/lit/ - Literature

Has anbody read Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze?

My thoughts:

This book is one giant attack on the traditional liberal-democratic view of the individual as a responsible agent and citizen. It is also a profound materialist critique of old-school Marxism and Freudianism. Since I'm a big fan of both of these schools of thought, this was a tough pill to swallow, but swallow it I did, and to great effect.

One of the big themes that stuck with me from the first chapter on is the idea of paranoia becoming a very real influence in the way that we conceptualize our relation, as individuals, to society. These large theoretical systems, like Marxism and Freudianism, push an individual's understanding through certain pat circuits that then condition our awareness at the expense of realizing new micro and macro possibilities. It's a very Nietzschean idea that D/G then broaden out with some really fancy (perhaps too fancy) jargon, such as the ideas of the body without organs, desiring machines, the socius, etc. Unfortunately, these ideas, as important as they are, do not reveal themselves in a very clear, straightforward way and must be made sense of, by the reader, through stages of refinement as they go along scratching their head from one section to next. Nonetheless, it is an infectious train of thought that develops and ultimately results in a clear analysis.

D/G build a whole new system of mental identification that encourages people to pay close attention to the flux of experience and to always be suspicious of large-scale explanations of a Hegelian sort which attempt to sublate negativities into larger conceptions on the mistaken assumption that life somehow can then be better understood or improved by the narrowing of possibility. Not so, say D/G. Better to skip free of such Oedipalizing influences into the nomadic realm of possibility, the realm of the schizo experiencing partial objects as though in a vacuum, unattached, new, possible.

As Foucault in the preface states, this is indeed a profound work of ethics. It is also a necessary counterpoint to much of the theoretical clutter that has been amassing for the last two centuries in Europe and America. I simply see this as a reminder that life remains open, full of possibility. D/G just had to invent a number of concepts to remind us and to give us, in a visceral way, a new perspective from which to view our ideological situation.