Oedipus Wrecks? or, Whatever Happened to Deleuze and Guattari? Rereading Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Of all the intellectual events that can be said to have arisen in France in the wake of those other, more socially disruptive, 'events' of May 1968, the reception accorded Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) remains among the most noteworthy. It is perhaps also tru...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRedirections in Critical Theory pp. 110 - 165
Main Author Heffernan, Nick
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 1994
Edition1
Subjects
Rigid Segmentarity
Guattari's Work
Uncle Vanya
Deterritorialized Flows
Molar Forms
Public Central Banks
Supple Segmentarity
Conferred
Relative Deterritorialization
Meta-language
Milton's God
Primitive Territorial Machine
Pcf
Keith Reader
Timeless
Refocused
Literary Machine
Guattari's Ideas
Guattari's Project
Smooth Space
War Machine
Molar Politics
Molecular Multiplicities
Modern Social Formation
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Summary:Of all the intellectual events that can be said to have arisen in France in the wake of those other, more socially disruptive, 'events' of May 1968, the reception accorded Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) remains among the most noteworthy. It is perhaps also true to say that the book itself, unlike the productions of other French theorists whose 'stardom' was either secured or heightened during the post-1968 intellectual fallout, has remained notably untouched by widespread academic appropriation and application, particularly by an Anglo-American readership. Whether this is because Deleuze and Guattari's ideas are especially resistant to such a process of recuperation and adaptation, or whether it is more a matter of the English-speaking academic world increasingly being over-faced with attractive French theoretical options is an open question. For now, though, it is interesting to note that British commentators in particular have found it difficult to account for the enormous 'popular' success and influence of Anti-Oedipus among the French intelligentsia of the early 1970s as anything other than a time-bound intellectual phenomenon. Keith Reader, in his study Intellectuals and the Left in France since 1968, judges that 'the interest of L'anti-Oedipe...resides in its reception and impact as much as in the ideas it elaborates', and goes on to account for 'the rapid obsolescence of much of it' as an effect of its being, in retrospect, 'little more than a rhetorical excursus'. 1
ISBN:0415077567
9780415077569
DOI:10.4324/9780203161562-2