Is Anti-Oedipus Really a Critique of Psychoanalysis?

": We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks." In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inComparative and continental philosophy Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 125 - 141
Main Author Cherniavsky, Axel
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 04.05.2021
Subjects
Critique
desire
evaluation
psychoanalysis
unconscious
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Summary:": We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks." In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However, critique, in philosophy, is used in certain technical and precise senses. We will try to demonstrate that, technically, Anti-Oedipus is a delimitation of a Kantian sort, an evaluation of a Nietzschean kind, and, finally, a divergence in terms of Deleuze himself. Thanks to this precision, we will find that the target of Anti-Oedipus is not psychoanalysis in general but what Deleuze and Guattari call, respectively, "the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious," a conception of life presupposed by psychoanalysis, and a configuration of desire that explains both psychoanalysis and the system in which it functions.
ISSN:1757-0638
1757-0646
DOI:10.1080/17570638.2021.1975767