louis wrote: >...Felix Guattari...was a psychoanalyst ... > >Their first >collaboration was the 1972 "Anti-Oedipus". Massumi interprets this work as >a polemic against "State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism". massumi does not reduce 'anti-oedipus' to a polemic against statist marxism. 'anti-oedipus' is forst and foremost a polemic against psychoanalyis, as the title declares. a particular kind of psychoanalyisis which they see as reducting everything, including resistance and opposition, into a repetition of the oedipal model. they deliver a polemic against statist marxism becuase they see it as a recurrence of hegel's 'philosophy of right' within marxism. >Their approach to fascism is totally at odds with the historical >materialist approach. Thinkers such as Marx and Trotsky focus on the class >dynamics of bourgeois society. Bonapartism is rooted in the attempt of the >French bourgeoisie in 1848 to stave off proletarian revolution. and, if you had read more carefully, then you would have realised that their position is really not that different. first, they go to great lengths to distinguish between different kinds of fascism: a paranoid-fascism which is resorted to as the last ditch attempt to stave off a perceived threat to identity and self-possession, including 'having' (ie., property) as the premise of identity. >Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. no. if anything, they could be accused of being too optimistic. >Class is not so important to them. no. in fact, ways of being in capitalist society is exactly their topic. >They are concerned with what they call >"microfascism", the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of >us. Ooooh, scary stuff. their term micro-fascism is not continuous with fascism as such, or paranoid-fascism, as i noted. micro-fascism refers to a tendency within oppositional groupuscules to become that which they hate, to mimic the paranoia and aggressivity of fascism as the seeming condition of being oppositional. that is, they are concerned with the repetition of the ideologies and practices of domination within oppositional groups themselves - also what becomes of opposition when it transmutes into the Party of Order. >"Since the 1960's, new collective subjectivities have been affirmed in the >dramas of social transformation. We have noted what they owe to >modifications in the organization of work and to developments in >socialization; we have tried to establish that the antagonisms which they >contain are no longer recuperable within the traditional horizon of the >political. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the >'60s should above all be understood within the universe of consciousnesses, >of desires, and of modes of behaviour." and, how would this fragment from 'communists like us' read as anything more than a locating of changes in forms of working class subjectivity in changes in the labour process as well as changes in the forms of reproduction of working class subjectivity in things like schooling? you and i may disagree with their conclusions - i think they are wildly optimistic in claiming that we are beyond recuperation - but i don't think it is so easy to claim they have nothing to offer. in any case, both lenin and trotsky regarded defeatism as a key problem, and their use of triumphalist rhetoric here is not exactly outside that tradition. >She started showing more of an interest in Marxism >after Derrida did. which goes slightly against your fears that deridda and others are seducing people away from marx, doesn't it? be happy. >But she is not reading the 18th Brumaire. She is reading >Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and Simone Weil. and she might get round to reading the 18th brumaire if she didn't have the impression of marx that third or fourth internationalism has bequeathed us. maybe it also worth remembering that in the 18th brumaire, marx said: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century can only create its poetry from the future, not from the past." negri and guattari take this very seriously. sometimes so seriously that i think i should be reading them only after having partaken of various, very synthetic, substances. but they are certainly on the team; and a way into marxism for people who want their revolutions as movement rather than repetition. angela
