Summary, Quotes, & Questions

In this chapter (Chapter Five) of Cold War Freud, Herzog (2016) historicizes the environment and aftermath of Anti-Oedipus, in and outside of psychoanalytic communities. The author highlights how this prominent book was “lifted” into philosophical theory and cut off from important psychoanalytic thinking. Ultimately, Herzog argues that the text should be considered a psychoanalytic text. “ For – and this is my contention – Anti-Oedipus needs to be understood also as a psychoanalytic text, not just an attack on psychoanalysis” (156).  Below I have included quotes that I found helpful for understanding both Herzog’s argument and the argument of Guattari and Deleuze: 156 - “Specifically in drawing on psychoanalytic concepts, the book reconceives how psyches and politics might be thought to interrelate.” 158 - “Ultimately, prime among the ideas put forward in Anti-Oedipus would be the notion of the unconscious as more of a ‘factory’ than a ‘theater’ – continually churning and producing rather than symbolically representing – and of a world in which human beings are best understood as ‘desiring-machines’ (machines désirantes). Or rather, more accurately, human beings are conceived as composed of multiple, endlessly shifting, connecting and disconnecting desiring-machines, which are in turn con- tinually connecting and disconnecting to all other life (both human and non-human), in flows interrupted and changed by stoppages, surges, and redirections.” 164 - “The contention put forward in Anti-Oedipus, then, was that desire was roiling continuously, in everyone, beyond and below all ideology. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari also noted – and here again they were building on Reich’s idea that people could be both rebellious and conformist – that roiling desire could, at any moment, go in either revolutionary- ‘schizophrenizing’ or fascistic-paranoid directions (or both at the same time.” 166 - “It was Klein, not Reich, who gave Deleuze and Guattari the kind of imagery they needed for making vivid the constant natural-cum- mechanical flux they thought best described daily life.” 176 - “But, as noted, the book was not just an assault on psychoanalysis. It was also a work of psychoanalysis.”Questions: Why was the psychoanalytic community at the time so threatened by Anti-Oedipus, instead of seeing the possibilities that it created? How can Anti-Oedipus be used to think through current American politics and culture?