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As an introduction to schizo-analysis: responding to ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (unfinished notes)
Jan 1st, 2007 by notebooker

There is a background to every text, a life, a thought, an obsession, a spilt cup of coffee on papers badly placed on a temporary desk. Good sex, drunken rants, flirtatious concepts, all of these form part of that which will never be said within the text, only ever sensed, occasionally and differently, by the readers and writers who follow the words along the page. This, maybe, is why people want to read biography, interviews, trivial detritus from the lifetimes of another, the writer, the author, the proper name appended to the title. When the text is one within philosophy there’s this sense that somehow knowing about the brandishing of a poker or the peculiar arrangement of garters, socks and toilet habits, somehow knowing this will help know the concepts. This betrays a latent humanism, most often, where we want to know what the author thinks, we want to discern accurately, so we think, the moments that occurred in someone elses’ mind and re-occur them in our own. There seems no reason to assume this humanistic notion of a transport of ideas from one mind to another as the central task of reading and interpreting a text. There seem many reasons to assume that a text is in fact nothing to do with an author to the extent that the act of reading occurs without any author and if the text works it works without an author other than the reader. Would it matter, say, that the images and ideas drawn from a book that had been read under one name suddenly found themselves shifted to another name? It might matter in terms of understanding the author but surely the point of reading is to understand the ideas and images not the author? Otherwise I would always be in a better position to understand an author by talking directly to them and not reading their work? The author really does seem somehow redundant, theoretically, since it is the ideas and images that we are interested by and in.

Despite this, those texts that occur on the margins of ‘real’ texts, authorised works, always seem to have a strange, uncanny necessity to them. This is no less the case than in ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ by Felix Guattari, a collection of strange and varied notes and jottings produced in the course of writing, jointly with Deleuze, the work ‘Anti-Oedipus’, the first volume of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. When I first acquired this text a few months ago I read through it quickly and briefly, finding it strange and impenetrable, dismissing it as a rather weak and perhaps idiotic collection put together more as part of an attempt at hagiographical recuperation than intelligent concept creation. Guattari is increasingly viewed as an aberrant force on Deleuze, the ‘wild’ infecting the ‘pure’, lunacy implicating itself into rigour. Zizek is no doubt the main location of such a view (in his ‘Organs without Bodies’) but it’s not isolated to him alone and the increasing interest in the central and more ‘classically philosophical’ work such as ‘Difference and Repetition’ also appears at times, justifiably or not, as the result of an attempt to subtly, perhaps even subconsciously, purge Deleuze of Guattari. In this context ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (henceforth AOP) might be thought as an attempt to regain the crucial duality or pluralistic-monism of the name ‘Deleuze-Guattari’. All this, however, would be to miss the point or purpose of the AOP. There is no hagiography here, nor any attempt to somehow provide evidence for the absolute necessity of the double name. Instead there is a kind of compassion.

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Current Mood: enthralled
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Reviews of Numerous Wonderful Books
Nov 19th, 2006 by notebooker

(This is a list produced by Alan Sondheim - not me - and something that he does maybe once or twice a year. I’ve known Alan online for a good few years now, in fact since I was first at University as an undergrad, and his eclectic and curious reading patterns are reflected in his strange and fascinating work as both a theorist and artist. He also simply offers leads and possible avenues of reserach that I simply couldn’t find anywhere else and as such is a fantastic connection to plug into. Numbers 2 and 3 in this list are probably top of my priorities to read…)

I haven’t done these in a while; I’m fairly behind schedule. But there
are so many exciting things, new and used, that I feel the need to
begin, even if the reviews are encapsulated.

1 Prevention of Railroad Accidents or Safety in Railroading, George
Bradshaw, 1912. This is a small semi-paperback, profusely illustrated.
There are sections on how to move explosives and warnings about not
climbing on the front of a locomotive while it’s moving towards you.
“Don’t try to open knuckles as cars are about to come together.” This
curious work opens a whole new world of course. Look for it!

2 The Book of Talismans, Amulets, and Zodaical Gems, Thomas and
Pavitt, 1914. This is a wonder; there are ten plates plus one colored
plate, covering gnosticism, Egypt, India, the Koran, and so forth. A
lengthly section deals with the mystic qualities of gems. I believe
this has been reprinted..

3 The Ochre Robe, an autobiography, Agehananda Bharati. This is a
troub- ling book by an Austrian who wrote the brilliant The Tantric
Tradition. Bharati was somewhat of a follower of Bose; his account
is oddly harsh, “no-nonsense,” and thereby wonderful. Bharati was
an expert, among other things, on Wittgenstein and the British
philosophical tradition; his use of language is precise. I can
recommend both of these books without hes- itation; The Tantric
Tradition for example has an important section on intentional
language. (1970-80)

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