Dear Diary Moment 6/6/2020:
Just today, I started on what I hope to be a long term project focused (immersed even (in Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus that I hope results in a Philosophy Now article. (About time!!! Isn’t it?) I started with Buchanan’s reader’s guide. And already I’ve come to recognize the import of the biographical aspect of it –that is along with recognizing how excellently written Buchanan’s book is. It just seems to me that we can better understand the book once we understand the different sensibilities between Deleuze and Guatarri in terms of Rorty’s distinction between a public and private approach to philosophy.
Guatarri is clearly the public philosopher in that he was the activist. He, for instance, created a psychological clinic in which both patients and staff shared all duties involved: patients and lower staff (janitors, maintenance techs, etc. (engaged in the more professional matters of talking to other patients (offering them the talking cure (while nurses and doctors shared in the more mundane matters of maintaining the facility. And note how similar this is to the communes experimented with in the 60’s and 70’s. But even more important: note how it was actually Guatarri that first undermined the whole Oedipal motif by eliminating the paternal element from the structure he created, not to mention the fact he was the source of the free-writing, surreal approach that characterizes the Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze, on the other hand, was more the academic type that preferred more private approaches to philosophy. As Negri pointed out: while Guatarri was perfectly comfortable with engaging in more personal conversations, Deleuze was more evasive. This was because Deleuze was more comfortable with conceptual play for the sake of creating yet more concepts. At the same time, his approach involved an overlap in that he and Guatarri had the common attractor of social justice.
And I bring this up to point to how potent such a mix could be, to pose an argument for why the book was as important as it was.