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Anti-Oedipus; Capitalism and schizophrenia

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13642537.2021.1966934

1469-5901

Daniel Rubinstein,

Mental Health and Psychiatry

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.It breathes, it heats, it eats.It shits and fucks.What a mistake to have said the id.Everywhere it is machines -real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections."(Deleuze and Guattari, 1996, p.8)In these famous opening lines Deleuze and Guattari signal that Anti-Oedipus, subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not a book of academic philosophy or psychoanalytic theory, not only in the way they appropriate and re-assemble the thought of Freud and Marx, but also in their use of language, style and rhetoric.Anti-Oedipus reads like a work of experimental fiction or avant-garde literature rather than as a book of scholarly research.Paraphrasing Lacan (with whom Guattari had a tumultuous relationship), Anti-Oedipus is structured like the unconscious.It is an unrepresentable and disruptive book that resists being reduced to intelligible significance.This is not a model or an updated framework for psychoanalysts; rather what is offered here is a method, but one that can be only understood in its practice.The book shows how one can grasp the psyche as a desiring machine, as a constellation of thermodynamic stoppages and flows.Therefore, the question is not what is Oedipus, but how does desire operate, how is it possible to decode the flows and products of desiring machines?Anti-Oedipus is a work of practical philosophy and psychiatry, a response to the uprisings of 1968, and a toolbox containing instruments useful for dismantling the master's house.What Deleuze and Guattari say about the unconscious can be applied in equal measure to Anti-Oedipus itself.'The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use.The question posed by desire is not "What does it mean?" but rather "how does it work?"'.(Deleuze and Guattari, 1996, p.108).Their goal is not to write a book that describes desire, but to show how desire functions.In this review I will focus on three of the playful, interconnected lines of inquiry into desire developed by Deleuze and Guattari.The first is the charge directed at Marx and Freud regarding the place they allocate to desire.The second is their assault on the superego, and the third is the way it is possible to talk about gestures not as symptoms with hidden causes, but as affect.