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“The revolutionary unconscious investment is such that desire...[causes] flows capable of hallucinating history, of reanimating the races in delirium, of setting continents ablaze."

Rare gem among a lot of cringey stuff. For a book so focused on “affirmation” or “positive” flows with no negation they sure are “reactionary” against Lacan, Freud, Hegel, etc. I wish they would stop reacting against X

Drugs

This book is worth reading if nothing else just for the references: Klein next to Ninjinsky, Bateson next to Beckett, Lacan next to…etc.

Guattari’s tangents really take away from the substance. Deleuze is cringey but a good thinker overall, but Guattari attaches himself to concepts and theories (against others, dialectically) such that their whole argument falls apart. His critique of Oedipus is helpful in context, but it stops being a work of philosophy and instead becomes cultural criticism.

The Oedipus critique is definitely good thus far (as a stand-in for any symptomatic, normative reading that psychology in general reduces a patient to, not just psychoanalysis recoding life), but 1) it’s definitely Guattari heavy 2) it feels like it takes up too much time in the work.

Good insofar as based on Lacan, awful insofar as based on Nietzsche

A lot of discussions of credit, bank notes, gold, balance of payments hard to translate to the era of fiat

Finance ironically creates the conditions for socialism

So fucking good