Topic > Deleuze's literary critics - 1186

After May '68 in Paris Deleuze began a collaboration with the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, who was active as a political militant of the far left. Thus, after having written essays that recall his university studies (dedicated to the study of empiricism, Spinoza and above all the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche), Deleuze suddenly acquires notoriety in extra-academic sectors with two works of great complexity: the Anti-Oedipus (1972 ) and its sequel A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both subtitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. The main critical target of the Anti-Oedipus is psychoanalysis, accused of seeing desire only within family relationships (the Oedipus complex), and not as something genetically revolutionary and creator of new orders, as the two believed. This anti-Oedipal theory also has literary implications: for Kafka's works, for example, psychoanalytic interpretations have been suggested over the years, which see authority, the Law, bureaucracy as father figures - this is what Deleuze tries to take down with his book “Kafka: towards a minor literature”. In other words, the accusation against psychoanalysts is that they have weakened the concept of the unconscious, thus ending up enslaving psychoanalysis to the power of the State, the Church and the Market. Delueze's philosophical production is closely linked to his literary critics, a link that is clearly clear in his “What is philosophy?”. In this text the authors clarify what is in common and what is different between the so-called three disciplines of knowledge: philosophy, art (in general) and science. What these disciplines have in common is a certain relationship with chaos. Each of these different ways of knowing, according to Deleuze and... half of the paper... use of "malleable" verbs (with multiple meanings), a succession of adverbs and terms that connote pain. - The interaction between Czech (the original, rural but forgotten language), Yiddish (feared and despised) and German (the language of cities, bureaucracy and commerce). Even when it is unique, a language remains a mixture of different languages, which clash with each other. Deleuze's intention to avoid any transcendental interpretation in favor of a practical approach to Kafka's work includes a brief analysis of the historical context, which constitutes a critical situation of the Habsburg empire, its imminent disintegration, which caused complex "processes of reterritorialization ”, as Deleuze interprets them, like Einstein's theories, Austrian dedacophonist music, expressionism in cinema, the birth of psychoanalysis and the Prague linguistic school.