Thoughts on the Table of Contents of Anti-Oedipus

Ok friends, so given my general lack of acomplishment this week, I don’t really have a proper Delueze essay for you this week. I browsed the first several pages of the chapter I had planed to read this week, and it didn’t really work for me. The third major division (part?) of the book is titled “Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men” and basically covers the formation of Oedipal¹ structures on the social/cultural level. While this is important, this part of the text is hard to get through, of decreasing utility, and oblique.

I have to say that this is probably exactly the kind of project that psychoanalytical terms and frameworks are ill suited to. We can talk about normative ideas, and cultural organization really well without imposing the tangentially useful Analytic crap. There’s plenty of room and need for it, but right here, I really can’t imagine ever coming back to it. I keep stalling out on this section of the book, I think this should be a hint to me.

So this brought me back to the table of contents so that I can think of how to proceed. I do want to keep reading Deleuze, but I need to find something that works better. My first impulse is to go to DR (which is what Jared of SportiveThoughts Recommends), but I have half a mind to just skip 4 sections in AO and read 8. “The Urstaat,” and 10. “Capitalist Representation,” and then move on to the final part, which is “Introduction to Schizoanalysis.”

In an effort to give this post a little meaning, as a follow up to the list of reason why I thought AO was important/worthwhile, I’d like to present a list of possible applications/uses. Next week, I’ll have something more substantive.

• structural models (machines), are inherently incomplete and flawed. Deleuze and Guatteri’s discussion of this concept, can be helpful in exploring and explaining social practices which we may be tempted to assume as being somehow a priori, like memory, or gender.
• I think I’m going to, at some point, use Deleuze and Guatteri’s discussion of recording machines as part of a justification for studying memory. Same for the section that I quoted in Culture, Memory and Lanague.
• Once I find more of the nomadic subject/multipicity of subjectivity’s stuff, I think that would be very helpful to my cause.

I think that’s just the surface, but a start. Have a good weekend.

Cheers, tycho