Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Paper Summary:

When Gilles Deleuze threw himself out of a Paris window in 1995, there ended a collaboration between him and psychologist Felix Guattari in literary criticism, philosophy and social theory whose influence on methods of critical thinking only seems to have grown and become more solid since then. The paper traces the joint writings of Guattari and Deleuze who were part of a circle of French intellectuals, that in the 1950s and afterward developed interdisciplinary critical approaches to literature, art, society and theory. The paper focuses on an analysis of the two's most famous work, "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", which illustrates the effect their writing had on the social theory field.

From the Paper:

"Anti-Oedipus introduces a number of terms that are used throughout the Deleuze and Guattari canon--desire, territoriality, reterritorialization, deterritorialization, schizoanalysis, etc. In various ways, these terms seem meant to help organize critique. But in his preface to the book Foucault (xii) cautions against considering it "the new theoretical reference...in our age of dispersion and specialization." The fact of critique is far more important than theory, though if Deleuze and Guattari have an overarching concern, it is the "strategic adversary [of] fascism" (Foucault xiii). Thus the notion of desire for Deleuze and Guattari tends to refer to the whole range of anxieties, hopes, fears, and dislocations commonly associated with the mentally ill but in fact experienced by most people as day-to-day life, as well as by the social constructions, or social productions, in which they operate, with the constructions being more successful in negotiating rewards."

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