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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia () is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
In the book, Deleuze and Guattari developed the concepts and theories in schizoanalysis, a loose critical practice initiated from the standpoint of schizophrenia and psychosis as well as from the social progress that capitalism has spurred. They refer to psychoanalysis, economics, the creative arts, literature, anthropology and history in engagement with these concepts.Foucault (1977, 14). Contrary to contemporary French uses of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, they outlined a "Materialism psychiatry" modeled on the Unconscious mind regarded as an aggregate of productive processes of desire, incorporating their concept of desiring-production which interrelates desiring-machines and bodies without organs, and repurpose Karl Marx's historical materialism to detail their different organizations of social production, "recording surfaces", coding, territorialization and the act of "inscription". Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas of the will to power and eternal recurrence also have roles in how Deleuze and Guattari describe schizophrenia; the book extends from much of Deleuze's prior thinking in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense that utilized Nietzsche's ideas to explore a radical conception of becoming.
Deleuze and Guattari also draw on and criticize the philosophies and theories of: Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Charles Fourier, Charles Sanders Peirce, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Karl Jaspers, Lewis Mumford, Karl August Wittfogel, Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Louis Hjelmslev, Jacques Lacan, Gregory Bateson, Pierre Klossowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Monod, Louis Althusser, Victor Turner, Jean Oury, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Pierre Clastres.Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 423–427).
They additionally draw on authors and artists whose works demonstrate their concept of schizophrenia as "the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines",Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.4 such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Georg Büchner, Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Daniel Paul Schreber, Adolf Wölfli, Vaslav Nijinsky, Gérard de Nerval and J. M. W. Turner.
Thus, given the richness and diversity of the source material it draws upon and the grand task it sets out to accomplish, Anti-Oedipus can, as Michel Foucault suggests in the preface to the text, "best be read as an 'art, and it would be a "mistake to read it as the new theoretical reference" in philosophy.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, xli).
Anti-Oedipus became a sensation upon publication and was widely celebrated, creating shifts in contemporary philosophy. It is seen as a key text in the "micropolitics of desire", alongside Lyotard's Libidinal Economy. It has been credited with devastating Lacanianism due to its unorthodox criticism of the movement.
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors. "The truth is," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "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. ... Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 322–333). In the terms of classical Marxism, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural "base" of society, they argue, not an Ideology, subjective "superstructure."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114, 378). In failing to recognise this, Deleuze and Guattari argue, Wilhelm Reich fell short of the materialist psychiatry towards which he aimed and was unable to provide an adequate answer to his question "Why did the masses desire fascism?"
Unconscious mind libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious investments made according to the or ideological interests of the subject (individual or collective) who desires.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114, 322). Deleuze and Guattari qualify this distinction between unconscious desire and preconscious need or interest when they write: "It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment"; however, they go on to insist once again that the interests "are not identical with this investment" (1972, 379).
A form of social production and reproduction, along with its economic and financial mechanisms, its political formations, and so on, can be desired as such, in whole or in part, independently of the interests of the desiring-subject. It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal metaphor, that Adolf Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists. It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military–industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus complex, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 114–115).Schizoanalysis seeks to show how "in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression—whence the role of the Death drive in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere."Section 2.5 The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation, pp. 98, 105 Desire produces "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 31).
Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression and Oppression. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 373). When they insist that a social field may be invested by desire directly, they oppose Freud's concept of sublimation, which posits an inherent dualism between desiring-machines and social production: "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." This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Deleuze and Guattari develop a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and Freudo-Marxism (with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social). Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female , but instead posits a multiplicity of flows that a "hundred thousand" desiring-machines create within their connected universe; Deleuze and Guattari contrast this "non-human, molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary human sexuality: "making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand," they write, adding that "we always make love with worlds."Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 323, 325).
Furthermore, they argue that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itselfDeleuze and Guattari (1972, 34–35) and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. However, they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as deterritorialization to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" (i.e. they do not intend to romanticize "mental disorders"; instead, they show, like Foucault, that "psychiatric disorders" are always second to something else).
As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side!—never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement of social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm. ... notice of the dominant tone in the most respected associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs Stéphane, the state of fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the thought that someone might try to escape the Oedipal dragnet. Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests.Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel were two psychoanalysts from the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In November 1968 they disguised themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane and published L'univers Contestationnaire, in which they argued that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and proceeded to psychoanalyze them as having a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father.Jean-Michel Rabaté (2009) 68 + 1: Lacan's année érotique published in Parrhesia, Number 6 • 2009 pp. 28–45André Stéphane Bela, L'Univers Contestationnaire (Paris: Payot, 1969). Jacques Lacan regarded Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel's book with great disdain; while they were still disguised under the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that he was certain that neither author belonged to his school, as none would abase themselves to such low drivel.Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI D'un Autre à l'autre, 1968–9, p. 266 The IPa analysts responded with an accusation against the Lacan school of "intellectual terrorism." Gérard Mendel published La révolte contre le père (1968) and Pour décoloniser l'enfant (1971).
The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?"
To address this question, Deleuze and Guattari examine the relationships between social organisation, power, and desire, particularly in relation to the Sigmund Freud "Oedipus complex" and its Familialism mechanisms of subjectivation ("daddy-mommy-me"). They argue that the nuclear family is the most powerful agent of psychological repression, under which the desires of the child and the adolescent are repressed and perverted.Section II.7 Social Repression and Psychic repression, pp. 123–32Holland (1999) p. 57 Such psychological repression forms docile individuals that are easy targets for social repression.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 396). By using this powerful mechanism, the dominant class, "making cuts ( coupures) and segregations pass over into a social field", can ultimately control individuals or groups, ensuring general submission. This explains the contradiction phenomenon in which people "act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat".Anti-Oedipus, section 2.5 The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation, Desire and the infrastructure, p.104 Deleuze and Guattari's critique of these mechanisms seeks to promote a revolutionary liberation of desire:
If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence—desire, not left-wing holidays!—and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 126–127).
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression. The Oedipus complex arises from this double operation: "It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives."
Deterritorialization is closely related to Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts such as line 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). Deleuze and Guattari posit that dramatic reterritorialization often follows relative deterritorialization, while absolute deterritorialization is just that... absolute deterritorialization without any reterritorialization.
The psychiatrist David Cooper described Anti-Oedipus as "a magnificent vision of madness as a revolutionary force", crediting its authors with using "the psychoanalytic language and the discourse of Saussure (and his successors)" to pit "linguistics against itself in what is already proving to be an historic act of depassment." The critic Frederick Crews wrote that when Deleuze and Guattari "indicted Lacanian psychoanalysis as a capitalist disorder" and "pilloried analysts as the most sinister priest-manipulators of a psychotic society", their "demonstration was widely regarded as unanswerable" and "devastated the already shrinking Lacanian camp in Paris." The philosopher Douglas Kellner described Anti-Oedipus as its era's publishing sensation, and, along with Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974), a key text in "the micropolitics of desire." The psychoanalyst Joel Kovel wrote that Deleuze and Guattari provided a definitive challenge to the mystique of the family, but that they did so in the spirit of nihilism, commenting, "Immersion in their world of 'schizoculture' and desiring machines is enough to make a person yearn for the secure madness of the nuclear family."
Anthony Elliott described Anti-Oedipus as a "celebrated" work that "scandalized French psychoanalysis and generated heated dispute among intellectuals" and "offered a timely critique of psychoanalysis and Lacanianism at the time of its publication in France". However, he added that most commentators would now agree that "schizoanalysis" is fatally flawed, and that there are several major objections that can be made against Anti-Oedipus. In his view, even if "subjectivity may be usefully decentred and deconstructed", it is wrong to assume that "desire is naturally rebellious and subversive." He believed that Deleuze and Guattari see the individual as "no more than various organs, intensities and flows, rather than a complex, contradictory identity" and make false emancipatory claims for schizophrenia. He also argued that Deleuze and Guattari's work produces difficulties for the interpretation of contemporary culture, because of their "rejection of institutionality as such", which obscures the difference between liberal democracy and fascism and leaves Deleuze and Guattari with "little more than a romantic, idealized fantasy of the 'schizoid hero. He wrote that Anti-Oedipus follows a similar theoretical direction to Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, though he sees several significant differences between Deleuze and Guattari on the one hand and Lyotard on the other.
Some of Guattari's diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004).Guattari (2004). The philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani wrote that rather than having their confidence shaken by the "provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence" of Anti-Oedipus, the psychoanalytic profession felt that the debates raised by the book legitimated their discipline. Joshua Ramey wrote that while the passage into Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" is "fraught with danger and even pain ... the point of Anti-Oedipus is not to make glamorous that violence or that suffering. Rather, the point is to show that there is a viable level of Dinoysian sic experience." The philosopher Alan D. Schrift wrote in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2015) that Anti-Oedipus was "read as a major articulation of the philosophy of desire and a profound critique of psychoanalysis." (2025). 9781107643796, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107643796
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