Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia () is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
In the book, Deleuze and Guattari critique contemporary French uses of psychoanalysis and historical materialism by repurposing their concepts in the development of schizoanalysis, a loose critical practice initiated from the standpoint of schizophrenia and psychosis as well as from the social progress that capitalism has spurred. Schizoanalysis is described as a "materialist psychiatry" modeled on the unconscious regarded as an aggregate of productive processes of desire, incorporating their concept of desiring-production which interrelates desiring-machines and bodies without organs, to detail their different organizations of social production, "recording surfaces", coding, territorialization and the act of "inscription". They refer to psychoanalysis, economics, the creative arts, literature, anthropology and history in engagement with these concepts.Foucault (1977, 14).
Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas of the will to power and eternal recurrence also have roles in how Deleuze and Guattari describe schizophrenia; the book extends from much of Deleuze's prior thinking in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense that utilized Nietzsche's ideas to explore a radical conception of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari also draw on and criticize the philosophies and theories of: Spinoza, Kant, Charles Fourier, Charles Sanders Peirce, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Karl Jaspers, Lewis Mumford, Karl August Wittfogel, Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Louis Hjelmslev, Jacques Lacan, Gregory Bateson, Pierre Klossowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Monod, Louis Althusser, Victor Turner, Jean Oury, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Pierre Clastres.Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 423–427).
They additionally draw on authors and artists whose works demonstrate their concept of schizophrenia as "the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines",Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.4 such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Georg Büchner, Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Daniel Paul Schreber, Adolf Wölfli, Vaslav Nijinsky, Gérard de Nerval and J. M. W. Turner.
Thus, given the richness and diversity of the source material it draws upon and the grand task it sets out to accomplish, Anti-Oedipus can, as Michel Foucault suggests in the preface to the text, "best be read as an 'art, and it would be a "mistake to read [it] as the new theoretical reference" in philosophy.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, xli).
Anti-Oedipus became a sensation upon publication and was widely celebrated, creating shifts in contemporary philosophy. It is seen as a key text in the "micropolitics of desire", alongside Lyotard's Libidinal Economy. It has been credited with devastating Lacanianism due to its unorthodox criticism of the movement.
Summary
Schizoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari's "schizoanalysis" is a social and political analysis that responds to what they see as the reactionary tendencies of psychoanalysis.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 54, 108, 127–128, 325-xx). Deleuze and Guattari argue that there was no specific "turning point" in the theoretical development of Freudianism at which it became reactionary; instead, it contained "revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements" from the start. "We refuse to play 'take it or leave it'," they write. This politically ambiguous mixture of tendencies in psychoanalysis arises, they argue, from its ambiguous relationship with its discoveries: "As if every great doctrine were not a combined formation, constructed from bits and pieces, various intermingled codes and flux, partial elements and derivatives, that constitute its very life or becoming. As if we could reproach someone for having an ambiguous relationship with psychoanalysis, without first mentioning that psychoanalysis owes its existence to a relationship, theoretically and practically ambiguous, with what it discovers and the forces that it wields" (1972, 128). Despite the militancy of the analyses proposed within Deleuze and Guattari's project, they insist that "no political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis" (1972, 415). Guattari developed the implications of their theory for a concrete political project in his book with the Italian autonomist marxist philosopher Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us (1985). For the variable relations between the socius of capital and revolutionary autonomous territorialities, see Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 410). 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 (1972, 93, 115, 322–333, 354, 400). 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.First thesis (1972, 375); second thesis (1972, 377); third thesis (1972, 390); fourth thesis (1972, 401).
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. "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."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 322–333). In the terms of classical Marxism, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural "base" of society, they argue, not an ideological, subjective "superstructure."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114, 378). In failing to recognise this, Deleuze and Guattari argue, Wilhelm Reich fell short of the materialist psychiatry towards which he aimed and was unable to provide an adequate answer to his question "Why did the masses desire fascism?"
Unconscious libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious investments made according to the needs or ideological interests of the subject (individual or collective) who desires.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114, 322). Deleuze and Guattari qualify this distinction between unconscious desire and preconscious need or interest when they write: "It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment"; however, they go on to insist once again that the interests "are not identical with this investment" (1972, 379). 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 Hitler 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 unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military–industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114–115). 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."Section 2.5 The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation, pp. 98, 105 Desire produces "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 31).
Desiring machines and social production
The traditional understanding of desire assumes an exclusive distinction between "production" and "acquisition."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 26). This line of thought—which has dominated Western philosophy 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. 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.Kant's analysis of superstitious beliefs, hallucinations, and fantasies in his Critique of Judgment treats desire as a creative, productive force, Deleuze and Guattari explain, although his analysis limits its effects to the production of a psychic reality and thereby retains the validity of desire-as-lack; (1972, 26–27). Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 28). 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.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 28), Guattari (1992, 15), and Holland (1999, 25). 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.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1–9). Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations, is "purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions."