Anti-Oedipus, first published in 1972, has provoked extreme and antithetical reactions, perhaps the most polarised and yet equally passionate in recent and contemporary French thought. Some have found it the source of a radical rethinking of politics beyond the Freudo-Marxist enclosure that still dominates aspects of contemporary theory, while others denounce it as the apex of a certain romantic ethos of ‘anything goes’, an apologia for desire, flux and becoming.
However, what is rarely acknowledged or thought through are the complex philosophical sources of the myriad arguments presented by the book, which are clearly indebted to thinkers as varied as Spinoza, Kant, Freud and Lacan. This course will trace these arguments of this book and these connections by focusing on two aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s project, as indicated by the
double subtitle given to it: capitalism and schizophrenia. In other words, these lectures will trace the dovetailing accounts of psychoanalysis and political philosophy that provide the work with its backbone.
Monday Introduction: a political philosophy of the unconscious (Jon Roffe)
Tuesday The critique of psychoanalysis (Graham Jones)
Wednesday The syntheses of desire and the politics of the unconscious (Graham Jones)
Thursday Capitalism and the State: Deleuze and Guattari’s account of society (Jon Roffe)
Friday Schizoanalysis: libidinal philosophy as political radicalism examined (GJ and JR)