion of desiring-production
. Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations
, is "purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions."
Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression
and social oppression
. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: "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." When they insist that a social field may be invested by desire directly, they oppose Freud's concept of sublimation
, which posits an inherent dualism
between desiring-machines and social production. This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Anti-Oedipus develops a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry
, and Freudo-Marxism
(with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social).
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female gender roles, but instead posits a multiplicity
of flows that a "hundred thousand" desiring-machines create within their connected universe; Deleuze and Guattari contrast this "non-human, molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary
sexuality: "making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand," they write, adding that "we always make love with worlds."
triangle of father
, mother and child. 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
. 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 and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis
as a way of maintaining normality. However, they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as deterritorialization
to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" (i.e. they do not intend to romanticize "mental disorders"; instead, they show, as Foucault, that "psychiatric disorders" are always second to something else).
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari develop their concept of the "body without organs
" (often rendered as BwO). 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
. In their later work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full.
, Bela Grunberger
and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
, who were prominent members of the most respected psychoanalytic association (the International Psychoanalytical Association
). They argue that this case demonstrates that psychoanalysis enthusiastically embraces a police state
:
Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel were two psychoanalysts from the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In November 1968 they disguised themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane and published L’univers Contestationnaire, in which they argued that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and proceeded to psychoanalyze them as suffering from a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father. Jacques Lacan
regarded Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel's book with great disdain; while they were still disguised under the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that he was certain that neither author belonged to his school, as none would abase themselves to such low drivel. The IPa analysts responded with an accusation against the Lacan school
of "intellectual terrorism." Gérard Mendel published La révolte contre le père (1968) and Pour décoloniser l’enfant (1971).
describes Anti-Oedipus as a contribution towards the fight against fascism
—he suggests that it may be called "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."
: the contradictory phenomenon whereby an individual or a group comes to desire their own oppression
. This contradiction had been mentioned briefly by the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza
: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" That is, how is it possible that people cry for "More taxes! Less bread!"? Wilhelm Reich discussed the phenomenon it in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism
:
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"). They argue that the nuclear family
is the most powerful agent of psychological repression
, under which the desires of the child and the adolescent are repressed and perverted. Such psychological repression forms docile individuals that are easy targets for social repression.
By using this powerful mechanism, the dominant class, "making cuts (coupures) and segregations pass over into a social field", can ultimately control individuals or groups, ensuring general submission. This explains the contradictory
phenomenon in which people "act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat". Deleuze and Guattari's critique of these mechanisms seeks to promote a revolutionary liberation of desire:
is the agent to which capitalist production
delgates the psychological repression
of the desires of the child. Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression
insofar as it works unconsciously
. Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child's sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.
Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppression
, which levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism. A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family
is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression, as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring "the very thing that dominates and exploit us." The Oedipus complex
arises from this double operation: "It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production
that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives."
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.
During the course of their argument, Deleuze & Guattari borrow a number of concepts from different scientific fields. To describe the process of desire, they draw on fluid dynamics
, the branch of physics that studies how a fluid flows through space. They describe society in terms of forces acting in a vector field
. They also relate processes of their "body without organs
" to the embryology
of an egg, from which they borrow the concept of an inductor
.
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume theoretical work by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Its volumes, published eight years apart, are Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ....
, the second being A Thousand Plateaus
A Thousand Plateaus
A Thousand Plateaus is the second book of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the first being Anti-Oedipus. Written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it was translated into English by Brian Massumi...
(1980).
Anti-Oedipus analyses the relationship of desire
Desire (philosophy)
In philosophy, desire has been identified as a philosophical problem since Antiquity. In Plato's The Republic, Socrates argues that individual desires must be postponed in the name of the higher ideal....
to reality and to capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
society in particular; it addresses questions of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first outlines Deleuze and Guattari's "materialist
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
" and its modelling of the unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
in its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of "desiring-production
Desiring-production
Desiring-production is a term coined by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book Anti-Œdipus . They oppose the Freudian conception of the unconscious as a representational "theater", instead favoring a productive "factory" model: desire is not an imaginary force based on...
" (which inter-relates "desiring machines" and a "body without organs
Body without organs
Gilles Deleuze introduced the notion of the "Body without Organs" in The Logic of Sense ; but it was not until his collaborative work with Félix Guattari that the BwO comes to prominence as one of Deleuze's major ideas.The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with...
"). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
's psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
that focuses on its theory
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...
of the Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
. The third section re-writes Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's materialist account of the history
Marx's theory of history
The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time - this means the relationships which people enter into with one another in order to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and...
of society's modes of production as a development through "primitive," "despotic
Asiatic mode of production
The theory of the Asiatic mode of production was devised by Karl Marx around the early 1850s. The essence of the theory has been described as "[the] suggestion .....
," and "capitalist
Capitalist mode of production
In Marx's critique of political economy, the capitalist mode of production is the production system of capitalist societies, which began in Europe in the 16th century, grew rapidly in Western Europe from the end of the 18th century, and later extended to most of the world...
" societies and details their different organisations of production, "inscription" (which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange"), and consumption. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call "schizoanalysis
Schizoanalysis
Schizoanalysis was first introduced in 1972 by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. Its formulation was continued in their follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus...
."
The book draws on and criticises the ideas of a vast range of thinkers; as well as Marx and Freud, these include Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
, Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
, Laing, Cooper
David Cooper
David Cooper may refer to:*Dave Cooper , Canadian cartoonist, commercial illustrator and graphic designer*Dave Cooper , 1980s English heavy-metal musician...
, Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
, Klein
Melanie Klein
Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
, Oury
Jean Oury
Jean Oury is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst born in March 1924. He is the founder and director of the psychiatric hospital La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny, France. He has been member of the Freudian School of Paris, founded by Jacques Lacan from inception until the dissolution of this...
, Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
, Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris...
, Peirce, Bateson
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe...
, Clastres
Pierre Clastres
Pierre Clastres, , was a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He is best known for his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory on stateless societies.-Theories:...
, Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
, Klossowski
Pierre Klossowski
Pierre Klossowski was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.-Life:...
, Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, Monod
Jacques Monod
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis"...
, Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
, Turner
Victor Turner
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage...
, Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anticommunist.-Biography:...
, Fourier
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
, Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, and Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
. Deleuze and Guattari also draw on a wide range of creative writers and artists during the course of their argument; these include Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Büchner
Georg Büchner
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...
, Butler
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Samuel Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh...
, Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, Kleist
Heinrich von Kleist
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was a poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him.- Life :...
, Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Schreber
Daniel Paul Schreber
Daniel Paul Schreber was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox. He described his second mental illness , making also a brief reference to the first illness in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness...
, and Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
. Foremost among its influences, however, stands Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
—Anti-Oedipus may be considered a kind of sequel to The Antichrist
The Antichrist (book)
The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895. Although it was written in 1888, its controversial content made Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz delay its publication, along with Ecce Homo...
.
Some of Guattari's diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004).
Schizoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari's "schizoanalysisSchizoanalysis
Schizoanalysis was first introduced in 1972 by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. Its formulation was continued in their follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus...
" is a militant
Militant
The word militant, which is both an adjective and a noun, usually is used to mean vigorously active, combative and aggressive, especially in support of a cause, as in 'militant reformers'. It comes from the 15th century Latin "militare" meaning "to serve as a soldier"...
social and political analysis that responds to the reactionary
Reactionary
The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...
tendencies of psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. It proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments
Cathexis
In psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea. The Greek term cathexis was chosen by James Strachey to render the German term Besetzung in his translation of Sigmund Freud's complete works. For Freud, cathexis is...
of desire—whether revolutionary or reactionary—in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical.
Deleuze and Guattari develop four theses of schizoanalysis:
- Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
- Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
- Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
- Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido
Libido
Libido refers to a person's sex drive or desire for sexual activity. The desire for sex is an aspect of a person's sexuality, but varies enormously from one person to another, and it also varies depending on circumstances at a particular time. A person who has extremely frequent or a suddenly...
does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated
Sublimation (psychology)
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defence mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly converting the initial impulse in the long term...
, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors; for "the truth is," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
fucks the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
; and so on. [...] Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." In the terms of classical Marxism
Base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure; the base comprehends the forces and relations of production — employer-employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations — into which people enter to produce the necessities and...
, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural "base" of society, they argue, not an ideological
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
, subjective "superstructure."
Unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious
Preconscious
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the word preconscious is applied to thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed and are therefore available for recall and easily capable of becoming conscious....
investments made according to the need
Need
A need is something that is necessary for organisms to live a healthy life. Needs are distinguished from wants because a deficiency would cause a clear negative outcome, such as dysfunction or death. Needs can be objective and physical, such as food, or they can be subjective and psychological,...
s or ideological interests
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
of the subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
(individual or collective) who desires.
A form of social production and reproduction, along with its economic and financial mechanisms, its political formations, and so on, can be desired as such, in whole or in part, independently of the interests of the desiring-subject. It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal metaphor, that HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
was able to sexually arouse the fascists. It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconsciousComplex (psychology)A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status...
, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military–industrial complex). And ideologyIdeologyAn ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
, OedipusOedipus complexIn psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus.
Schizoanalysis seeks to show 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." Desire produces "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction."
Desiring machines and social production
The traditional understanding of desire assumes an exclusive distinction between "production" and "acquisition." This line of thought—which has dominated Western philosophyPhilosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
throughout its history and stretches from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
to Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
—understands desire through the concept of acquisition, insofar as desire seeks to acquire something that it lacks. This dominant conception, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a form of philosophical idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
; the importance that it gives to the notion of "lack," Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
explains, places desire under the category of the Negative. Alternative conceptions, which treat desire as a positive, productive force, have received far less attention; the ideas of the small number of philosophers who have developed them, however, are of crucial importance to Deleuze and Guattari's project: principally Nietzsche's
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
will to power
Will to power
The will to power is widely seen as a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in man; achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all...
and Spinoza's
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
conatus
Conatus
Conatus is a term used in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This "thing" may be mind, matter or a combination of both...
.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality. On the basis of three "passive syntheses" (partly modelled on Kant's
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
syntheses of apperception
Transcendental apperception
In philosophy, Kantian transcendental apperception is that which Immanuel Kant thinks makes experience possible. It is where the self and the world come together.There are six steps to transcendental apperception:...
from his Critique of Pure Reason
Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement...
), desire engineers "partial objects, flows, and bodies" in the service of the autopoiesis of the unconscious. In this model, desire does not "lack" its object; instead, desire "is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it." On this basis, Deleuze and Guattari develop their notion of desiring-production
Desiring-production
Desiring-production is a term coined by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book Anti-Œdipus . They oppose the Freudian conception of the unconscious as a representational "theater", instead favoring a productive "factory" model: desire is not an imaginary force based on...
. Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
, is "purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions."
Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression
Psychological repression
Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
and social oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...
. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: "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." When they insist that a social field may be invested by desire directly, they oppose Freud's concept of sublimation
Sublimation (psychology)
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defence mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly converting the initial impulse in the long term...
, which posits an inherent dualism
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
between desiring-machines and social production. This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Anti-Oedipus develops a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry
Anti-psychiatry
Anti-psychiatry is a configuration of groups and theoretical constructs that emerged in the 1960s, and questioned the fundamental assumptions and practices of psychiatry, such as its claim that it achieves universal, scientific objectivity. Its igniting influences were Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing,...
, and Freudo-Marxism
Freudo-Marxism
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marx with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud....
(with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social).
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female gender roles, but instead posits a multiplicity
Multiplicity (philosophy)
Multiplicity is a philosophical concept that Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson developed by analogy with Riemann's description of the mathematical concept. It forms an important part of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Capitalism and...
of flows that a "hundred thousand" desiring-machines create within their connected universe; Deleuze and Guattari contrast this "non-human, molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary
Binary opposition
In critical theory, a binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually...
sexuality: "making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand," they write, adding that "we always make love with worlds."
Reframing the Oedipal complex
The "anti-" part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society based on the familyFamily
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
triangle of father
Father
A father, Pop, Dad, or Papa, is defined as a male parent of any type of offspring. The adjective "paternal" refers to father, parallel to "maternal" for mother...
, mother and child. Criticizing psychoanalysis "familialism
Familialism
Familialism is an ideology that promotes the family of the Western tradition as an institution. Familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and...
", 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
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
. 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
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
) and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production.
Furthermore, they argue that schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis
Neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...
as a way of maintaining normality. However, they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as deterritorialization
Deterritorialization
Deterritorialization is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus , which, in accordance to Deleuze's desire and philosophy, quickly became used by others, for example in anthropology, and transformed in this reappropriation...
to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" (i.e. they do not intend to romanticize "mental disorders"; instead, they show, as Foucault, that "psychiatric disorders" are always second to something else).
Body without organs
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari develop their concept of the "body without organs
Body without organs
Gilles Deleuze introduced the notion of the "Body without Organs" in The Logic of Sense ; but it was not until his collaborative work with Félix Guattari that the BwO comes to prominence as one of Deleuze's major ideas.The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with...
" (often rendered as BwO). 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
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
. In their later work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full.
Charges of fascism to psychoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari address the case of Gérard MendelGérard Mendel
-The revolt against the father:His popularity began when he published his 1968 work La révolte contre le père . Deleuze and Guattari assessed this book as one example of the "drivel on Oedipus"...
, Bela Grunberger
Bela Grunberger
Béla Grunberger was a Jewish Hungarian-French psychoanalyst known for his 1969 work L’univers Contestationnaire, written with fellow IPa member Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, under the joint pseudonym 'André Stéphane'...
and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association...
, who were prominent members of the most respected psychoanalytic association (the International Psychoanalytical Association
International Psychoanalytical Association
The International Psychoanalytical Association is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, on an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi...
). They argue that this case demonstrates that psychoanalysis enthusiastically embraces a police state
Police state
A police state is one in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population...
:
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.
Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel were two psychoanalysts from the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In November 1968 they disguised themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane and published L’univers Contestationnaire, in which they argued that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and proceeded to psychoanalyze them as suffering from a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father. Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
regarded Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel's book with great disdain; while they were still disguised under the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that he was certain that neither author belonged to his school, as none would abase themselves to such low drivel. The IPa analysts responded with an accusation against the Lacan school
École Freudienne de Paris
The École Freudienne de Paris was a French psychoanalytic professional body formed in 1964, of which Jacques Lacan was a founding member....
of "intellectual terrorism." Gérard Mendel published La révolte contre le père (1968) and Pour décoloniser l’enfant (1971).
Schizoanalytic slogans
Fascism, the family, and the desire for oppression
In a preface written for the English-language edition, Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
describes Anti-Oedipus as a contribution towards the fight against fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
—he suggests that it may be called "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."
Desiring self-repression
Deleuze and Guattari address a fundamental problem of political philosophyPolitical philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
: the contradictory phenomenon whereby an individual or a group comes to desire their own oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...
. This contradiction had been mentioned briefly by the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" That is, how is it possible that people cry for "More taxes! Less bread!"? Wilhelm Reich discussed the phenomenon it in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, originally Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus in German, was a book written by Wilhelm Reich in 1933...
:
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
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
"Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
" and its familial
Familialism
Familialism is an ideology that promotes the family of the Western tradition as an institution. Familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and...
mechanisms of subjectivation
Subjectivation
Subjectification is a philosophical concept coined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It refers to the construction of the individual subject. The concept has been often used in critical theory, sometimes with Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation...
("daddy-mommy-me"). They argue that the nuclear family
Nuclear family
Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...
is the most powerful agent of psychological repression
Psychological repression
Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
, under which the desires of the child and the adolescent are repressed and perverted. Such psychological repression forms docile individuals that are easy targets for social repression.
By using this powerful mechanism, the dominant class, "making cuts (coupures) and segregations pass over into a social field", can ultimately control individuals or groups, ensuring general submission. This explains the contradictory
Contradiction
In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other...
phenomenon in which people "act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat". 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.
The family under capitalism as an agent of repression
The familyFamily
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
is the agent to which capitalist production
Capitalist mode of production
In Marx's critique of political economy, the capitalist mode of production is the production system of capitalist societies, which began in Europe in the 16th century, grew rapidly in Western Europe from the end of the 18th century, and later extended to most of the world...
delgates the psychological repression
Psychological repression
Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
of the desires of the child. Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...
insofar as it works unconsciously
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
. Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child's sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.
Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...
, which levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism. A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family
Nuclear family
Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...
is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression, as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring "the very thing that dominates and exploit us." The Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
arises from this double operation: "It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production
Desiring-production
Desiring-production is a term coined by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book Anti-Œdipus . They oppose the Freudian conception of the unconscious as a representational "theater", instead favoring a productive "factory" model: desire is not an imaginary force based on...
that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives."
Territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation
Although (like most Deleuzo-Guattarian terms) deterritorializationDeterritorialization
Deterritorialization is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus , which, in accordance to Deleuze's desire and philosophy, quickly became used by others, for example in anthropology, and transformed in this reappropriation...
has a purposeful variance in meaning throughout their oeuvre, it can be roughly described as a move away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical, arborescent
Arborescent
Arborescent is a term used by the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari to characterize thinking marked by insistence on totalizing principles, binarism and dualism...
context, which seeks to package things (concepts, objects, etc.) into discrete categorised units with singular coded meanings or identities, towards a rhizomatic
Rhizome (philosophy)
Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project...
zone of multiplicity
Multiplicity (philosophy)
Multiplicity is a philosophical concept that Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson developed by analogy with Riemann's description of the mathematical concept. It forms an important part of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Capitalism and...
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
Line of flight
A line of flight is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and used extensively in his work with Félix Guattari. Translator Brian Massumi notes that in French, "Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance...
, destratification
Destratification
Destratification is a process in which the air or water is mixed in order to eliminate stratified layers of temperature, plant, or animal life. The first example of destratification was in 1919, in a small resorvoir....
and the body without organs
Body without organs
Gilles Deleuze introduced the notion of the "Body without Organs" in The Logic of Sense ; but it was not until his collaborative work with Félix Guattari that the BwO comes to prominence as one of Deleuze's major ideas.The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with...
/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
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume theoretical work by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Its volumes, published eight years apart, are Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ....
, A Thousand Plateaus).
The authors posit that dramatic reterritorialization
Reterritorialization
Reterritorialization is the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a term created by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical project Capitalism and Schizophrenia . They distinguished that relative deterritorialization is always...
often follows relative deterritorialization, while absolute deterritorialization is just that... absolute deterritorialization without any reterritorialization.
Terminology borrowed from science
Fluid dynamics
In physics, fluid dynamics is a sub-discipline of fluid mechanics that deals with fluid flow—the natural science of fluids in motion. It has several subdisciplines itself, including aerodynamics and hydrodynamics...
, the branch of physics that studies how a fluid flows through space. They describe society in terms of forces acting in a vector field
Vector field
In vector calculus, a vector field is an assignmentof a vector to each point in a subset of Euclidean space. A vector field in the plane for instance can be visualized as an arrow, with a given magnitude and direction, attached to each point in the plane...
. They also relate processes of their "body without organs
Body without organs
Gilles Deleuze introduced the notion of the "Body without Organs" in The Logic of Sense ; but it was not until his collaborative work with Félix Guattari that the BwO comes to prominence as one of Deleuze's major ideas.The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with...
" to the embryology
Embryology
Embryology is a science which is about the development of an embryo from the fertilization of the ovum to the fetus stage...
of an egg, from which they borrow the concept of an inductor
Inductor
An inductor is a passive two-terminal electrical component used to store energy in a magnetic field. An inductor's ability to store magnetic energy is measured by its inductance, in units of henries...
.
See also
- Anti-psychiatryAnti-psychiatryAnti-psychiatry is a configuration of groups and theoretical constructs that emerged in the 1960s, and questioned the fundamental assumptions and practices of psychiatry, such as its claim that it achieves universal, scientific objectivity. Its igniting influences were Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing,...
- Feminism and the Oedipus complexFeminism and the Oedipus complexIn Freudian Psychoanalysis, gender development is due to issues related to castration in the Oedipus Complex, and is controversial in Feminism because of the nature of Freudian castration...
- Freudo-MarxismFreudo-MarxismFreudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marx with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud....
- Id, ego, and super-egoId, ego, and super-egoId, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described...
- La Borde clinic
- Objet petit aObjet Petit aIn the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire...
- Plane of immanencePlane of immanencePlane of immanence is a founding concept in the metaphysics or ontology of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Immanence, meaning "existing or remaining within" generally offers a relative opposition to transcendence, a divine or metaphysical beyond or outside...
- Psychoanalytic conceptions of languagePsychoanalytic Conceptions of LanguagePsychoanalytic conceptions of language refers to the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with linguistics and psycholinguistics. Language has been an integral component of the psychoanalytic framework since its inception, as evidenced by the fact that Anna O. Psychoanalytic conceptions of...
- Psychological repressionPsychological repressionPsychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
Sources
- Deleuze, GillesGilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Trans. Michael Taormina. Ed. David Lapoujade. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents ser. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1584350180. - Deleuze, Gilles and Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
. 1972. "Intellectuals and Power." In Deleuze (2004, 206-213). - Deleuze, Gilles and Félix GuattariFélix GuattariPierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
. 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and SchizophreniaCapitalism and SchizophreniaCapitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume theoretical work by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Its volumes, published eight years apart, are Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ....
. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476953. Preview available on Google Books - ---. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian MassumiBrian MassumiBrian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987...
. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and SchizophreniaCapitalism and SchizophreniaCapitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume theoretical work by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Its volumes, published eight years apart, are Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ....
. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945. - Derrida (1997) Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux in Le MondeLe MondeLe Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
, 20 November 1997, page 17. English translation in Derrida (2005) Paper Machine as "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious" pp. 70–2 - Foucault, Michel. 1977. Preface. In Deleuze and Guattari (1972, xiii-xvi).
- Guattari, FélixFélix GuattariPierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
. 1992. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. Trans. of Chaosmose. Paris: Éditions Galilée. ISBN 0909952256. - ---. 2004 The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Ed. Stéphane Nadaud. Trans. Kélina Gotman. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. ISBN 1584350318.
- Holland, Eugene W. 1999. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415113199.
- Seem, Mark. 1977. Introduction. In Deleuze and Guattari (1972, xvii-xxvi.
Further reading
- Alliez, Éric. 2004. "Anti-Oedipus – Thirty Years On (Between Art and Politics)." Trans. Alberto ToscanoAlberto ToscanoAlberto Toscano is a cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou’s The Century and Logics of Worlds...
. In Deleuze and the Social. Ed. Martin Fulgsang and Bent Meier Sorenson. Deleuze Connections ser. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 151–68. ISBN 0748620931. - Badiou, AlainAlain BadiouAlain Badiou is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure . Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy...
. 2004. "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus." Trans. Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl. Polygraph 15/16: 75–92. - Buchanan, Ian, ed. 1999. A Deleuzean Century? Durham, NC: Duke UP. ISBN 0822323923.
- ---. 2008. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Reader's Guide. London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0826491499.
- Deleuze, GillesGilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
and Félix GuattariFélix GuattariPierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
1975. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature 30. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: Pour une literature mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0816615152. - Flieger, Jerry Aline. 1999. "Overdetermined Oedipus: Mommy, Daddy and Me as Desiring-Machine." In Buchanan (1999, 219–240).
- Guattari, FélixFélix GuattariPierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 0140551603. - ---. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270198.
- ---. 1996. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270309.
- Hocquenghem, GuyGuy HocquenghemGuy Hocquenghem was a French writer and queer theorist.-Biography:Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris and was educated at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the age of fifteen he began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher, René...
. 1972. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. 2nd ed. Series Q ser. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. ISBN 0822313847. - Jameson, FredricFredric JamesonFredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
. 1999. "Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze." In Buchanan (1999, 13-36). - Lambert, Gregg. 2006. Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? London and New York: Continuum.
- Massumi, BrianBrian MassumiBrian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987...
. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Swerve editions. Cambridge, USA and London: MIT. ISBN 0262631431.
External links
- Preview of Anti-Oedipus available on Google Books
- Preview of A Thousand Plateaus available on Google Books
- "Reading Notes on Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia" by Michael HardtMichael HardtMichael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000...
- "Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari" by Brian MassumiBrian MassumiBrian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987...
- "Schizo's Web" by Harrison Mujica-Jenkins at latephilosophers.com
- "Mapping the Postmodern: Deleuze and Guattari's Social Schizophrenia"
- "Drive and Desire: Zizek and Anti-Oedipus"