psyched out - bookforum.com / in print
Deleuze and Guttari
These were important books in the 1950s and ’60s, and we continued to read them, if not without misgivings. The deinstitutionalization of schizophrenics was mainly an effect of Reagan-era budget cuts, rather than of the counterculture. Either way, it was hard to see liberation on the faces of the people begging for change on the capitalist sidewalk. And that, in turn, made it more difficult to know what to make of Deleuze and Guattari’s stated preference for “a schizophrenic out for a walk” over “a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” as the model of subjective experience.
The crazy-salad system building of Anti-Oedipus was intoxicating, as was that of its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), but the implications proved ambiguous and not a little troubling. Reich, at least, believed in the fusion of Marx and Freud as a step forward in the struggle for both collective and individual happiness. Even when he went mad, he saw himself as defending mankind from pollution by atomic bombs and sinister UFO technology. It seemed as if Deleuze and Guattari were picking up where he had left off, in prose that was playfully delirious, where Reich’s later ranting had been in terrible earnest. But it was hard to tell how their vision of human emancipation could be distinguished from a celebration of profound abjection.
In expressing these concerns, I date myself, no doubt. By the early 1990s, something changed in the context of Deleuze’s reception, at least in the United States. Until then, he had been known mostly by way of Foucault’s epochal logrolling (“perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzean”). But by the time of Deleuze’s death in 1995, the increasing pace of translation and interpretation had created its own well-regulated and institutionally disciplined plateau of meaning. Nobody would ever think to plug Anti-Oedipus into a “reading machine” cobbled together from leftover bits of New Left ideology. It had become a text inspiring patient exegesis, not worry.
At first reading, Francois Dosse’s joint biography of Deleuze and Guattari, subtitled Intersecting Lives, seems every bit a product of this change in discursive regime. It takes the apotheosis very much for granted. Dosse is the author of several volumes on the history of recent French theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences. His new book is, like them, conscientious to the point of exhaustion. None could wish it longer. His accounts of each stage of Deleuze and Guattari’s work (separately and in collaboration) are cogent and never indulge in the mimicry that can make commentary on poststructuralist thought such a exercise in terminal cuteness. It is, at times, curiously stolid. There are chapters describing how Deleuze and Guattari encountered various radical factions during the 1960s and ’70s, when traffic between the street and the seminar room was often heavy each way. But in Dosse’s telling, all ardor has cooled into so much historical data; he might as well be narrating disputes among the Saint-Simonians in the 1820s.
