Anti-Oedipus

Introduction

Deleuze wrote the book with the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, who worked at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde; it appeared in 1972 as the first volume of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, followed by A Thousand Plateaus (1980). In place of psychoanalysis it proposes “schizoanalysis”, and draws on Marx, Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud, from whom it takes the “body without organs”. Capitalism decodes and “deterritorialises” flows of desire and money, then recaptures them through the family and the state. Foucault’s preface to the English translation (1977) called it an introduction to the non-fascist life. The book became a reference point for the generation after 1968.

Connections

Builds on

• Capital1867 · Karl Marx

Criticizes

• The Interpretation of Dreams1900 · Sigmund Freud
• Écrits1966 · Jacques Lacan

Taken up in

• A Thousand Plateaus1980 · Gilles Deleuze

More works by Gilles Deleuze

• 1962Nietzsche and Philosophy
• 1968Difference and Repetition
• 1980A Thousand Plateaus