Alfreien’s Reviews > Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis > Status Update

“The book itself, in other words, was designed to function as a kind of desiring-machine, to program or produce, as well as to model or comprehend, desire in schizophrenic form.”

“Hence a second reason to write from the perspective of schizophrenia, even though Anti-Oedipus textually embodies both opposing tendencies – paranoia in its inclusion of everything from cell biology to economics, from anthropology to avant-garde poetry, in what appears to be a single all-embracing system; schizophrenia in its ultimate subversion of such systematicity by a highly figurative style of discourse”

“Despite their psychological origins, the terms “paranoia” and “schizophrenia” for Deleuze and Guattari designate effects of the fundamental organizing principles and dynamics of capitalist society. ”

“And paranoia represents what is archaic in capitalism, the resuscitation of obsolete, or traditional, belief-centered modes of social organization, whereas schizophrenia designates capitalism’s positive potential: freedom, ingenuity, permanent revolution.”

“A powerful capitalist counter-tendency to schizophrenia exists: Deleuze and Guattari call it paranoia. If we understand schizophrenia to designate unlimited semiosis, a radically fluid and extemporaneous form of meaning, paranoia by contrast would designate an absolute system of belief where all meaning was permanently fixed and exhaustively defined by a supreme authority, figure-head, or god.”

“we could define schizophrenia as a form of “unlimited semiosis” – in the psyche as well as throughout society – that emerges when fixed meanings and beliefs are subverted by the cash nexus under capitalism. ”

“Schizoanalysis does not romanticize asylum inmates and their often excruciating conditions of existence; it construes schizophrenia in broad socio-historical rather than narrowly psychological terms, as the result of a generalized production of psychosis pervading capitalist society (a process no single psychiatric patient could possibly embody).”