Inside out Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers
Daniel W. Smith

Félix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend. Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1981). Their collaboration, a kind of French version of Marx and Engels, sparked enormous interest and curiosity: what had led them to undertake their joint labour? How exactly did they work and write together? In 1972, Guattari had not yet written a book of his own; his first book, Psychoanalysis and Transversality, would be published shortly after Anti-Oedipus, with an introductory essay by Deleuze. Deleuze, by contrast, was already a well-known figure in French philosophy and the author of ten influential works, including the landmark Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and his magnum opus Difference and Repetition (1968). The nature of Guattari’s influence on Deleuze, in particular, is still the object of debate. Was Guattari a bad influence, transforming the good Deleuze-as-philosopher (the solo Deleuze – dry and even dull, but rigorous and scholarly) into the bad and crazy Deleuze-as-desiring machine (the Deleuze of the D&G writing machine – irreverent and flamboyant, but philosophically suspect)? Or was it Guattari who compelled an aloof or even ‘elitist’ Deleuze to go beyond his natural metaphysical tendencies and confront social and political issues directly? There remain, to this day, partisans on both sides of the issue.

The publication of Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers1 has opened up a new window on the Deleuze–Guattari collaboration. Editor Stéphane Nadaud – who provides a helpful introductory essay – has here gathered together the Guattari manuscripts that are archived at the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) at the Abbaye d’Ardenne. The papers were written between 1969 and 1972, addressed to Deleuze, and they constitute the basis for much of the material in Anti-Oedipus (a few of the papers were written after the publication of Anti-Oedipus in March of 1972, and anticipate A Thousand Plateaus). The manuscripts were never meant to be published in their own right, and no doubt some will question their significance, much as the value of Nietzsche’s vast Nachlass has been disputed. Authors are indeed assessed by their fruits, not their roots. Yet there is new and informative material here, at least for readers with the patience to toil through Guattari’s jottings. The papers, as one might expect, vary widely in style, content and tone, ranging from fairly developed theoretical proposals to scattered notes on diverse topics to early chapter outlines for A Thousand Plateaus. Several texts are little more than notes on books Guattari was reading, including Leroi-Gourhan’s Milieu et techniques, Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s Les Idéalitiés mathématiques, as well as Deleuze’s own book on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy, which Guattari had evidently not read prior to their collaboration. The final section of the book includes entries from a 1971–72 journal that Guattari was apparently encouraged to write at the suggestion of Deleuze and his wife Fanny. Not surprisingly, it includes the most personal and gossipy passages of the volume, recording the ups and downs of Guattari’s relations with his girlfriends, patients and colleagues.

Kélina Gotman is to be commended for having produced a fluid and readable translation, making these texts easily accessible to English-speaking readers. The volume, however, is not without its editorial quirks. Strangely, Nadaud decided not to publish the papers in their chronological order (though some texts are dated by Guattari himself), but instead has organized the texts around six thematic sections of his own choosing. Moreover, although Nadaud notes that almost all of Guattari’s texts ‘were annotated by Deleuze’, the footnotes only cite slightly more than twenty such annotations, many of which say little more than ‘underlined by Deleuze’. Obviously, Deleuze’s annotations were more extensive than that: at one point, for example, Nadaud indicates that Guattari’s text ‘is followed by two pages written by Deleuze on the infinitive’. Yet none of these more substantial responses by Deleuze is included in the volume. Both decisions are regrettable – Nadaud says he wanted to publish the texts in their ‘pure’ form – since they make it difficult to follow the development of Guattari’s own thinking or to get a sense of the creative give-and-take that took place between him and Deleuze. A well-constructed index would have made it easier for the reader to trace out various themes in these inevitably ad hoc texts. Nonetheless, we should be grateful to Nadaud for having undertaken the editorial work required to make these papers available in published form. Readers, depending on their interests, will find many paths to follow (and construct) through these texts; I will highlight a few of them.

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