ABSTRACT
In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and political activist Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, a full-scale attack on the doctrines of psychoanalysis, particularly as formulated by Jacques Lacan and his followers, which had become so pervasive in Parisian intellectual circles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Anti-Oedipus many saw a philosophical expression of the spirit of the May 1968 student revolt – some, because the book offered an exuberant and iconoclastic synthesis of Marxist and Freudian motifs within an anti-structural, Nietzschean thematics of liberation; others, because it seemed to enunciate an irresponsible and anarchistic politics of libidinal self-indulgence. The book enjoyed a considerable success, serving for a time as the focus of widespread and animated debate, and it remains the bestknown work by Deleuze or by Guattari. Its popularity, no doubt, stemmed in large part from the timeliness of its irreverent radicalism and its critique of psychoanalysis. Yet Anti-Oedipus was neither a spontaneous effusion of May-’68 irrationalism nor an opportunistic exploitation of the cult of Lacanism. Rather, it was the result of nearly twenty years of investigation in philosophy, psychoanalysis and political theory on the part of its authors; hence, it was as much a response to intellectual currents spanning decades as a reaction to the May insurrection.
