Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis

174 Pages·1999·1.14 MB·English

by  Eugene W. Holland

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S
ANTI-OEDIPUS
Anti-Oedipus is one of the most important texts in philosophy to have appeared
in the last thirty years. The first collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, it presents a brilliant and devastating critique of the Freudian Oedipus
complex by condemning it as a reactionary, guilt-inducing product of capitalist
institutions. A truly remarkable and vastly complicated text, Anti-Oedipus
revolutionized poststructuralism and Continental philosophy.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to schizoanalysis
Eugene W. Holland provides a comprehensive yet accessible guide to this complex
and notoriously difficult text. He investigates the manner in which Deleuze and
Guattari negotiate the interactions between the three main materialist thinkers of
modernity, Freud, Marx, and Nietzche, and lucidly examines the role of
schizoanalysis in Deleuze and Guattari’s radical materialist psychiatry.
An indispensable guide to Anti-Oedipus, this book is a perfect introduction
to the early thought of Deleuze and Guattari, celebrating not only the importance
and rigor of their work but highlighting its lasting implications for the continuing
debates on Marxism, environmentalism and feminism.
Eugene W. Holland is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature
at the Ohio State University.

DELEUZE AND
GUATTARI’S
ANTI-OEDIPUS
Introduction to schizoanalysis
Eugene W. Holland
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
©1999 Eugene W. Holland
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Holland, Eugene W.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus : introduction to schizoanalysis /
Eugene W. Holland
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
1. Social psychiatry. 2. Psychoanalysis—Social aspects.
3. Oedipus complex—Social aspects. 4. Capitalism.
5. Schizophrenia—Social aspects. I. Guattari, Félix.
II. Holland, Eugene W. III. Title.
RC455.D42213 1999
194—dc21 CIP
ISBN 0-415-11318-0 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-11319-9 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-00742-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17440-2 (Glassbook Format)
CONTENTS
Preface vii

1 Introduction 1

How it works (1): the materialisms of Freud, Marx,
and Nietzsche 4
How it works (2): the critical operators drawn from Kant,
Marx, and Freud 14
Operator 1: Kant and critique 14
Operator 2: Marx and revolutionary autocritique 15
Operator 3: Freud and the tendentious joke 18

2 Desiring-production and the internal critique of Oedipus 25

The three syntheses of the unconscious 26
The connective synthesis of production 26
The disjunctive synthesis of recording 26
The conjunctive synthesis of consumption–consummation 33
The five paralogisms of psychoanalysis 36
The paralogism of displacement and the critique of
representation (1) 37
The paralogism of application and illegitimate use of the
conjunctive synthesis 38
The paralogism of the double-bind and illegitimate use of the
disjunctive synthesis 41
The paralogism of extrapolation and illegitimate use of the
connective synthesis 45
The paralogism of the afterward and the critique of
representation (2) 54

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CONTENTS
3 Social-production and the external critique of Oedipus 58

Social-production in general 61
Forms of surplus-value and coding 64
The relations of anti-production and systems of inscription 68
Savagery (1): the relations of anti-production 69
Savagery (2): territorial inscription 71
Despotism (1): the relations of anti-production 74
Despotism (2): imperial inscription 76
Capitalist relations of anti-production 78
Capitalist inscription 79
Schizoanalysis and Freud 87
Schizoanalysis and Lacan 89

4 Beyond critique: schizoanalysis and universal history 92

The two modes of investment: paranoia and schizophrenia 93
Therapeutic transformation 97
Revolutionary transformation 99
Intersections 106
Marxism 106
Environmentalism 111
Feminism and gender 115
Recapitulation 121

Notes 124
Bibliography 149
Index 155
vi
PREFACE
This book is intended as an introduction to reading Deleuze and Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus, not as a substitute for it. If this introduction encourages
people to read – or re-read – the original, its aim will have been fulfilled;
anyone who reads this book will be well prepared to read and enjoy Anti-
Oedipus itself. Anyone who reads this book instead of the original, however,
will be making a sorry mistake, for they will miss the chance to encounter
first-hand one of the most fascinating and compelling experiments in recent
French thought, an experiment that Deleuze and Guattari called
“schizoanalysis.”
The experiment is both intricate and far-reaching, and the resulting book is
quite difficult – albeit for specific reasons that I will explain in what follows. Indeed,
those well-versed in Deleuze and Guattari’s works appear to have had as much
difficulty with it as have those for whom Anti-Oedipus represents the initial
encounter with Deleuze and Guattari: despite the title’s notoriety, little sustained
scholarly attention has been focused on the book in its own right. Experienced
readers of Deleuze and Guattari may stand to benefit as much as do neophytes,
then, from an introduction to schizoanalysis.
Anti-Oedipus is the first-fruit of a remarkable (and long-lasting) collaboration
between philosopher Gilles Deleuze and anti-psychiatrist Félix Guattari. Guattari
can be considered the rough equivalent in France of R. D. Laing or David Cooper in
England, Thomas Szaz or Ernest Becker in the United States – except that Guattari,
in addition to being a leading theoretician of the innovative La Borde psychiatric
clinic, was also a militant political activist who always sought to link his (anti-
)psychiatric reforms and theorization to working-class and community-based
revolutionary politics. Gilles Deleuze, meanwhile, was an apparently quite strictly
academic philosopher, best-known initially for studies of the Western tradition’s
maverick philosophers (such as Bergson and Spinoza, with Kant being the important
exception), until his major contributions to French post-structuralism and its
“philosophies of difference” appeared in the late 1960s. Indeed, it may be that the
events of 1968 brought these two otherwise quite unlikely collaborators together
in a way that would be unthinkable outside the context of that tumultuous and
fertile moment, and that their thought-experiment was conducted in an effort to
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PREFACE
respond to it. But the fruit of that collaboration is, in any case, quite unlike either
the Anglo-American anti-psychiatry, to which Guattari’s work bears certain affinities,
or the Frankfurt School’s synthesis of Marx and Freud (particularly the “negative
dialectics” of Theodor Adorno), to which Deleuze’s poststructuralist philosophy
of difference could usefully be compared. Without attempting the impossible (and
in any case pointless) task of trying to determine exactly what in Anti-Oedipus
comes from the one and what from the other, it could be said that while Deleuze
dramatically deepens Guattari’s anti-psychiatric stance by grounding it in an
alternative philosophical tradition featuring Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson rather
than Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, Guattari at the same time dramatically sharpens
Deleuze’s philosophical perspective by bringing it into contact with theoretical
and institutional struggles in French psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and with the
political turmoil surrounding students’ and workers’ movements in France and
throughout Europe (particularly Italy). As much because of the moment in which it
emerged as because of the quite disparate figures that were its authors,
schizoanalysis is, to say the least, a quite extraordinary venture in experimental
thinking and writing.
My first book Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis aimed to show what
schizoanalysis can contribute to the field of literary and cultural history. It combined
intensive reading of Baudelaire’s poetic texts and essays with extensive socio-
historical contextualization of the emergence of modernism in mid-nineteenth-
century France. The present book, in some ways a sequel to the first, is both less
ambitious and more so: it is not as specialized and detailed, but at the same time it
aims to be both comprehensive and accessible in its presentation of schizoanalysis.
Comprehensive yet accessible: that is no easily accomplished task. For Anti-Oedipus
is an extremely complicated work that draws on a prodigious range of sources, not
all of which can be treated adequately in a book of this scope. Indeed, to follow up
all or even most of Deleuze and Guattari’s references to art and literature,
anthropology and ethnography, economics, psychology, physics, aesthetics,
biology, philosophy, mathematics, and so on, would require a book several times
the size of Anti-Oedipus itself. So a short introduction to schizoanalysis, such as
this is, will necessarily be very selective, leaving out much that could have been
included.
For the purposes of this introduction, I consider schizoanalysis to draw
principally on the three great materialists of the last century – Freud, Marx, and
Nietzsche – and it is on schizoanalysis as a revolutionary “materialist psychiatry”
that I concentrate here. I must thereby forgo treating in detail Deleuze and Guattari’s
debts to Spinoza and Bergson, for example, or to chaos theory and molecular biology.
The former are explained with admirable lucidity by Michael Hardt (in Gilles Deleuze:
an Apprenticeship in Philosophy), while the latter figure significantly in Brian
Massumi’s extraordinary book (A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia).
This introduction to schizoanalysis lies squarely in-between these two equally
valuable but quite different works: Hardt’s book examines the relation of Deleuze’s
viii
PREFACE
early work to Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche; later encounters with Guattari, Marx,
and Freud lie beyond its scope. Massumi, meanwhile, treats the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia as a whole, but tends to emphasize the topics and
perspectives of the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, over those of Anti-
Oedipus. (Relatively little mention is made of Freud and Lacan, for example, in either
A Thousand Plateaus or Massumi’s User’s Guide, whereas they are fundamental
reference-points, obviously, for Anti-Oedipus.)
At the same time, it must be said that the second volume of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia has proven more durable or popular than the first. In one sense it is
the more accessible: whereas Anti-Oedipus mounts one long complex argument
(appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), A Thousand Plateaus operates on
many fronts at once; one really can, as the authors recommend, explore any of the
plateaus in its own right, and pick and choose which to read and which to skim or
skip over. More telling, however, is the more cautious and sober tone of the second
volume; the revolutionary enthusiasm of Anti-Oedipus appears to be dampened if
not silenced in A Thousand Plateaus. And this for determinate historical reasons,
no doubt: as I argued in Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, the period succeeding
the revolutionary outburst of 1968 in France – much like the period succeeding the
short-lived revolution of 1848, two economic long-waves before – is a time of
retrenchment. Anti-Oedipus (1972) was published in the afterglow of the events of
May 1968, before the first “oil shock” of 1974 put an end to hopes for widespread
social transformation in France (and elsewhere); A Thousand Plateaus (1980) –
published in the thick of the oil crisis (1974–81) – is both less engaged with pressing
socio-historical events and far richer and broader in scope.
Anti-Oedipus should therefore be understood partly as an inspiration and a
reflection of May 1968: because of its revolutionary enthusiasm, to be sure, and its
rationale for the kind of de-centralized, small-scale, and improvisational “micro-
political” struggle that took place in Paris and then throughout France in the spring
of that year; but also because of its critique of party power-structures (and implicitly,
therefore, of the French Communist Party and its betrayal of students and workers
in siding with the Gaullist forces of law and order). Yet the book should also be
understood, as Michel Foucault insists in his 1977 Preface to the English edition,
in a less time-bound fashion as an ethics or politics of what he calls “anti-fascism,”
by which he means opposition to “not only historical fascism…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 exploits us” (xiii). In this
respect, it is precisely because we have passed from a period of revolutionary
enthusiasm for social change to one of retrenchment and quiescence that the lessons
of Anti-Oedipus remain so vitally important: historically short-sighted as it may be
so to do, people are all the more likely to become enamored of power and everyday
fascism when these forces seem to have won the day and to represent the only
game in town. Whether swimming against or with the historical tide, schizoanalysis
carries the fight against fascism and power well beyond battles with the French
ix