PANEL 5 - Anti-Oedipus Fifty Years On: «a book of ethics»
Convenors: António Baião and Beatriz de Almeida Rodrigues
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
In 1972, when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G) published the first volume of the diptych Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they sought to examine their political environment and intervene in a public space dominated by Marx and Freud. As Foucault stated, it was a question of finding an alternative view into a world watched by the «bureaucrats of the revolution», on the one hand, and by the «poor technicians of desire», on the other. Anti-Oedipus is not located in the interstice, but in its own territory. There it seeks to build an emancipated domain for philosophical thought, freed from the discursive ties where it had been kept captive. For this reason, criticism that Anti-Oedipus is an elliptical, hermetic, confusing, poetic exercise isn’t uncommon. But if Artaud or Beckett are summoned, it is not just to show off some highbrow cultural references and confuse the reader. Instead, it points to the ways in which the domains of aesthetics, ethics and politics overlap and interact with each other, revealing how intellectual work can produce spaces of resistance.
Anti-Oedipus generated such hermeneutic ambiguity that 50 years later its conceptual richness resonates in radically different currents of thought: «Body without organs» became a territory of ontological liberation quite appealing to transhuman theory; the destructive-constructive potential of the «desiring machines» reveals itself in the production of subjectivities for which the body is a cage and where the boundaries between «machine» and «human» become blurred and can be appropriated by posthumanist theory; the famous reference to Nietzsche's «accelerate the process», as a means to open up the possibility of a revolutionary event, was literally absorbed by the various contemporary accelerationisms; the manifestations of «microfascisms», a desire for self-repression, revealed how each subject became an adequate locus for power, which stems from the post-anarchist concerns on the reconfiguration of the state-form and the rehabilitation of «voluntary servitude».
The intention of this panel is to understand Anti-Oedipus as an eminently ethical text, as Foucault admitted in his famous introduction, and to understand how it remains relevant to contemporary political philosophy. The focus of this panel will be around the following topics:
- Microfascisms and libidinal power;
- The state-form: process or institutional apparatus?
- Identitarian implications of nomadism;
- Resistance to oedipalization as resistance to domination;
- Contemporary dialogues with D&G: post-anarchism, xenofeminism, post-humanism, accelerationism etc.
If you want to apply, please submit an abstract, of 400-500 words along with five keywords, of your paper prepared for peer review by 17 April 2022. We will respond by 28 April 2022. All proposals must be submitted online through our website using the Abstract submission Form (please, click “Submit Abstract” and fill the form).
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
In 1972, when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G) published the first volume of the diptych Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they sought to examine their political environment and intervene in a public space dominated by Marx and Freud. As Foucault stated, it was a question of finding an alternative view into a world watched by the «bureaucrats of the revolution», on the one hand, and by the «poor technicians of desire», on the other. Anti-Oedipus is not located in the interstice, but in its own territory. There it seeks to build an emancipated domain for philosophical thought, freed from the discursive ties where it had been kept captive. For this reason, criticism that Anti-Oedipus is an elliptical, hermetic, confusing, poetic exercise isn’t uncommon. But if Artaud or Beckett are summoned, it is not just to show off some highbrow cultural references and confuse the reader. Instead, it points to the ways in which the domains of aesthetics, ethics and politics overlap and interact with each other, revealing how intellectual work can produce spaces of resistance.
Anti-Oedipus generated such hermeneutic ambiguity that 50 years later its conceptual richness resonates in radically different currents of thought: «Body without organs» became a territory of ontological liberation quite appealing to transhuman theory; the destructive-constructive potential of the «desiring machines» reveals itself in the production of subjectivities for which the body is a cage and where the boundaries between «machine» and «human» become blurred and can be appropriated by posthumanist theory; the famous reference to Nietzsche's «accelerate the process», as a means to open up the possibility of a revolutionary event, was literally absorbed by the various contemporary accelerationisms; the manifestations of «microfascisms», a desire for self-repression, revealed how each subject became an adequate locus for power, which stems from the post-anarchist concerns on the reconfiguration of the state-form and the rehabilitation of «voluntary servitude».
The intention of this panel is to understand Anti-Oedipus as an eminently ethical text, as Foucault admitted in his famous introduction, and to understand how it remains relevant to contemporary political philosophy. The focus of this panel will be around the following topics:
- Microfascisms and libidinal power;
- The state-form: process or institutional apparatus?
- Identitarian implications of nomadism;
- Resistance to oedipalization as resistance to domination;
- Contemporary dialogues with D&G: post-anarchism, xenofeminism, post-humanism, accelerationism etc.
If you want to apply, please submit an abstract, of 400-500 words along with five keywords, of your paper prepared for peer review by 17 April 2022. We will respond by 28 April 2022. All proposals must be submitted online through our website using the Abstract submission Form (please, click “Submit Abstract” and fill the form).