We are confronted from the very start with the question of interpretation: if, indeed, there is nothing to interpret, nothing to uncover, then what is it that we are doing or that we can do while remaining connected to the relay that is Anti-Oedipus?
For those of us familiar with the rhetoric surrounding Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is quite familiar: the text is but a tool box; it offers itself as an opening onto new spaces of action, of thought, of thought as action.
However, and though we have supposedly learned our lessons well, we repeatedly find ourselves under the sway of one of two radically opposed tendencies.
The first is to trace theoretical genealogies leading the text back to such figures as Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, genealogies that highlight the ingenuity of the text’s authors, and, in so doing, subordinate the entire schema (texts, authors, and readers) to the hierarchy that we have come to recognise as the History of Ideas.
The second tendency veers in an anti-theoretical direction, fiercely denouncing the so-called earnestness of any attempt at understanding as ostensibly castrating since to understand is to supposedly excise the radical impetus, the laughter, and the momentum they generate.
The former tendency forces the text into that sphere of the public domain that is subjugated to the standards of clarity and authority. The text is a Nietzschean reordering of Marx and Freud. No, the text is a Nietzschean redemption of a Marxism polluted, crippled even, by the degeneration of the time’s Sino-Soviet socialism, a redemption that has abandoned any allegiance to the dominant Freudianism of the day. No, no, no; the text is actually an implicit engagement with and repudiation of Lacan through Freud; after all, it is a radical materialist psychiatry that remains the central concern here. The theories, and the interpretations, abound as they jostle for first place in that academic pantheon appropriately known as secondary literature.
The latter tendency forces the text into a private domain of so-called nomadic manipulations and appropriations, a domain where communication and collaboration are, unfortunately, rendered quasi-impossible.
One is stuck between, on the one hand, the “royal” Law that dictates how the text ought to be read and where best it might be placed in the Grand History of Thought and, on the other, the threat of a dis-integration into the realm of a crippled and crippling atomism.
It would be convenient at this point to map such tendencies onto the very processes that Deleuze and Guattari have diagnosed elsewhere, especially in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus, to argue, for instance, that the tension one experiences is none other than the one operating between the two limits of the royally totalizing and the nomadically dispersive, the very same tension through which history is said to unfold and action to emerge.
Though this strategy may prove to be quite fruitful, it cannot overcome its basic flaw of reducing our responses to the text, and perhaps even the text itself, to the status of yet another example of those dualities that have suffused the authors’ work: active/reactive, molecular/molar, minor/major. The flaw resides in the strategy’s progressivist revisionism, in what Guattari would reject as a “dominant grammaticality” (“Semiological Subjection”, 143) according to which the various parts are subordinated to the logic of the whole, its essence, and final outcome—be it meaning, cure, or profit.
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Guattari, Felix. “Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement” in The Guattari Reader. Ed Gary Genosko. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. 141-47.
