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hushed's review
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
I finally know what it is to be a body without organs
ajmcwhinney's review against another edition
4.0
Overhated. Great critiques of conservative Freudianism. Really mind-bending and useful way of thinking about the interlining of labor and desire, as well as semiotics. Some of this has still flown over my head (and I don't necessarily agree with all of its political conclusions) but it's a great read nonetheless. More Marxists should read it. I will probably like this more than A Thousand Plateaus, based on the fact that so much of the really annoying and shitty "Deleuzian" scholarship loves that book and doesn't really seem to take Anti-Oedipus as seriously (probably because it's still at its core so Marxist).
casparb's review
5.0
Possibly the most important book I've read this year? It's been a long journey here. Familiarity with Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud all came in very useful here. I’d highly highly recommend prep reading at least a couple of these.
So it didn't disappoint. Does that mean it's true - or that I agree with it? Probably those questions don't even make sense. It's going to take a couple more reads to clarify, but I was pleased with how much I managed to comprehend. It was immensely satisfying finally understanding the two fearsome diagrams of which I have been aware for months. They're rather bizarre until one reads the text. Perhaps more bizarre then, but comprehensibly so. It's quite possible to spend an hour on 5 pages while reading this text. Indeed precisely that occurred more than once. AO is difficult. It gets less difficult, as D&G seem to believe in reiteration - things clarify as one recognises concepts as motifs. At least it's less dry than Difference & Repetition. Flows etc.
Anti-Oedipus then? Flows and territories. The schizoanalytic affirming what the psychoanalytic negates. Or something like that. Very sexy to play with deterritorialisation, to begin to understand it. The body without organs was different from what I'd expected. As a disjunctive, non-productive break in productive flows, it appeared more like a negative concept than had been expected. But it comes together.
I'm not entirely confident about applying the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework just yet - but something kept coming to mind in the second half of this book. I kept thinking about Candide. To my knowledge, Deleuze never mentions this book in his writings, but it seems so perfect? If the voyage is the schizoid activity, then Candide himself comes into place. It's tempting to think of that novel as a schizophrenic odyssey (complete with violent deterritorialisations, perhaps), though I wonder about the ending: in a sense, does Candide, in settling, accept the Oedipal? No longer is he a beast of disjunction, enacting the interruption of regulative flows. The economics of that text also make me wonder - D&G's analysis of capitalism as the constantly deterritorialising (and subsequently reterritorialising) structure was exhilarating. Capital as a deterritorialised abstraction of the money form makes me wonder w/r/t Candide about his ludicrous wealth in the second half. So - Candide, Ou la Schizophrénie?
There's a much-needed bash at the pacifying assertion from Marx: 'The tendency of the rate of profit is to fall'. I see Marxists of various stripes rhetorically cower behind this dictum. I think D&G have done wonderfully in crushing it as any kind of consolation.
I'm keen to read A Thousand Plateaus, but that won't be for a few months at least.
I also read Deleuze's short essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' a couple days ago. It's really good! I was very impressed. Would highly recommend it as an intro to his work, seeing as it's only ten pages or so. Helps to have read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but is by no means incomprehensible without. The Postscript is a ridiculously powerful essay - he's compressed an awful lot into a short space. It's also where the surfers seem to latch onto him.
A-O? Good.
So it didn't disappoint. Does that mean it's true - or that I agree with it? Probably those questions don't even make sense. It's going to take a couple more reads to clarify, but I was pleased with how much I managed to comprehend. It was immensely satisfying finally understanding the two fearsome diagrams of which I have been aware for months. They're rather bizarre until one reads the text. Perhaps more bizarre then, but comprehensibly so. It's quite possible to spend an hour on 5 pages while reading this text. Indeed precisely that occurred more than once. AO is difficult. It gets less difficult, as D&G seem to believe in reiteration - things clarify as one recognises concepts as motifs. At least it's less dry than Difference & Repetition. Flows etc.
Anti-Oedipus then? Flows and territories. The schizoanalytic affirming what the psychoanalytic negates. Or something like that. Very sexy to play with deterritorialisation, to begin to understand it. The body without organs was different from what I'd expected. As a disjunctive, non-productive break in productive flows, it appeared more like a negative concept than had been expected. But it comes together.
I'm not entirely confident about applying the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework just yet - but something kept coming to mind in the second half of this book. I kept thinking about Candide. To my knowledge, Deleuze never mentions this book in his writings, but it seems so perfect? If the voyage is the schizoid activity, then Candide himself comes into place. It's tempting to think of that novel as a schizophrenic odyssey (complete with violent deterritorialisations, perhaps), though I wonder about the ending: in a sense, does Candide, in settling, accept the Oedipal? No longer is he a beast of disjunction, enacting the interruption of regulative flows. The economics of that text also make me wonder - D&G's analysis of capitalism as the constantly deterritorialising (and subsequently reterritorialising) structure was exhilarating. Capital as a deterritorialised abstraction of the money form makes me wonder w/r/t Candide about his ludicrous wealth in the second half. So - Candide, Ou la Schizophrénie?
There's a much-needed bash at the pacifying assertion from Marx: 'The tendency of the rate of profit is to fall'. I see Marxists of various stripes rhetorically cower behind this dictum. I think D&G have done wonderfully in crushing it as any kind of consolation.
I'm keen to read A Thousand Plateaus, but that won't be for a few months at least.
I also read Deleuze's short essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' a couple days ago. It's really good! I was very impressed. Would highly recommend it as an intro to his work, seeing as it's only ten pages or so. Helps to have read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but is by no means incomprehensible without. The Postscript is a ridiculously powerful essay - he's compressed an awful lot into a short space. It's also where the surfers seem to latch onto him.
A-O? Good.
ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i'm coming away from this pretty sure... uh, well questioning, actually, that since desiring machines produce production, whether the form of desire can be altered. following what is given here i don't really know. what barely sustained my thin interest throughout reading this: sensing the stylistic ancestral traces of what would later proudly become the ad busters-sounding graffito on subsequent oscar grant "riots." it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that this was a book i read simply so i could let other people know i've read it. for at least four hundred pages the authors sustain a tone of irritation that would induce me to want to scream: "if freud bothers you so much, then stop reading him." i guess i have no idea how big a thing freud is in theory, because leo bersani (fucking prick) does the same thing. knowing that others who read theory dismiss this as gibberish also adds a kind of rock star appeal to these guys for me. a friend of mine said that he preferred pasolini's take on oedipus-- the two aren't mutually exclusive. besides it's occurred to me (and i've been just waiting to say this) that theory is just long-form poetry that forgets to not take itself seriously. what can you argue makes this any less legitimate than anything else. i fivestarred this because of its historical importance, and for feeling that i was witnessing the methodological roots of what would inspire the ideological destabilization of the west that i really dig in this heat and kathy acker.
jjbbq's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
3.0
I probably would have benefited from reading more of the prerequisites. But I just don’t care that much about Freud.