Anti-Oedipus (French: L'anti-Oedipe) is a 1972 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Anti-Oedipus analyses the relationship of desire to reality and to capitalist society in particular; it addresses questions of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first outlines Deleuze and Guattari's "materialist psychiatry" and its modelling of the unconscious in its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of "desiring-production" (which inter-relates "desiring machines" and a "body without organs"). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis that focuses on its theory of the Oedipus complex. The third section re-writes Karl Marx's materialist account of the history of society's modes of production as a development through "primitive," "despotic," and "capitalist" societies and details their different organisations of production, "inscription" (which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange"), and consumption. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call "schizoanalysis."
The book draws on and criticises the ideas of many thinkers; in addition to Marx and Freud, these include Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jean Oury, Georges Bataille, Karl Jaspers, Louis Hjelmslev, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gregory Bateson, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Monod, Lewis Mumford, Victor Turner, Karl August Wittfogel, Charles Fourier, Immanuel Kant, and Baruch Spinoza. Deleuze and Guattari also draw on a wide range of creative writers and artists during the course of their argument; these include Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Georg Büchner, Samuel Butler, Franz Kafka, Jack Kerouac, Heinrich von Kleist, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, Daniel Paul Schreber, and J. M. W. Turner. Foremost among its influences, however, stands Friedrich Nietzsche—Anti-Oedipus may be considered a kind of sequel to The Antichrist.
Some of Guattari's diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004).
Read more about Anti-Oedipus: Schizoanalysis, Fascism, The Family, and The Desire For Oppression, Terminology Borrowed From Science, Influence