On Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

The destruction of the Oedipus complex: the title of a 1924 article by Freud.He argues that the Oedipus complex can be so annihilated by repression into the unconscious that no trace of it remains.An overwhelming triumph of the Superego that poses a problem for psychoanalysts.For others, it's a triumph against psychoanalysis: 'You see, it doesn't exist.'Since the last war Freud has regained his place in the world of ideas in France.Among the older generation, Merleau-Ponty rereads him and places him alongside Husserl, Descartes and Marx.Sartre, more reluctant, attempts a synthesis with Marx that makes his image of psychoanalysis resemble American culturalism.Lvi-Strauss declares that his masters are Marx and Freud.Ricoeur, adding Nietzsche, calls them the philosophers of suspicion and gives us his Freudian hermeneutics.A new generation arrives: Althusser, who adds a bit of Freud to his new Marx; Foucault, who posits the relationship between the two authors through the connections between madness and society, economy and language.But already Derrida objects to the hegemony of linguistic signification, logocentrism and theological discourse, substituting trace, difference and dissemination.Lyotard restores the rights of the figural in discourse.Philosophers shake Freud's right hand and Marx's left but feel caught in a vice.Gilles Deleuze, the most Nietzschean, pushes the philosophical counterattack the furthest.Not only does he reclaim the ground lost to the Freudo-Lacanian invasion, but he also battles on psychoanalysis's home turf: clinics (cf.his analysis of Sacher-Masoch).Better yet, he strikes at the

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