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Analytics of Schizophrenia: A Deleuze-Guattarian Consideration of Buchner's Danton's Death and Weiss's MaratlSade MOHAMMAD KOWSAR A passing glance over Georg Buchner's Danton's DeathI and Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade2 would lure the eye's attention to shapes, images and colorations of a congeneric landscape. The French Revolution serves as the background for both plays, and the dramatization of the deaths of two exemplary figures of the period (Danton and Marat) reinforces, no doubt, the family resemblance between the two texts written so far apart in time (1835 and 1964 respectively). Both plays discuss the optimistic hopes of the early phase of the Revolution, record the ensuing climate ofTerror, and note with irony the return to despotic rule. Madness, integral to Weiss's conception (the murder of Marat is a reenactment performed by the inmates of an insane asylum during the Napoleonic era), is also present in the hypertrophied visions of the various characters in Danton's Death. The melancholic tropics and ecstatic domains conjured by the imaginations of Danton and his associates induce a haunted atmosphere which approximates the state of frenzy kindled by the Marquis de Sade and the mental patients of Charenton. Finally, it appears that Buchner and Weiss have authored texts that integrate themes of social revolution and madness with a third component, equally important, that is to say human sexuality. Erotic values inform the texts in question, not as an aspect of human activity equal to any other series of considerations, but as a fundamental ontic counterpoint. In addition, the forms of sexuality delineated in the plays are uncompromisingly extreme, highly profane and militantly transgressive. The itemization of the corresponding thematic concerns in the plays of Buchner and Weiss is not part of a general attempt to reduce the differences and complexities of the texts to some common denomination. Rather, the emphasized resemblances should be taken as a tentative point of convergence from which the analysis of the two works can depart. The following question introduces itself: what contemporary theory (from which a coherent set of critical and aesthetic principles may be gleaned) has actually gone farthest in establishing a viable link between the categories of social revolution, madness MOHAMMAD KOWSAR and sexuality, given that their confluence serves as our initial point of reference? To my mind, only the theories ofGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, published in their joint effort Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,3 can satisfactorily broach the complex issues raised by the plays of Buchner and Weiss. Accordingly, this essay attempts to be as much a faithful exposition of the working principles of Anti-Oedipus as a demonstration of those principles as practiced upon two dramatic texts. When Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus appeared in 1972, it soon became clear that here was a tome that did not shrink from taking to task psychoanalysis and the dominant critical theories derived from dialectical materialism, structural anthropology and linguistics. The decade that has passed since the publication of their book has not blunted the points of contention raised by the two highly informed and irreverent authors. Deleuze and Guattari are determined in their project to explode myths and sacred notions, as well as political philosophies (of both right and left), all the while intending with extreme urgency to supplant the reigning ideologies with the schizophrenic imagination. Their method, a species of sophisticated guerrilla warfare conducted on a literary level, they propose to call "schizoanalysis." The impressive rigor and polemic discipline with which Deleuze and Guattari conduct and develop their argument guard them against any easy charge of practicing romantic nihilism. It is clear from the outset that the authors are well versed in the languages of Marx and Freud: economic determinism grounds human activity in production, psychoanalysis in sexual desire; one predicts the inevitability ofrevolutionary change, the other charts the territory of unreason. Deleuze and Guattari, undaunted by the debt they owe to Marx and Freud, proceed to draw different conclusions. The authors of Anti-Oedipus support the primacy of function over meaning and interpretation; they suggest that a concern for how things work should replace the search for the meaning of things. To function is to obey...

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