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MLN 116.5 (2001) 1102-1105



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Book Review

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis


Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, xii +123 pages.

Eugene Holland's second book is an eloquent and rigorously argued complement to his first, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Holland describes it, the second book is intended to be "an introduction to reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, not . . . a substitute for it" (vii). It is one of three such books to appear in the last decade, including Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Brian Massumi's A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992). Whereas Hardt's book explores the relation of Deleuze's early work to Bergson and Spinoza, while Massumi's emphasizes the perspectives of the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, Holland's book distinguishes itself from these by attending to Anti-Oedipus's "materialist psychiatry" as the combined inheritance of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. If Holland instead chooses to focus exclusively on the materialist critique offered by Anti-Oedipus, this is because, as he insists, its "revolutionary enthusiasm . . . appears to be dampened if not silenced in A Thousand Plateaus" (ix).

The book is organized into four chapters. The first is an introduction that, assuming that Anti-Oedipus is a sort of machine, describes "what it can do and how it works" (3). The second is an analysis of the notion of "desiring-production" which situates this within an "internal" critique of Oedipus. This is followed by a third chapter which describes the "external" critique of Oedipus and its corresponding notion of "social-production." A fourth chapter concludes the book by examining potentially fruitful applications of schizoanalysis within areas of theoretical and political activism such as marxism, feminism and environmentalism. Throughout, Holland carefully details the relations between Deleuze and Guattari's book and its various theoretical predecessors, including (among others) Marcuse, Reich, Weber, Adorno, Lukács, Klein, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. The first chapter in particular is concerned to position Anti-Oedipus in a tradition of "transcendental" critique stemming originally from Kant, yet undergoing a materialist inflection by way of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to become finally a critique of "psychoanalytic metaphysics." As Marx's critique revolutionized Smith's and Ricardo's classical political economy by hitting upon abstract labor as an analytic category which would allow him to speak of capitalism's "autocritique" within a universal history, so, Holland argues, Deleuze and Guattari manage to abstract a notion of the Oedipus that allows them to explain psychoanalysis's autocritique within a universal history. According to Holland, this is made possible because they "translate desire and labor from their respective 'determinate systems of representation' (psychoanalysis and political economy) into the concepts of [End Page 1102] 'desiring-production' and 'social-production,' precisely in order to stress their common derivation from 'production in general and without distinction' as it appears under capitalism" (18). Thus, translation comes to occupy a crucial role within Holland's book, expressed most schematically in his various interpretations of the operations of "decoding" and "recoding" that result from capitalism's incessant work of "axiomatization."

The second and third chapters comprise the bulk Holland's analyses, explaining--in true Kantian fashion--the three "syntheses" of the unconscious, the "paralogisms" of psychoanalysis (the illegitimate uses of these three syntheses), and the social formations which roughly correspond to the historical development of Oedipus (savagery, despotism, and capitalism). The central themes explored here include notions of production and anti-production, the "body-without-organs" as a template for desiring-production, systems of (political and linguistic) representation and inscription, and the historically changing character of the "socius," together with the various investments of desire (social and psychic) that constitute it. While these chapters are strictly explicatory, the fourth and final chapter, entitled "Beyond Critique: Schizoanalysis and universal history," attempts to synthesize Deleuze...

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