The two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari's influential text: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
A painting by Francis Bacon
Anti-Oedipus sets out a critique of the psychoanalyis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Instead of seeing desire as a lack of something, desire is considered a productive and creative force that is directly present in political and economic life. This idea underpins the proposals for a materialist psychiatry and schizoanalysis, as well as a novel theory of fascism as lurking in paranoid desires. The wikipedia summary is here. Ebook versions of Anti-Oedipus are here.
A Thousand Plateaus builds on and complicates the concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus. The subject matter broadens out from psychoanalysis and the unconscious to topics such as state formation, nomadism, linguistics, fascism (again), technology, political economy, archaeology and anthropology. The wikipedia summary is here.
Files
Anti-Oedipus
(1.89 MB)
A Thousand Plateaus
(3.25 MB)
Comments
I'm not much into the
I'm not much into the post-modern vernacular, i.e. the use of obtuse adjectives, poetic imagery and political jargon juxtaposed into a soup of hard to digest sentences, however, their basic premise that 'desire' as a reification imposed upon social relationships is Marxist to its core, nothing new really! Post-modernism after all really translates as post-Marxism, and up to the point of its analysis of social relationships centered around commodity fetishism, it still holds its ground to this day.
What still astounds the true anarchist is the power that this materialistic commodity fetishism has as a political tool used by fascists to control the masses without any blatant brainwashing methods. Its like a massive neon light at the entrance to every freeway----
WE ARE GIVING YOU EVERYTHING YOU DESIRE BUT DON'T NEED YET YOU COME BACK FOR MORE ALTHOUGH IT MAKES YOU MISERABLE AND PSYCHICALLY DIVIDED (SCHIZOPHRENIC) AND STILL VOTING FOR YOUR OPPRESSORS.