Is Anti-Oedipus Really a Critique of Psychoanalysis?

AXEL CHERNIAVSKY

Comparative and Continental Philosophy

Francis & Taylor

Año: 2021

1757-0638

"We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks." In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However, critique, in philosophy, is used in certain technical and precise senses. Almost half a century later, it may be possible to determine whether Anti-Oedipus is indeed a critique of psychoanalysis and, if it is, just what kind of critique it is. We will try to demonstrate that, technically, it is a delimitation of a Kantian sort, an evaluation of a Nietzschean kind, and, finally, a divergence in terms of Deleuze himself. Thanks to these precisions we will find out that the target of Anti-Oedipus is not psychoanalysis in general but respectively what Deleuze and Guattari call "the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious," a conception of life presupposed by psychoanalysis, and a configuration of desire that explains both psychoanalysis and the system in which it functions.