ANTI-OEDIPUS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S 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. ANTI- DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S OEDIPUS Introduction to schizoanalysis Eugene W. Holland First published 1999 by Routledge Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©1999 Eugene W. Holland Typeset in Times by Routledge 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 194—dc21 1999 CIP ISBN 13: 978-0-415-11318-2 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-11319-9 (pbk) CONTENTS Preface 1 Introduction How it works (1): the materialisms of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche How it works (2): the critical operators drawn from Kant, Marx, and Freud Operator 1: Kant and critique Operator 2: Marx and revolutionary autocritique Operator 3: Freud and the tendentious joke 2 Desiring-production and the internal critique of Oedipus The three syntheses of the unconscious The connective synthesis of production The disjunctive synthesis of recording The conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation The five paralogisms of psychoanalysis The paralogism of displacement and the critique of representation (1) The paralogism of application and illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis The paralogism of the double-bind and illegitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis The paralogism of extrapolation and illegitimate use of the connective synthesis The paralogism of the afterward and the critique of representation (2) 3 Social-production and the external critique of Oedipus Social-production in general Forms of surplus-value and coding The relations of anti-production and systems of inscription Savagery (1): the relations of anti-production Savagery (2): territorial inscription Despotism (1): the relations of anti-production Despotism (2): imperial inscription Capitalist relations of anti-production Capitalist inscription Schizoanalysis and Freud Schizoanalysis and Lacan 4 Beyond critique: schizoanalysis and universal history The two modes of investment: paranoia and schizophrenia Therapeutic transformation Revolutionary transformation Intersections Marxism Environmentalism Feminism and gender Recapitulation Notes Bibliography Index 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 poststructuralism 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 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 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