Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia - Gille Deleuze and Felix Guttari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: L'anti-Oedipe) is a 1972 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Submitted by Tyrion on September 25, 2013

Anti-Oedipus analyses the relationship of desire to reality and to capitalist society in particular; it addresses questions of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first outlines Deleuze and Guattari's "materialist psychiatry" and its modelling of the unconscious in its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of "desiring-production" (which inter-relates "desiring machines" and a "body without organs"). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis that focuses on its theory of the Oedipus complex. The third section re-writes Karl Marx's materialist account of the history of society's modes of production as a development through "primitive," "despotic," and "capitalist" societies and details their different organisations of production, "inscription" (which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange"), and consumption. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call "schizoanalysis."

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