Abstract 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."
An analysis of the way in which the Frankfurt School viewed the sociology of culture and a discussion of Jurgen Habermas' "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society."
Abstract This paper reviews the key texts of the Frankfurt School on the sociology of culture. It also discusses Jurgen Habermas' writings on the subject, particularly in "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society." Finally, it discusses the works of French critical theorists such as Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and examines the ways in which the Frankfurt School impacted their thought.
From the Paper "The French radical philosophers and sociologists built upon the foundation laid by the Frankfurt School in developing their own critique of culture. They extended the Frankfurt School theorists' attack on mass culture, liberal tolerance, and the decay of the public sphere to include such key areas a language, discourse, and the psyche. Thus, it can be said that the French theorists were much more interested in the ways in which culture played out on the semiotic or symbolic level. Debord's Society of the Spectacle articulated the fact that no true social interactions could take place, as all interactions are now mediated. Foucault introduced the notion of discourse as a tool for maintaining power-as-knowledge via specialization in the professional realm. In a similar vein, Bourdieu's analysis of language was meant to show us "our place" in the social sphere. He connected language with what he deemed "symbolic capital"; just as Foucault linked knowledge with currency, Bourdieu would assert that those in possession of "symbolic capital" were the same who possessed enough power to perform acts of "symbolic violence" against those with less symbolic capital. But the greatest destabilization would come from Deleuze and Guattari, who would reject the Freudian-Marxist axis upon which the Frankfurt School theory had developed altogether in favor of a whole new freedom that would be based on the libidinal flow of desire."
Abstract This paper attempts to explain the structuralists' themes which dominated the philosophical thinking in the Twentieth Century and influenced many postmodernists and post-structuralists. As examples, the writer makes reference to the works of Ferdinand Saussaaure, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuz. Post-Structuralism and Postmodernists basically argue that "truth" is relative, it says that language is rooted in culture and its practice, thus it always favors that particular culture. Meaning, on the other hand, is not objective but depends on the experience of the individual.
From the Paper "In the late 1960s the structuralist's movement, which was based in France, attempted to synthesize the ideas of Saussaaure, Freud and Marx. Thinkers like Claude Levi-Strauss and Lacan developed structuralism, which was against the existentialist doctrine, which claimed that man is what he makes himself. For these structuralists the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he /she has no control, but which could be understood and uncovered by using structuralists methods."
