Rating: 
Summary: Giant-Killers
Review: An amazingly distilled discussion exploring the fascistic roots of psycholanalysis, Marxism, and capitalism. Certainly not for the timid of heart, Deleuze-Guatarri weave a tapestry than unravels soon after reading. A must for anyone interested in post-structural discussions of power.
Rating:
Summary: boundaries? we don't need no stinking boundaries!
Review: Deleuze (and Felix Guattari)are fasinating, but their prose appeals to only the sophisticated and open-minded. These men test and subsequently abolish the hierarchies on which elitism, superiority, and exclusion are built and return the world to a "horizontality" that has not existed since humans came out of the trees. They begin be striking at the heart of modern psychology, the Oedipus Complex, seeking to destroy what they believe to be the source of dominance and difference. They supplement this radical notion by equating individual desire with social desire and have no use for repression. Superegos and overactive egos have no place in their society of unbridled and unexcused desire. Because desire takes as many forms as there are persons to implement it, its is a constantly changing thoroughly innovative idea seeking new channels and different combinations to realize itself, or as they term it, a "body without organs," the changing social body of desire. This is wild stuff and worth the time it takes decifer it.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit too much
Review: Entertaining, unpredictable and perhaps partially true. It seemed an almost inane attempt to attain omniscience. The concepts were interesting, but I don't think that they will work in reality, unless of course, you want to play God. Good old fashioned down to earth morals...I think that's the cure for facism. As far as schizophrenia...well I think even socialist countries have schizophrenics, so I don't really see the connection. As for me, I will keep my organs for myself and significant other.
Rating: 
Summary: Actually four and a half stars
Review: Extremely dense, muddy prose slung half way between poetic delerium and hardened theory, this vast experiement in writing is fascinating in its ability to have turned over seemingly everything- and liberally shaken. This can be a masochistic experience for any reader, although I think that it is one of the most interesting philosophical texts written this century. Certainly seems essential reading for budding psychoanalysts, intending social theorists and anybody interested in the problem of fascism. 'Dip in and out of it', as has been suggested by another reviwer.
Rating: 
Summary: In Praise of Fascism.
Review: Fascism - it's not just for Benito Mussolini anymore.This book started the whole idea that now rather than rationally refute those who may have legitimate sources of disagreement with us, it's now okay that we just label them fascists. So: a traditionalist Catholic, an orthodox Jew, a Lakota shaman, an American scientist, a civil libertarian, a psychologist, or anyone else who disagrees with a bunch of narrowly defined BS about "productionist metaphysics" and Reichian pseudo-science or anything else proposed by a bunch of French a**holes is now a fascist. Anyone who would like to found a community based on traditional values or who dares to suggest such "ultra-reactionary heresy" as that there might be an objective truth or the commonsense notion that perhaps "reason is indeed reasonable" is really a fascist in disguise. Nice. Funny thing is, the opposition to fascism is starting to look an awfully lot like - yeah, fascism!
Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I've had to wade through a lot of postmodern, "poststructuralist" muck in my day -...- but this by far takes the cake. (The world's worst translation of _Simulacra and Simulation_ has nothing on this!) Lest you miss out on the choice narrative style, here's a synopsis: "Deleuze wants language to be encountered as communication which codes and 'over-codes' desires, which territorializes and 'deterritorializes' power, and which spreads and 'organizes' in the patterns of rhizomes. He challenges us to recognize in language an aspect where meaning and reference are less important than pattern, where we leave behind talking about the world in favor of a talk matching the world's flows and breaks and relative movements." "Meaning and reference less important than pattern." Does that make a lot of sense to you? Is it any wonder that contemporary philosophy is fighting not only to be considered relevant, but even for its very survival?...
Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I've had to wade through a lot of postmodern, "poststructuralist" muck in my day -...- but this by far takes the cake. (The world's worst translation of _Simulacra and Simulation_ has nothing on this!) Lest you miss out on the choice narrative style, here's a synopsis: "Deleuze wants language to be encountered as communication which codes and 'over-codes' desires, which territorializes and 'deterritorializes' power, and which spreads and 'organizes' in the patterns of rhizomes. He challenges us to recognize in language an aspect where meaning and reference are less important than pattern, where we leave behind talking about the world in favor of a talk matching the world's flows and breaks and relative movements." "Meaning and reference less important than pattern." Does that make a lot of sense to you? Is it any wonder that contemporary philosophy is fighting not only to be considered relevant, but even for its very survival?...
Rating:
Summary: Deleuze's book on Society
Review: If you're into sociology, and you're curious about Deleuze, then read this one first. Skim some of the bits on psychoanalysis. But read the opening and the sections on representation closely. This is the book that gives birth to Empire, currently a hot one in the anti-globalism movement. It's in this one that D/G show how any social order requires a means by which to articluate desire. They argue that desire is fundamentally productive, creative. But that it must be harnessed if a society is going to survive it's chaotic impulses and forces.
Anti Oedipus is really a book of anthropology. It shows how "primitive," "despotic," and finally "capitalist" regimes differ in their organization of production, recording (inscription, representation), and consumption. It's also a history insofar as it covers the process by which capitalism ultimately commands all the flows and chains of production, submitting them to a form of organization that is abstract (money is abstract) rather than local and physical.
The oedipal part of it is a critique of the Oedipal complex insofar as the complex articulates a model of society based on the family triangle. They want to show that the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of contemporary society.
Their alternative, to be taken literally, is schizoid: subvertive, resistance, and always escaping capture by slipping in between the categories that organize capitalist society and its way of thinking.
Rating:
Summary: 50 pages twice
Review: Most people I know who have attempted this get through about 50 pages, put it down for a year and get through the same 50 pages agiain. Get it from the library first. But it does look really good on your shelf - be sure to learn at least one quote from it to bring up in class - instant A (no one will understand it and assume you do)!
Rating:
Summary: Intensity = INFINITY
Review: The synthesis by Deleuze and Guattari of Nietzsche and Marx is rather shocking, and this experience alone makes the book worth reading. So what IS a body without organs? It's relatively simple, but it can't be put into words. It's the threshold between the old and the new, intensity = 0. You get this out of reading people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bataille (and others in the po-mo cannon). Just imagine a little light bulb going off in your head. That's the Bw/oO.
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