Félix Guattari: The Anti-Œdipus Papers (2006)

“‘The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory,’ wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and ‘constructivist’ vision of capitalism: ‘Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down.’

Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that ‘the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together.’ They added, ‘Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd.’ These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded ‘conceptor,’ arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde (created in the 1950s).”

Edited by Stéphane Nadaud
Translated by Kélina Gotman
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2006
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350318, 9781584350316
437 pages

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PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (2009)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text focuses on the intersection between Deleuzian philosophy and the arts. Deleuze combined exceptionally rigorous insight into important Western philosophers with an extraordinary sensitivity to literature, music, painting and film. He was intensely interested in the medium of thought, which is by no means limited to philosophy alone: it also takes place in science, mathematics, literature, painting and cinema, to name just some of the genres of thought to which Deleuze most often refers. His own thinking emerged almost as often in conversation with artists and literary writers as in engagement with other philosophers, and his philosophy cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of his engagement with the arts.

This significant and timely collection of essays from an international team of leading Deleuze scholars brings together interpretations and commentaries from Deleuzian perspectives on subjects such as literature, painting, music and film.

The book represents diverse modes of engagement with Deleuze’s philosophical concepts and problems and demonstrates the central role the arts play in any understanding of his philosophical ideas.

Editors Eugene W. Holland, Daniel Warren Smith, Charles J. Stivale
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009
ISBN 0826439233, 9780826439239
276 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-1-24)

Ann Weinstone: Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism (2004)

“An ethically-based approach to human relations for the media age.

Otherness, alterity, the alien—over the course of the past fifty years many of us have based our hopes for more ethical relationships on concepts of difference. Combining philosophy, literary criticism, fiction, autobiography, and real and imagined correspondence, Ann Weinstone proposes that only when we stop ordering the other to be other—whether technological, animal, or simply inanimate—will we truly become posthuman.

Posthumanism has thus far focused nearly exclusively on human–technology relations. Avatar Bodies develops a posthumanist vocabulary for human-to-human relationships that turns our capacities for devotion, personality, and pleasure. Drawing on both the philosophies and practices of Indian Tantra, Weinstone argues for the impossibility of absolute otherness; we are all avatar bodies, consisting of undecidably shared gestures, skills, memories, sensations, beliefs, and affects.

Weinstone calls her book a “tantra”—by which she means a set of instructions for practices aimed at sensitizing the reader to the inherent permeability of self to other, self to world. This tantra for posthumanism elaborates devotional gestures that will expose us to more unfettered contacts and the transformative touch.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Electronic Mediations series, 10
ISBN 0816641463, 9780816641468
227 pages

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PDF (updated on 2018-6-6)