Information AboutAnti-oedipus |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ANTI-ŒDIPUS | |
| 1972 books | |
| anti-psychiatry | |
| philosophy books | |
| freudian psychology | |
| deleuze-guattari | |
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KEY CONCEPTS Desiring Machines & Social Production ian understanding. On the contrary, desire is a Productive force. The opposition to the notion of Lack is one of the main criticisms Deleuze and Guattari make both to Freud and Marxism . Like their contemporary, , which led to a necessary Dualism between desiring machines and social production, which had trapped Laing and Reich. They oppose an "inhumane molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary sexuality: ''"making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand."'' Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the connectivity of just ''male'' and ''female'' gender roles, but by the multi-gendered flows that a "hundred thousand" ''Desiring-Machines'' create within their connected universe. The "anti-" part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal Complex begins with that original model's articulation of society based on the Family triangle. Criticizing psychoanalysis "familialism", they want to show that the oedipal model of the family is a kind of organization ( Meme ) that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of Society . Instead of conceiving the "family" as a sphere contained by a larger "social" sphere, and giving a logical preeminence to the family triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be ''opened'' onto the social, as in Bergson 's conception of the ''Open'', and that underneath the pseudo-opposition between family (composed of Personal Subjects ) and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production. Furthermore, they argue that Schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself and capitalism keeps enforcing Neurosis as a way of maintaining Normality . It must be noted, however, that they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as Deterritorialization to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" (i.e. they never intended to romanticize "mental disorders"; instead, they show, as Foucault , that "psychiatric disorders" are always second to something else... maybe to the "absence d'oeuvre"?). Body Without Organs In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari begin to develop their concept of the ''BwO'' - Body Without Organs , their term for the changing social body of Desire . Since desire can take on as many forms as there are persons to implement it, it must seek new channels and different combinations to realize itself, forming a ''BwO'' for every instance. Desire is not limited to the affections of a Subject . In their later work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari eventually differentiate between three kinds of ''BwO'': cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty ''BwO'' is the ''BwO'' of '''Anti-Oedipus'''. This ''BwO'' is also described as "catatonic" because it is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty ''BwO'' is non-productive. The full ''BwO'' is the healthy ''BwO''; it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization. The cancerous ''BwO'' is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern. Deterritorialization Although (like most Deleuzo-Guattarian terms) Deterritorialization has a purposeful variance in meaning throughout their oeuvre, it can be roughly described as a move away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical context, which seeks to package things (concepts, objects, etc.) into discrete categorised units with singular coded 'meanings', towards a zone of multiplicity and flux, where meanings and operations flow freely between said things, resulting in a dynamic, constantly changing set of interconnected entities with fuzzy individual boundaries. To use an example given by the authors, the mouth was historically territorialized when its functions were conclusively defined as eating and talking. Partial deterritorialization occurred when the mouth learned and adapted birdsong through transgression of its imposed categorization as 'a human mouth' and subsequent sharing of meaning/operation with birds. Deterritorialization is closely related to Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts such as '' Lines Of Flight '', '' Destratification '' and ''the Body Without Organs /BwO'' (a term borrowed from Artaud ), and is sometimes defined in such a way as to be partly interchangeable with these terms (most specifically in the second part of Capitalism And Schizophrenia , A Thousand Plateaus ). Whether this partial interchangeability of the authors' terms is itself meant to serve as a highly abstract instantiation of deterritorialization remains unclear. Notably, the authors hypothesise that dramatic Reterritorialization often follows Relative deterritorialization, while Absolute deterritorialization is just that... absolute deterritorialization without any reterritorialization. ENDNOTES |
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