Revisiting Anti-Oedipus

ETHOS: Dialogues in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 2018

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) is one of the most influential, provocative, perplexing and forceful books to have been written in the field of political theory and philosophy in the last century. In this book, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by situating the politics of desire and the process of the production of desire at the centre of their philosophical investigation, address a range of questions from psychoanalysis to politics, economics to history, and linguistics to philosophy with regard to modern capitalist society. This paper focuses on this book in which they attempt to develop an alternative theory and practice of psychoanalysis which they called schizoanalysis. The aim of the article is to provide a detailed picture of their conception of desire and show that they face a serious dilemma since their view is based on an inherently revolutionary concept of desire.

International Deleuze Conference Symposium 2012 Henan University, Kaifeng, PR China. Ed. Jihai Gao, Paul Patton, and Jing Yin. Kaifeng: Henan University Press, 2012

Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire stands at the heart of their criticisms of psychoanalysis and the political program they develop in Anti-Oedipus. Although this notion is clearly divorced from a commonsense understanding in terms of wish, want, demand, etc., without these as touchstones not only is it difficult to conceive what they mean by desire but also desire’s political import. Despite the fact Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire is frequently referred to in secondary literature, it remains a stubbornly opaque notion. Secondary works to date either largely dodge the issue, explaining “how the concept gets constructed and how it works” rather than “what desire means” (Holland 2005, 53), or explain Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire in polymorphous, early (Freudian) psychoanalytic terms, where the objects and aims of desire are variable. Although a conception of this type is by no means foreign to Deleuze and Guattari’s view, alone it fails to capture sufficiently what they mean by desire. To better understand this notion my paper focuses on two claims Deleuze and Guattari make regarding the nature of desire in Anti-Oedipus. First, there is nothing specifically psychical about desire. Second, desire and labor are the same in nature while occupying different regimes. I argue these claims open onto two conceptions of desire, implying different understandings of the relationship between mind and body and supporting different understandings of the relationship between individuals and community. I show not only that these two conceptions of desire imply fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical anthropology – i.e., accounts of human nature – but also that each supports a different understanding of the nature of political activity.

Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

Paolo Plotegher, Deleuze and Guattari Queering Desire, Canary Editions, Minneapolis / Bolzano, 2023

I wrote this text for students of the Art Psychotherapy training I'm teaching at Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh (Edinburgh). I put it together initially in the shape of a slide presentation, adding more and more words over time, to the point that that it became too much for the format. I spent many years, before my own training as an art therapist, trying to put Deleuze and Guattari into practice, initially struggling to make sense of their writing and attempting to let that struggle affect my everyday life and what I was doing together with other people in collective "projects" (e.g. Summer Drafts-when we got together with migrants and locals in a town in Italy with the help of artists over three summers). Part of the struggle has been to learn to "betray" Deleuze and Guattari, take them away from all academic Deleuzianisms, to find ways of putting some of their learning in to practice, together with more learnings coming from others we came across (e.g. Silvia Federici for the New Cross Commoners). When I trained as an art therapist, I struggled with bringing together the psychodynamic approach with what I previously learned with others in self-organised contexts. I still struggle to communicate how Deleuze and Guattari have shaped how I do and think art therapy, and so writing this text addresses the struggle.

Science Fiction Film and Television, 2010

Mosaic [Winnipeg] 44.4 (2011): 161. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 June 2016., 2011

Crisis and Critique 8.1, 2021

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) brings together politics and desire in an attempt to fuse political and libidinal economy. In this book, they advocate a notion of desire as a productive force or activity, as a striving, which is not conditioned by any particular object (an object that lacks), nor subdued to any prohibitive “law” or symbolic structure. While the impact of Nietzsche on their conception of desire has correctly been highlighted, a more detailed analysis of the importance of Spinoza is still missing. This paper pursues precisely this purpose: it seeks to highlight a particular, especially Deleuzian reading of Spinoza in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference Asia 2019

Desire and repression: the relations between molar and molecular What I would like to address here is the way in which Deleuze and Guattari sought to put the question,-which they defined as the fundamental question of political philosophy, as Spinoza puts it (and that Reich rediscovered)-, namely: the question of voluntary servitude. Why men fight for their bondage as if it were their salvation, why the hungry do not revolt and why the exploited do not strike? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, 38). But this question will be posed by Guattari and Deleuze, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, following namely Reich and the freudian marxism, the question would then be, therefore, to know, how can desire pursuit its own repression? Freud made a discovery, the discovery of desire as libido, the discovery of a productive unconscious "domain of free synthesis where everything is possible, connections without end, disjunctions without exclusion, conjunctions without specificity, partial objects and flows." (Deleuze, Guattari, 1972, 66) But this discovery was cloistered by the Oedipus complex, that is, reduced to the socially acceptable forms, to the social norms themselves. We aim to emphasize here the originality of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory in relation to psychoanalysis and Freudo-Marxism. Therefore, this is an attempt to understand what, according to them, was left aside by psychoanalysis. For Deleuze and Guattari the discovery of the productive unconscious has two correlates: the direct confrontation between desire and social production, between formations of symptoms and collective formations, their identity of nature and the difference of regime that distinguishes them; on the other hand, the repression that social normativity exerts under the productions of desire and the relation that exists between this repression[social repression] and psychic repression [réfoulement]. It is all that will be lost, at least uniquely committed to the establishment of the sovereign Oedipus. (Deleuze, Guattari, 1972, 66) The Freudian Oedipus complex describes the constitution of an "I" as the result of an unconscious desire repression operation of the superego. The super-ego can only perform this action because it is the social law itself, which means that it is by "internalizing" the law, or repressing an incestuous desire, that the child begins to identify with his parents, to constitute their "I", as an image resembling an ideal self and / or an