Michel Foucault's "Preface to the Anti Oedipus" (Summary)

In the years 1945-65, Europe experienced a certain way of thinking, political discourse, and intellectual ethics. This included being familiar with Marx and not straying too far from Freud, and treating sign-systems with respect. These requirements made writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

The five brief, impassioned, jubilant, and enigmatic years were marked by Vietnam and an amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics. The dream that cast its spell between World War I and fascism had returned to reality, with Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light. However, it is unclear whether the utopian project of the 1930s was resumed or if there was a movement toward political struggles that no longer conformed to the model prescribed by Marxist tradition.

Anti-Oedipus shows how much ground has been covered, but it does more than that. It motivates us to go further and not read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference. Instead, it can best be read as an "art" in the sense that is conveyed by the term "erotic art." Informed by abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, the analysis of the relationship of desire to reality and the capitalist "machine" yields answers to concrete questions.

Three adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus are political ascetics, sad militants, terrorists of theory, poor technicians of desire, and fascism. Political ascetics preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse, while poor technicians reduce the multiplicity of desire to the binary law of structure and lack. Fascism, both historical and in our everyday behavior, is the major enemy, as it causes us to love power and desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

In conclusion, Anti-Oedipus presents three adversaries that challenge the traditional understanding of political discourse and intellectual ethics. By examining the relationship between desire, reality, and the capitalist "machine," it offers insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first to be written in France in quite a long time. It aims to guide readers on how to avoid being fascist, even when they believe themselves to be revolutionary militants. The book focuses on the art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether present or impending, and carries essential principles that can be applied to everyday life.

These principles include freeing political action from unitary and totalizing paranoia, developing action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization. It also encourages withdrawing allegiance from the old categories of the Negative, which Western thought has long held sacred as a form of power and access to reality. Instead, it prefers positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems, and believing that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

The book emphasizes that one does not need to be sad to be militant, even though the thing they are fighting is abominable. Instead, the connection of desire to reality possesses revolutionary force. It is not necessary for politics to restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. Instead, the group must be a constant generator of de-individualization.

Anti-Oedipus also advises against becoming enamored of power. Deleuze and Guattari have tried to neutralize the effects of power linked to their own discourse, using humor and games to sway readers. However, the book often leads readers to believe it is all fun and games when something essential is happening: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.