Dear Diary Moment 8/29/2020:
Two things that have come together in this particular immersion in the Anti-Oedipus:
For one, for the last 20+ years I’ve been doing a lot of writing (30+ if you count poetry). And along the way, I have managed to develop a kind of sensitivity to writing styles. For instance, I can confidently say that much of the writing in say The New Yorker has a major advantage in that it tends towards a concrete narrative style as compared to more philosophical texts which tends to be expositional in style. This has to do (among other things (with what is considered a major compositional foul: overuse of “be” verbs: is, are, etc… Compare, for instance:
“He was running down the street.”
to:
“He ran down the street.”
Now compare this to the more abstract expositional style of philosophy:
“A is B; B is C; therefore, C is A.”
Or:
“The infinite is that which the finite can never fully grasp.”
Secondly, what was really helpful here was having read Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers before moving on to the original text. If you read it, you tend to find him feeling like a poetic style that tends to repeat itself to a point that was almost irritating in the way it always ended with a kind of enjambment: a partial sentence:
“I went out today. Everything was there: Eyes, lips, tongues, bodies, anuses waiting for shit, everything. Didn’t make sense.”
Then:
“When I thought about it, my desiring production came to the surface. I realized why it was important. Then I got it.”
I am, of course, doing parody here. But this is how it felt: repeatedly. But when you read the original text, it has a whole different feel. The composition is all over the place with compound sentences that present a lot of interpretive challenges. It reads more like Deleuze’s compositional style in earlier books than Guattari’s in the Anti-Oedipus Papers. (Perhaps I should read Chaosophy.) At the same time, it maintains the very stream of consciousness style I saw at work in Guattari’s work.
We should also note here how the book often breaks into the indirect discourse associated with Deleuze’s earlier book Difference and Repetition: that which suddenly breaks from a third person perspective into an omniscient third (almost first (person one:
“All who enter here shall worship at the altar of Oedipus. Put away your desiring production and tape recorders, your numen.”