Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
by Authors:
Gilles Deleuze , Felix Guattari , Helen R. Lane , Robert Hurley
Released: July, 1985
ISBN: 0816612250
Paperback
Sales Rank: 7,412
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List price:
$16.95
Our price:
$16.95
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| Book > Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia > Customer Reviews: |
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Average Customer Rating: 
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia >
Customer Review #1:
 Deleuzes book on Society
If youre into sociology, and youre curious about Deleuze, then read this one first. Skim some of the bits on psychoanalysis. But read the opening and the sections on representation closely. This is the book that gives birth to Empire, currently a hot one in the anti-globalism movement. Its in this one that D/G show how any social order requires a means by which to articluate desire. They argue that desire is fundamentally productive, creative. But that it must be harnessed if a society is going to survive its chaotic impulses and forces.
Anti Oedipus is really a book of anthropology. It shows how "primitive," "despotic," and finally "capitalist" regimes differ in their organization of production, recording (inscription, representation), and consumption. Its also a history insofar as it covers the process by which capitalism ultimately commands all the flows and chains of production, submitting them to a form of organization that is abstract (money is abstract) rather than local and physical.
The oedipal part of it is a critique of the Oedipal complex insofar as the complex articulates a model of society based on the family triangle. They want to show that the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of contemporary society.
Their alternative, to be taken literally, is schizoid: subvertive, resistance, and always escaping capture by slipping in between the categories that organize capitalist society and its way of thinking.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia >
Customer Review #2:
Actually four and a half stars
Extremely dense, muddy prose slung half way between poetic delerium and hardened theory, this vast experiement in writing is fascinating in its ability to have turned over seemingly everything- and liberally shaken. This can be a masochistic experience for any reader, although I think that it is one of the most interesting philosophical texts written this century. Certainly seems essential reading for budding psychoanalysts, intending social theorists and anybody interested in the problem of fascism. Dip in and out of it, as has been suggested by another reviwer.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia >
Customer Review #3:
brilliant, important
This is, in my opinion, the most important work of theory/philosophy for the latter half of the twentieth century. Although DandGs jargon tends to be weighty at times, it is ultimately playful. there is the tendency, amongst numerous DandG fans, to reduce their philosophy to a text merely about postmodern criticism. i believe this is a mistake. ultimately, Anti-Oedipus (and its companion volume) are about politics--radical politics at best--written by two Marxists who are looking for a new revolutionary theory. indeed, Guattari once said in an interview that postmodernism is "the very paradigm of every sort of submission, every sort of compromise with the existing status quo". Anti-Oedipus is important for political activists, otherwise it becomes just another piece of "knowledge-capital"...
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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia >
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