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8

Why is Anti-Oedipusthe Book of

the ’68 Movement?

People are used to saying, as if it were an established fact, that Anti-

Oedipusis the book that brings the mark of May 1968 on to the philo-

sophical stage. Circumstances conspire to give weight to this view: in

May, Gilles and Félix had marched with the students and workers in

Paris, they had met and started to build their collaborative relation-

ship, they had participated in the anti-psychiatric adventure and in the

action committees against prisons. But all of these biographical details

still say nothing.^1

Nor does it say much that Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, became

one of the few philosophical bestsellers and had as its prevalent readers

many rebel intellectuals who were culturally formed in that period and

in that movement.

One must reconstruct the evolution of Deleuze-Guattari thought in

Anti-Oedipus(but also in A Thousand Plateaus, in Kafka, and twenty years

later, in What Is Philosophy?) to understand in what way the conceptual

weavings of modern Western philosophy are recombined therein, and

thus to understand what it means precisely for Félix and Gilles’s thought

to express the rupture of ’68 and the change of scene that this entailed.

Although being the fulfilment of the modern parable, ’68 allows us

to look at the twentieth century from the perspective of its dissolution,

of its explosion. ’68 acts as the start of a proliferation of forms of drift

that are no longer reducible to any unitary history.

We can see ’68 as the final chapter of the proletarian and socialist

struggles of the twentieth century because it is certain that the move-

ment of students and workers, united in struggle, was the critical

fulfilment of that history.

But rhizomatic thought allows us to see ’68 instead as the first chapter

of a post-analytical and post-political evolution that we are today called

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