Also: Review of François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (original) (raw)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus surely has some of the most remarkable opening lines of any work of philosophy or cultural critique. First published in France in 1972, just a few years after the demonstrations of May 1968, its stylish bravado immediately reminds us of the attitudes struck by student agitators, and proclaims that their radical energies persist. [. . .] All of which prompts the question as to the purpose of this biography. If the life does not illuminate the work, and if the life is of no particular intrinsic interest itself (as is especially the case of Deleuze, who seems mostly to have read, written, and taught, and to have occasionally tagged along to events with his buddy Guattari), then why bother? Dosse suggests that one of his aims is to underline Guattari’s contribution to the collaboration, but a slim article rather than a bloated book could have achieved the same end. Especially compared to the brio and bravado of Deleuze and Guattari’s own work, which gets to the point so quickly and so memorably (“What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines . . .”), it is a shame that their biography proceeds with so little drive or desire.

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