Summary: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari writen by: Aiman Aslam

Anti-oedipus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia is written by the postmodern critics named Deleuze and Guattari. The book has a preface written by Michael Foucault and an introduction by Mark Seem. Furthermore, the book is divided into four major parts (namely, The Desiring Machines, Psychoanalysis and Familialism; The Holy Family, Savages, Barbarians and Civilized Men, and Introduction to Schizoanalysis), each part further comprising of certain sections, each section dealing with a separate (but linked to the previous) issue. The first part of the book is an account of Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist psychiatry, the second is a critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex, the third is a rewriting of Marx’s philosophy of history using the new language of materialist psychiatry and the fourth section is about Deleuze and Guattari’s new analytic endeavor, Schizoanalysis.

Michael Foucault, right in the preface to the book, pinpoints certain important features that are discussed by the writers throughout the book. According to him, the time period of 1945 to 1965 witnessed great reliance of the people on Marxism, Freudianism, and then Fascism. However, the later ages saw resistance against the narrow doctrines presented by these theories and their propounders. Deleuze and Guattari are among those who resisted. Their thought is hostile against totalizing theories that bind desire to fixed alibis, and also to the poor technicians of this desire—psychoanalysts and semiologists. Fascism (in all spheres of life) is considered to be an exploitation of peoples’ desire and just another way of repressing them. So the book, according to Foucault, could be renamed as An Introduction to the Nonfascist way of Life.

The preface is followed by Introduction written by Mark Seem. He starts off with the way a psychiatrist will check one up as one goes to him/her. It’s just another way of economic as well as psychological exploitation. What Deleuze and Guattari have actually protested against is the wrong desire ingrained among common people by those in power—the desire to be led by others. In sharp contrast to psychoanalysis, they present schizoanalysis to the people. The approach is diagnostic which will gradually lead to healing as it cures people from the cure itself. They have tried to probe into and deconstruct the seemingly natural attachment of the economy of our libido (flows of desire) to the political economy (flows of interest and capital). To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke. People are sick, sick of their own selves from which now healing is required. But Guattari and Deleuze’s Anti-oedipus is not the superman of Nietzsche rather it calls for actions and passions of a collective nature. Desire, according to them, becomes destructive only because it is always in a state of repression.

In the book, the writers draw the analogy between human life and machines. Human organs are just like machines which constantly give output in return for some input. Similarly, everything around us and inside us is machines altogether. In this context, every process around us is equivalent to production in one way or the other. For instance, man and nature are not separate parts of a process rather they are one and essential identity. Desiring machines are ruled by binary set of laws—one machine coupled with another for complete functioning, fuelled by desire and always in a state of free flux or flow.

Deleuze and Guattari have developed their notion of ‘Schizoanalysis’ in this book. This approach articulated a new mode of postmodern self organized around concepts of plural and multiple identities and decentred or displaced consciousness. They start from the basis that desire is itself revolutionary and radically subversive. Hence, society has needed to repress and control desire, to ‘territorialize’ it within demarcated areas and delimited structures: ‘To code desire is the business of the socius’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 139). In this view, the socius or the communal structure within which we live is a repressive system or regime: it organizes social harmony not through enabling collective action to result from rational debate, but by preventing individual and collective desires from being allowed their full potential.

The book gives a historical analysis of the ways in which desire is channeled and controlled by different social regimes. Deleuze and Guattari theorize desire as a dynamic machine which constantly produces new connections and productions. Perceiving the libido as a still fluid and as a flow prior to representation and production, ‘schizoanalysis’ opposes all those discourses and mechanisms which block the flow of the unconscious. For example, the family structure is one place where individual desires are controlled or ‘dammed up’, as certain social structures are produced and reproduced through parental roles, sibling rivalries and the imposition of gendered identities. Contrary to conventional psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari understand desire to be essential, and argue that it does not signify a lack, a subject in search of a lost object. Bodies are constructed as ‘desiring machines’ because machines arrange and connect flows. This ‘deterritorialized’ body is called ‘the-body-without-organs’—a body without organization, a body that casts off its socially articulated, regularized and subjectified circumstances. In this respect, schizoanalysis has various tasks that can be considered postmodern:

1. It attempts a decentered and fragmented analysis of the unconscious, aiming to recapture pre-linguistic experiences, unconscious investments of sounds and sights which liberate desire.
2. It seeks to release the libidinal flow and to create ‘new’ desiring subjects.
3. Contrary to the processes of psychoanalysis, which neuroticises the subject, it‘re-eroticizes’ the body by freeing it for libidinal pursuits.

Now if the book is looked at with reference to its separate parts, it could be explained this way. The western tradition of philosophy conceives of desire as something that has a negative aspect.  From Plato to Freud, and most recently Lacan, desire is thought to be something that is reaching toward the acquisition of something.  At the discussion of desire and lack, Deleuze and Guattari import some of Nietzsche’s philosophy.  For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not lack anything; rather desire is a machine and the object of desire (what Lacan would call Objet a) is yet another machine.  The circuits these desiring machines create are what Deleuze and Guattari call Desiring-Production.  Desiring-Production takes the place of Freud’s unconscious.  Desiring-production is responsible for the production of reality and in turn social forces and relations: “…the truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.” (38)

The second part of Anti-Oedipus is a critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex.  This portion of Anti-Oedipus makes the case that the Oedipal complex is a colonizing force.  The Oedipal framework colonizes and represses the desires of the members of society.  Even more, Capitalism has an integral role in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory.  Schizophrenia exists alongside capitalism and resists the neuroses that capitalism uses to maintain a repressive society.

The third piece of Anti-Oedipus is the reframing of Marx’s historical materialism in the language of materialist psychiatry.  Deleuze and Guattari trace history using through the discussion of territorialization and deterritorialization.  Since the production of reality and society takes place through desiring-production, history cannot be understood as a dialectics of class struggle, but rather through the flows and blockages of desire.  Deleuze and Guattari trace these flows from the beginning of the socius, which is also the beginning of desiring-production, to the barbarian machines, the despotic machine, the urstaat, and the civilized capitalist machine.

The concluding piece of Anti-Oedipus is an introduction to Schizoanalysis.  Schizoanalysis is uncovering the ways “the subject who desires can be made to desire its own repression” (105). The schizoanalytic process is discovering the subject in nature, rather than a psychiatrist’s office, discovering the formation and functions of the subjects as desiring machines.  “The Schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional” (322). Schizoanalysis deals with libidinal energies in a way that is outside of the Oedipal matrix.

“The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused”. (293)

More concretely, the schizoanalytic practice is “…(1) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify as a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, and knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency” (321).  Deterritorialization is a process with no end, schizoanalysis is deterritorialization toward “An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, and the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another” (322).

In a nutshell, one can view Deleuze and Guattari engaged with dogmas that make their approach postmodern in the first place. These dogmas or beliefs could be framed under the following statements. First for all, we can infer an institutional appropriation, taming and neutralizing of desire. Secondly, there is a defense or support for the liberation of the body and desire. Thirdly, there is also a pursuit of a ‘schizoanalytic’ destruction of the ego and the superego in the favor of a dynamic unconscious. Lastly, there is a rejection of the modernist notion of the unified, rational and expressive subject and the substitution of a postmodern subject which is decentred, liberated from fixed identities, and free to become dispersed and multiple.