XCI- (Re)Leituras - Anti-Oedipus, by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, comments by André Bandeira

This book, of 1972, should be called «Stupidity».It is about Psychoanalysis and Capitalism, and it states that the desire of consumption, in capitalism, makes out of us, «desire-machines». Consumerism would be so co-native to capitalism that we end up considering ourselves as bodies full of desire, without organs, longing for the desert, to fulfil our desire, as if we were a simple, formless, organ of it. The book, bigotely aims at making us aware of the hellish machinism of capitalism and, at the same time, liberate us from the constraints which hinder the plenishment of our desire. Taking into account that the book explores many authors (and artists too), it intends to substantiate its thesis by means of erudition, as if what the book contends for, was the quintessence of all that extensive, quoted Literature. But what they call «Desire» is so void as their «quintessential» erudition. They end up considering Freud reactionary, because he indulged to the necessity of Patriarchalism in society. Instead, they consider themselves the heirs of Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, out of which they extract a top-of-the-cream therapy, they call «Schizoanalysis». We know that some of the creators of nazism were the french self-styled heirs of medieval Catharism, and that Napoleon was the utmost model of Hitler. The fact that these demagogues began as left-wingers is completely irrelevant. So did Goebbels. As a matter of fact, there was something «schizo» in Nietzsche, but as Mancini once said, he told almost everything of almost any subject. And if Nietzsche was struggling with some schizofrenia, that could be the stuff of his work, but it certainly was not the result of it. Well, these two authors may be out of fashion but not the fashion itself, go ask Lady Gaga. A body conceived as «desire», which could dipense and receive pleasure by any edge, is very much in fashion. The authors, so eruditical they are, even found a name for an ancient cult to support this «possession», the one of Bephomet, a demon. So, they are very much up to date. Still, what they say is completely stupid, not because it is unclever, but because it is superbly clumsy. A body without organs, their «desire-machine», which gets rid of the others, to enjoy the plenty of desire, has implicitely to extend the «desert» around it, because at the end, it can get no satisfaction. In order to have a perfect schizofrenia, now you have one personality. Where is the other one? That would be the liberation of capitalism,if one should adopt this top-of-the-cream therapy. Disease and therapy are here deliberately confounded, as any charlatan would do. The second personality, it is their hate for a moderate satisfaction of our desires, and they worship the demon Bephomet, the lord of transformations,because they really do not want a Desire in quest for plenishment. The balance among conflicting satisfactions seems to be as ancient as Reason. What they really want, it is to spread the supreme unsatisfaction. If they prescribe the continuous transformation of one thing into another, what they actually want that is to destitute all of us of any identity or property, in order to fulfil their hatred. Thus, they'll begin to have some results, even if they are not therapeutic at all. The charlatans have taken over the stage.