'Anti-Oedipus' Confronts a Familiar People: On the Plasticity of the Celibate Machine

In "Anti-Oedipus," Deleuze and Guattari saw the difficulty of disentangling the question of Spinoza and, later, of Reich from the very limit of a system of representation by which they mean Oedipus. As "A Thousand Plateaus" would emphasize later, this limit brings out the question of the desire for democracy ('democracies are majorities'). It desires Oedipus. In "What Is Philosophy?", the limit question (Oedipus) gave way to the concept of a people to come. Fifty years since its publication, "Anti-Oedipus" remains a relevant text (apropos of its 'strategic adversary' identified by Foucault) against the background of the social pathology of neofascism, populist politics, and the rise of the alt-right and neoconservative movements in recent years. The paper tries to locate this inflexion point where the desire for democracy modulates into the bi-univocal plasticity of Oedipal desire whose dangers people already seem to know. They have unmasked Oedipus' double impasse and have escaped it. They no longer desire fascism; they desire fascists, neocons, and right-leaning mob rousers. Fifty years since its publication, "Anti-Oedipus" confronts a type of people who have learned to behave like the enemies of capitalism, too careful not to overload desire and destroy its bi-univocality, its great balancing act on the Body without organs. Incidentally, in 'Postscript on the Societies of Control,' Deleuze spoke about a people who know how to 'surf' replacing the 'older sports.' This applies to people who could become either schizoidal or regress to its more familiar inversion, the simulacra of Oedipus.