Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie) is a serial composed of two volumes, Anti-Oedipus (1972, translated in 1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980, translated in 1987). It was written by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, respectively a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, during the May 1968, a period of civil unrest in France.
Deleuze's translator Brian Massumi observes that the books differ drastically in tone, content, and composition.
The body without organs (or BwO; French: corps sans organes or CsO) is a fuzzy concept used in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The concept describes the unregulated potential of a body—not necessarily human—without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely. The term, first used by French writer Antonin Artaud, appeared in his 1947 play To Have Done With the Judgment of God. Deleuze later adapted it in his 1969 book The Logic of Sense, and ambiguously expanded upon it in collaboration with Guattari in both volumes of their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 and 1980).
Building on the general abstract notion of the body in metaphysics, and on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari theorized that since the conscious and unconscious fantasies in psychosis and schizophrenia express potential forms and functions of the body that demand it to be liberated, the reality of the homeostatic process of the body is that it is limited by its organization and more so by its organs. There are three types of the body without organs; the empty, the full, and the cancerous, according to what the body has achieved.
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus.
An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe) is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
In the book, Deleuze and Guattari developed the concepts and theories in schizoanalysis, a loose critical practice initiated from the standpoint of schizophrenia and psychosis as well as from the social progress that capitalism has spurred. They refer to psychoanalysis, economics, the creative arts, literature, anthropology and history in engagement with these concepts. Contrary to contemporary French uses of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, they outlined a "materialist psychiatry" modeled on the unconscious regarded as an aggregate of productive processes of desire, incorporating their concept of desiring-production which interrelates desiring-machines and bodies without organs, and repurpose Karl Marx's historical materialism to detail their different organizations of social production, "recording surfaces", coding, territorialization and the act of "inscription". Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas of the will to power and eternal recurrence also have roles in how Deleuze and Guattari describe schizophrenia; the book extends from much of Deleuze's prior thinking in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense that utilized Nietzsche's ideas to explore a radical conception of becoming.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Mille plateaux) is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.
Pierre-Félix Guattari (/ɡwəˈtɑːri/ gwə-TAR-ee; French: [pjɛʁ feliks ɡwataʁi] ; 30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and created ecosophy independently of Arne Næss. He has become best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and political activist, wrote a number of works together. Their conjoint works included Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Vol 1. Anti-Oedipus, Vol 2. A Thousand Plateaus), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and What Is Philosophy?
What is Philosophy? (French: Qu'est-ce que la philosophie ?) is a 1991 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The two had met shortly after May 1968 and collaborated most notably on Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Volume 1: Anti-Oedipus (1972); Volume 2: A Thousand Plateaus 1980) and Kafka: Towards a Minority Literature (1975). In this, the last book they co-signed, philosophy, science, and art are treated as three modes of thought.