The history major in me greatly appreciated Michel Focault’s preface, especially when he states, “…the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” He makes a very interesting assertion with this statement, in suggesting that every single human being possesses a thread of fascism that runs through us unknowingly and unchecked, and it is the human desire for power that permits it to exist.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss ethics and “care so little for power that they have tried to neutralize the effects of power linked to their own discourse.” They breakdown the subtly human need for power and attempt to dissect this fascism that is within all of us. They attempt to discover what it takes for man to get past this need for power and the steps necessary to get there. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that once we neglect our egos, collective expressions are possible and probable. They formed a wholly new idea by rejecting former ideologies such as Freud, Nietzshe and Hegel. They combine various elements and new ideas in order to come to various conclusions such as the fact that to be “anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo.”

In the preface, I liked the part where he broke it down and basically summed up the key points of the book. These key points included not becoming obsessed wih power and to free yourself of negativity. I also liked that he described living as an art. I personally like Freud but I had no idea he felt so negatively about schizoprenics. He even stated that they have an undesirable resemblance” to philosophers.”They mistake words for things. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference.” I can see how he would come to such a conclusion but he makes being a philosopher sound like an awful thing. I liked the arguement that desire doesn’t lack the object, rather it lacks a fixed subject and that needs are derived from desire.From desire comes production and this production is within the realm of the real. Within this real everything is possible. So if we desire something we have the ability to see it as real, even if its only within our minds.

Also i think it ties into Sartre how he believes our life is dictated by fear and we don’t do things because of this. this states how you be yourself.

The schophrenic is technically free because he resists all forms of oppresive power like the Oedipus of Freud’s pschoanalysis. The schizophrenic’s unconscious is always productive and never lacking and free from desire based on all beliefs .

I really thought it was interesting how Foucault said that Anti-Oespidus must be read as an art. He said how important it was to figure out how to start change rather than worry why the change must happen. Even by the first few paragraphs I could tell that his writing could be applied to any time period, and especially should be considered today. I think it is interesting how he broke down the book into what he thought were the most important points, but most of all I thought it was interesting that these points could be used to make a manual for everyday life! I also enjoyed reading Deleuze and Guattary’s views on delirium and what makes a person act certain ways. I also liked how they thought the most sinful things were linked back to desire. All of these ideas we have discussed in class but these guys went to the extreme of defining it all.

"erotic art," for example. Informed bythe seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, andconnections, the analysis of the relationship of desire to reality and to thecapitalist "machine"

Could you think about the nothingness that characterizes our very being,according to Sartre, as DESIRE?

Eros in Greek means LOVE or DESIRE

Questions thatare less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed

Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary isfascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more of atactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism ofHitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire ofthe masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads andin our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, todesire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

How does one keep from being fascist?

How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, offascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in ourbehavior?

If I TELL YOU THAT MOST RELATIONSHIPS ARE ACTUALLY BASED ON A POWER GAME

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?Could you elaborate on this and give me examples?

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposi-tion, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidalhierarchiza-tion.• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law,limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long heldsacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what ispositive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities,mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive isnot sedentary but nomadic.• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, eventhough the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of*A seventeenth-century priest and Bishop of Geneva, known for his Introduction to the Devout

Life.PREFACExiildesire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) thatpossesses revolutionary force.• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; norpolitical action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Usepolitical practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplierof the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of theindividual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the productof power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multipli-cation and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not bethe organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant genera-tor of de-individualization.• Do not become enamored of power.

something essential is taking place, something ofextreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism,fromthe enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones thatconstitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.

Why do we need schizo-analysis?

The ego, however, is like daddy-mommy: the schizo has long since ceasedto believe in it. He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems,rather than immersed in them.