This inaugural episode features a conversation about Chapter 1, Desiring Machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s major work, Anti-Oedipus. Rachel, B, and John tackled the thorny concepts of action and agency, subjectivity, machines, and desire, as well as the connection this reading has with practice(s) of everyday life. Your hosts did their very best to unpack the Marx-Freud doublet that preoccupied this chapter’s brilliant critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis.
We then feature part 1 of our wide-ranging interview with critical theorist/philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, and end by giving advice on setting up one’s dissertation committee and answering an age-old philosophical conundrum.
Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes.
Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music performed throughout the episode.
Links
- Overview of Anti-Oedipus at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- On desiring-production, from Oxford Reference
- Ian Buchanan, “Is Anti-Oedipus a May ’68 book?“
- Fun facts about Deleuze and Guattari from Critical-Theory.com
- Susan Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
- Agata Bielik-Robson’s homepage at University of Nottingham
“A painting by Richard Lindner, ‘Boy with Machine,’ shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical and social machine – which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does” (Anti-Oedipus, 7)
Always Already Podcast 
so glad to find this. thanks ❤
It’s been a few years since I read Anti-Oedipus, and I’m an autodidact (not by choice, but there it is), both caveats to apologize in advance if I’m over-stating the obvious or missing some nuance. Just wanted to chip in: As D&G extricate desire from the psychoanalytic condition of being predicated upon lack they also to rid desire of its moralizing shadow. This makes me think of a different parallel than the Affect/Desire question raised in your conversation (interesting points though), namely how Deleuze writes about the Nietzsche’s “Will To Power,” in that the Will To Power is imminent to force and only takes on its ethical character after it is expressed as either an active or reactive force. It seems to me that likewise the Oedipal regime is not denied but critiqued by D&G, insofar as Oedipal coordinates constitute a reactive (moralizing) containment that subjugates the social field to normative ends. Perhaps the movement of Schizoanalysis anticipates the Rhizome in that all of the points in the social field may be connected to other points, decentred (as you discussed), and capable of creative flight (deterritorialization), however, all the while, conversely, desiring production may also become Oedipalized. After all, and please do correct any point that I may have distorted, but isn’t one of the key impetuses of Anti-Oedipus (post ’68) this quandary of how it is that we may desire our own subjugation?
Thanks so much for the podcast! Looking forward to listening to more.