It's ridiculous to be a Maoist in Bécon-les-Bruyères, on a Sunday morning, at the train station, in front of a flower shop, selling a leftist newspaper announcing "victory at gun's point" (as Mao says). (p. 176)

If you like the work of Deleuze and Guattari, or that of Félix Guattari on his own, this is a fun and moving book to read, or at least to explore, as it is composed of various fragments, sometimes verging on Burroughsian cut-ups:

The devil has no name and no shape . . . the sign of the cross is the infinitive of deterritorialization . . . noise and the dog's fury, before speech. The dog is captured . . . actually it's the 'demonic' [the translation has 'demoniacal'-CW] caught in a trap . . .

or

the hellish differential calculus deterritorializing machine freaking [Leibniz] out . . .

and sometimes closer to tongue-in-cheek social commentary, as when Guattari quotes — of all people — the designer Paco Rabanne (who was later to predict the imminent end of the world on December 31^st, 2000) sounding suspiciously Deleuzo-Guattarian: "commodities [corrected from 'merchandise'-CW] must come after the desire for women, not before it!" In moments like these — from the Maoist in a sleepy Paris suburb to the sign of the cross and the dog, or Paco Rabanne as theorist of the body without organs, Guattari has an evocative power, a genius for seizing the absolute in an instant, like Gombrowicz or Fitzgerald.

As such, this collection is definitely more alive or at least intriguing than the last, 'grave-robbing' collections of Deleuze such as The Desert Island (one should remember that Deleuze had stated quite explicitly that Critique et clinique, translated as Essays Critical and Clinical, contained the final selection of his unpublished work which he considered to be of interest), or Guattari collections published by Semiotext[e] such as Soft Subversions — both of which give us second-rate versions of ideas and analyses we already know from Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. To be fair, these posthumous collections do contain some curious finds, like Guattari's odd untitled rêverie, "I am God most of the time," the title of which derives from the beginning of the text: "I am God most of the time, when I don't have a headache, when I'm not slipping down some Satanic slope…Then I understand quite well that we might settle ourselves down in God or set him on a pedestal" (translated by this reviewer in Chaosophy [New York: Semiotext[e], 1995]).

The papers collected here display that kind of charm at times: it is like opening a drawer in your grandfather's study (if your grandfather was Félix Guattari, which is less implausible than it sounds: he had several children, who reached adulthood by the early- to mid-1980s) and finding a secret diary. A diary kept by someone who was busy co-authoring Anti-Oedipus, and which contains lots of bits and pieces which made it into that book — but also some that, as far as I can tell, did not: "What is a black man like Charlie Parker, 'the bird' desiring when he can fuck as many white girls as he wants and still look down on them?" or "Spinoza's politics were those of castration"; further cryptic moments include footnotes that combine Austin on linguistic performance with Nietzsche on glory and Mao on power …

If you were hoping for an easy way into Deleuze-Guattari's thought, or for another work by Guattari (why haven't Psychanalyse et transversalité or L'inconscient machinique been translated?), however, this book will not serve your purpose. If your goal is to find out more about Guattari in a straightforward way, Gary Genosko's collection The Guattari Reader (London: Blackwell, 1996) is the place to look. That being established — i.e., that The Anti-Oedipus Papers is quirky, touching and occasionally very revealing, but not of general interest to any but seasoned Guattarophiles or Deleuzo-Guattarophiles — what exactly is in this book?

Most notably, the 'matrix' for one of the most unusual intellectual collaborations in the 20^th century: Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze once described this collaboration, disarmingly, as follows: "If I told [Guattari] that at the centre of the earth there was redcurrant jelly, his role would be to find what might support such an idea (if it is an idea!). It's the opposite of a series or exchange of opinions" (interview with Robert Maggiori, Libération, September 12^th 1991; online at http://onethousandblogsbyduffyandbutler.blogspot.com/2005/03/deleuzeguattari-nous-deux.html ). And when Deleuze was asked in the same interview to describe the method of their collaboration, he answered:  "It's a secret." So the texts in this volume shed light for the first time on the nature, not just of the 'creative process' of the two-headed monster that produced Anti-Oedipus, but of the invention of a collective language. Here is Deleuze describing that process in a more light-hearted way: "together, Félix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler" ("Letter to Kuniichi Uno," quoted in the Introduction).

However, if we cease to fetishize the nomadic, rhizomatic, machinic greatness of these thinkers, and consider the 'human' dimension, one learns from the Anti-Oedipus Papers that Guattari also suffered, understandably, from the popular belief that Deleuze was the 'real' author of the book. At one point he comments on drafts that Deleuze has sent back heavily rewritten: "it's true that the mastery and elegance in all this are so much your own! Unmistakably!" He worries about where he stands in between Lacan and Deleuze (surprisingly, given the published work); he blurts out that "it's hard, being strapped onto Gilles!", he wants the freedom to be stupid, to indulge in logorrhea. Conversely, he also suspects that some of his dreams express an underlying jealousy towards Fanny Deleuze, Gilles' wife — an implicit wish she might die so he could be even closer to Deleuze.

It may be comforting to some of us that Guattari found Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge tough going; it's surely amusing to hear that he would dream of Lacan and then curse himself for doing so ("Another dream about Lacan! this is insane!"). Of course, Guattari quickly moves from this to his trademark conceptual approach ("dreams are fundamentally . . . right-wing Eros activities"). He also writes long descriptions of life at the La Borde Clinic to Deleuze, including confidential patient information at times, which occasionally lapses into a self-mocking version of a Gallic persona (patient X is attracted to me, but it's OK, she's not my style, she's too fat . . .). One can also find here his account of a dream that Guattarologists have heard of before: the Dream of the Lady in Black, which is a dream about death and literally arming oneself against it …

Scholars or specialists of Deleuze and Guattari will be curious to read the section entitled by the editor "Thoughts in no particular order," which contains Guattari's notes on Deleuze's concepts of Aiôn and Chronos; predictably, perhaps, he reinterprets these temporal categories in psychoanalytic and workerist terms. Current participants in the Lenin Renaissance (cf. Negri, ´i¸ek) will enjoy passages like this one: "we could say that as a rule, there was never any question of desire in the debates internal to the Socialist movement. And yet, all the more or less marginal discussions on organization were about desire. That's why Leninism came so close to liberating the desire of the masses!"

Indeed, politically there are some strange moments here: Guattari seems to be calling for hard, tough militantism ("the Tupamaros, the Weathermen") rather than the "softness" of May 68. If that were true, then we could point to his writings of the 1980s, notably those collected in Molecular Revolution. Psychiatry and Politics (New York: Penguin, 1984), for a critique of the machismo and bureaucratic centralization of such movements, including the Red Brigades. But then a few pages later he seems to reverse course, speaking of the heroic tale of Castro's first attempted coup d'état, with the arrival in the yacht Gramma, as "stupid shit" (the original is not available, but I suspect one could do better in translation). I confess there are elements that don't make any sense to me, and at times I wonder if this is because of the translation (as noted below); the original texts remain unpublished. This is the case with the recurring expression "power sign," for instance. But sometimes it is Guattari himself, sounding Orphic just like Lacan before him and Badiou after him: "heterosexuality is fundamentally homosexual."

These notes and papers reveal a man with a "diagrammatic" rather than a "conceptual" mind, who was perhaps a bit too caught up in the Structuralist / post-Structuralist enthusiasm for schemas, formulas, charts and categories; they do not, as the promotional materials of the MIT Press claim, "reveal Guattari as a mathematically-minded 'conceptor'," at least not in any useful or productive sense. That description does apply to Deleuze's friend Gilles Châtelet, whose book Les enjeux du mobile was translated as Figuring space: philosophy, mathematics, and physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).

The introduction to The Anti-Oedipus Papers by Stéphane Nadaud is excellent: fresh, insightful and well-written. Unfortunately the translation of the book as a whole is quite poor. Sometimes it is merely annoying, as with the usage of post-adolescent American spoken language ("thingies," "I dig it"); sometimes it reveals a real lack of understanding of technical terms (Duchamp's "machines célibataires" are rendered as "single machines" rather than "bachelor machines"; the key psychoanalytic concept transfer is not a 'transfer' like on the subway, but "transference"; Russell is not a theorist of "class" but of "sets," etc.). This does not prevent various moments in The Anti-Oedipus Papers from being moving or illuminating. Or some of its contents from being useful (there is a nice glossary of key terms which Guattari wrote in the 1980s). But for these reasons and those given above, a book it is not. As Guattari writes, "Desire is disparate at heart."

Note: this book was originally published as Ecrits pour L'Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Lignes / Leo Scheer, 2005).

© 2007 Charles T. Wolfe

 

Charles T. Wolfe, PhD, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney

Categories: Philosophical