Alex Lee's Reviews > Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This is the third time I've read this book. This time I understand pretty much everything in it, from page to page, paragraph to paragraph. This is a hard book to read. It's not as "out there" as 1000 Plateaus, but at the same time, it is more foundational in that this book is essentially a structuralist text despite being written in an "experimental" fashion (essentially Deleuze and Guattari claim that with this text you will need nothing else).

There are 3 main theses from this text.

- The internal struggle of every society is to control the "surplus" energy (capital/linguistic direction). Oedipus/psychoanalysis is one form that has worked to do so, to mold individuals to fit a superstructure of capitalist consumer/production. In that sense, this book, as much as being a structuralist text, is also a rebellion against structuralism.
- Capitalism works as a new transcendental territory to overcode individual desires in service of the ruling economy.
- The way to analyze/uncover this deep impulse is to adopt schizoanalysis, to follow the flow of that overcoding as it works through social desiring-machines. This will reveal the core codes that form the overarching capitalist regime which psychoanalysis has worked to keep buried

All in all, despite the heavy language and the density of concepts this is fairly straight forward exposition (when compared to 1000 plateaus).

Despite my past inability to articulate these ideas this cleanly this text has been the mainstay of my aesthetic and critical approaches for decades. This adherence speaks tons about the force of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts and presentations, that they were able to let me realize in my own way the depth of their direction, so that I can begin to resolve the paradoxes that are formed in my own unconscious... because I didn't understand this book consciously until these past two months, even if I understood the basic idea -- that socially we are structured by overcoding propositions that are adopted as natural when in fact they were in service of very artificial production engines, engines which we become absorbed under and agents for.

This book is definitely worth owning and reading if you have not done so. I would give it 10 stars if I could.