Ok, I'm trying to read his Anti-Oedipus and am having a

>>9216262
Hows your background reading,
Do you have a working familiarity with Kant, Nietzsche Marx and Lacan?

>>9216282

Kant, Nietzsche and Marx, yes. Lacan, not so much.

He suddenly threw in the concept of "body without organs" and figures every reader got that.

>>9216301
Yeah I understand, that's specifically an extremely Lacanian inspired concept.
Anti-Oedipus is a direct response to Lacan and psychoanalysis in general so its assumed you have a good understanding of the field particularly his implications on the function of ideas and symbols.

>>9216315
Can you explain in relatively simple terms what the BwO is/means? Doesn't have to be super in-depth.

>>9216323
Honestly I only have a half grasp myself since I haven't worked through Deleuze yet so I won't give my dumbass interpretation

File: fernando-vicente-body-machine.jpg (247KB, 620x449px) Image search: [Google]

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>>9216334
sigh...back to my clumsy, uselessly organ-filled body i suppose

File: dogon egg.jpg (165KB, 628x936px) Image search: [Google]

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>>9216262
His writing constantly steals ideas from other disciplines to serve as models for his own line of thought. You don't have to be an expert in embryology to understand what he's talking about, the point is to be perpetually thinking on one thing in the mode or metaphor of something else

>>9216323
see pic related. before an embryo has developed, there is an undifferentiated substance which lacks any observable form but contains within its thresholds and various zones the genetic information necessary to grow organs from the amorphous mass of biological material. Deleuze essentially takes this as a model for his own secularised adaption of immanence.

>>9216262
If you haven't noticed that the book was co-authored with Guattari, the problem seems to lie with your reading comprehension rather than with the fact that the autors have another nationality than you.
You could perhaps try reading all the words rather than skipping some.

>>9216323
body without organs = body without organization

it's literally: be weird so THEY cant control you

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What's Anti-Oedipus about in non-obscure terms? Honest question here. Is it an attack on psychoanalysis or something?

>>9217544
It's a pretty obscure journalistic treatise to spite Lacan.

It REALLY shouldn't have become as popular as it has.
It's become a monster.
Pseuds all over the Anglo-American world flock to it.

>>9217554
I see. So it's only relevant within this subset of psychoanalytic tradition? Not a philosophical treatise?

>>9217567
It's use was to provoke Lacan to move away from his Oedipal theory of the symbolic order (aka. social law), to his late psychical drive theory.

>>9216323
The expression comes from schizophrenic poet Antonin Artaud and he meant as a way to escape God's final judgment.
During the war in occupied France, Artaud had been committed to a psychiatric hospital where he received a lot of the most brutal "treatments" of the time, including electric shocks and brain dumbing drugs.
His idea was to build himself a body without organs in order to escape (see also the concept of line of flight) the enclosing structures of the established powers (that are essentially organised) while not falling into the trap of the inner world, ie remain active into the outer world and trace your line of flight in it.

tl;dr Disorganise your body and reorganise it in order to resist and to create.

>>9217657
'body' in this period of thought and among these authors, essentially means the psyche in Freud's sense.

>>9217681
Not only, see also deterritorialisation about the human hand. How compared to apes the human hand has ceased to be an organ and is still becoming something that eludes all definitions of an organ.

>>9217567
A thousand plateaus is their more definitive philosophical work, and it is much, much better than anti-oedipus. The exploration of the BwO in the latter is nowhere near as refined as its appearances in the former.

That said, Deleuze's standalone books are great too: difference and repetition is probably the closest he comes to elaborating a watertight metaphysical system, rather than just leaping from academic discipline to discipline with creative abandon.

>>9217846
Can I read ATP without reading first AO?

>>9217657
>Disorganise your body and reorganise it in order to resist and to create.
ie. basically an excuse for being a massive degenerate and getting aids like foucault

>>9217544
>Is it an attack on psychoanalysis or something?

I wouldn't call it an attack on psychoanalysis since he still operates very much within the framework of psychoanlysis. Its more so an attempt towards an interior revolution

>>9219333
of course. despite being the "sequel" to AO there really isn't a huge amount of continuity between the two besides the BwO, the notion of deterritorialisation and their general insistence on using science-y jargon. ATP manages to invent even more concepts than its predecessor and yet still manages to flesh out its arguments with greater clarity than the edgy anti-psychiatry agenda of AO.

>>9219354
>I have no imagination and can only understand things literally

>>9219663
This. Read the BwO chapter in ATP and get back to AO. Also read Letter to a Harsh Critic in Negotiations, it makes Deleuze a thousand times clearer. Also, Nietzsche and Philosophy is the basic Deleuze starting book, the interviews and articles from Desert Islands and Other Texts, Negotiations, Dialogues and Two Regimes of Madness help a lot!

>>9219873
Also webdeleuze.com for his courses, they are quite accessible since many of his students were literally curious people off the street, Deleuze was insanely popular.

>>9219873
>>9219881
Forgot to mention, those 4 compilations contain essays and interviews from the AO period which should be read before AO. They are also reprinted as The Anti-Oedipus Papers, but as far as I know all of them can be found in those 4 books I mentioned.

Last advice: believe Foucault when he says AO is a funny book or you'll end up putting it down and walking away, just as he says.