u/No-Bodybuilder-6474

I'm reading The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs alongside Anti-Oedipus, I recall reading something similar to the word-virus earlier in Anti-Oedipus about how language exerts social control.

What connection is there between the word-virus and Anti-Oedipus? I know Burroughs was an inspiration to D&G and that they were closely related in many ways as both postmodern thinkers.

A lot of new words came too fast as I was reading AO and I decided to post this so I can look back on the thread when I'm done reading.

What point are they making with Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlein's signs in Le renard pâle?

In the English translation of Anti-Oedipus, D&G allegedly reference a movie on the Vietnam War called Hearts & Minds, but in the original French, it turns out they were actually talking about a French movie called Le 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple. To make it even more confusing, it appears that they falsely attributed the quote, the real movie behind all this is In the Year of the Pig, very confusing and hilarious!

I saw the movie. The quote they used wasn't that interesting to think about, but the movie was very interesting, and in my review on Letterboxd, I talked about the film using my knowledge from Anti-Oedipus. Hope it fits the subreddit and that you find it interesting!

Here is my review:

I'm a sergeant in the U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets. I'm en route to Vietnam. However, I'm deserting the army because I'm protesting the U.S. Involvement in the Vietnamese conflict. —John Toller

Then the film proceeds to cut to General William C. Westmoreland saying:

Today your soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardsmen are better educated than before, are better informed, have traditional American ingenuity and initiative, are better physical specimens, have high morale and understand what the war is all about.

Then it cuts back to John Toller again:

As I mentioned before about changing the minds of the apathetic populace, the key is the communication, and most of the American soldiers I know can't communicate. They don't really understand the Vietnamese way of life and its goal. And the only way they can communicate is through money or with a gun. So after a while they develop this kind of fear. And so, a misunderstanding and a noncommunication - They mistrust the Vietnamese and they kind of despise them.

Pham Van Dong talked about how the Vietnamese have fought and struggled against foreign powers for hundreds of years, including the Manchus, Chinese and Mongols; as well as the modern and continual fight first with the French before WW2, through WW2, taken up again with the French, and finally against the Americans. The mind of the Vietnamese is enduring and patient. The fight for independence led by Ho Chi Minh was a rhizomatic battle for the freedom of the Vietnamese from foreign arborescently structured powers such as France. Vietnam is a great image of a country that experienced a successful bottom-up, grassroots minoritarian struggle, even though it is a structured, top-down, tree-like society today.

The last man who talks in this documentary film is Harrison Salisbury, and what he said here was very profound to me:

Prime Minister Pham Van Dong turned to me at one point and said "Mr. Salisbury, how long do you want to fight? Ten years? Twenty? Thirty? You pick the term of years. We're ready to accommodate you. " A rather bold statement, and maybe it had some bravado in it but this is, again, in accordance with the spirit of the Vietnamese people.

There's no one in that society who doesn't remember hunger in his own lifetime and it was interesting that, from the peasants to the young intellectuals when you posed the very same question- that is, "What has the revolution meant, first of all, to you?"- you'll get the same answer- "We now have enough to eat." As simple as that.

So that when the North Vietnamese government makes it its pledge of honor that the rice bowl will be filled this is so great a thing that we can hardly conceive of it-it seems to be off our radar. I think, you know, for them, the question is, first of all, a very, very concrete one. That statement is literally true. And then again it begins to move into the larger areas.

The circumference of the bowl expands and you note that the revolution has meant a passion for education, a passion for grass-roots involvement in their own future, their own social structures, their own politics and that at the other end of that power, which they are trying to move upward after so many, many years of colonial powerlessness. At the other end of that power is standing a man who also has a rice bowl in his hand and whose poverty is equivalent whose power has not separated himself from the fate of the majority who can move in the same cheap cotton clothing and with dignity among them, and whose power is not an inferior backroom game or a game of marked cards under a table or corrupt double-talk such as we've gotten so used to in the chanceries of the West.

Yet there is one light of hope and this is that throughout Vietnamese history they had catastrophes - they had Chinese, Mongolian invasions where whole provinces were destroyed. You [the Americans] are not the first people who destroyed villages in Vietnam unfortunately. And so, they are used to that and it's a great tradition that the village is not lost even when it disappears from the surface of the ground because the village is down below- down below with the tradition, down below with the people the ancestors who have made the country, literally.

The country is hand-made.

There is not one square foot, I would say, a square thumb of the earth that has not been built as it is by the peasantry in the past.

And this survives.

And when waylaid after 100 years, a village comes back- the descendants of a village come back to the village they find the village and the village starts again

I was in another thread looking but none of the links worked. I'd rather watch than read the transcript. Anyone know where to find it?

I'm looking for English subtitles since I'm only intermediate in French.

"Everyone is bisexual... We are statistically and molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense (emphasis mine)"

I'm in section 1.4 and I've been understanding more and more. But in 1.4, D&G talk alot about delirium, and it seems I've missed their own definition of it earlier in the book. It looks like it's actually a positive thing rather than a state of confusion.

Sorry if this has been asked before but I think a personal discussion helps in understanding.

Conforming to the meaning of the word "process," recording falls back on (se rabat sur) production, but the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording.

Something to do with desire? I couldn't quite grasp that.

Not quite sure about the cathexis part, but I believe it means the same as investment in AO?

From how I've interpreted the first two sections of the book, D&G is not talking about clinical schizophrenics. They are using "schizo" as a conceptual character, as a kind of model for how human minds operate when they are freed from social programming.

If I'm gonna use more D&G/philosophy terms that I'm trying to understand, a schizo is someone who completely rejects transcendent meanings and rather lives on the immanent plane of desiring-production.

So what I think this means is that a neurotypical/"normal" person looks at things transcendently to find a sort of hidden meaning. Which is something I feel like I've been teached to do at school, and I don't see the problem in yet. I find myself asking: "What does this symbol represent?"

But a schizo (which I think is the ideal way of living according to D&G?) doesn't care about what things represent, they only think about what things do. They don't ask what a word or an object means, they rather ask how it can be used as a machine. They quote Lenz on a walk through the mountains, and Lenz doesn't look at a tree and think of a transcendent metaphor (like "the tree represents my growth"). Instead he experiences his lungs as a machine plugging into the wind-machine, and his eyes plugging into the light-machine. What he does, and what a schizo does, is thinking about nature as an immanent factory rather than a theater of symbols.

I've also been researching the bricolage, because I couldn't understand it. Now my vague understanding of the word is that the schizo doesn't look up to the transcendent rules, goals, or instructions that the world provides us with. So they speak and create through the bricolage. Which is improvising with whatever random bits of language or objects are right in front of them. I don't remember exactly the definition of the word, and I don't have the book on me right now; but I think it was something about a handyman who does with what he has on hand, or what materials he's got.

So is there something I've got wrong or something that I'm missing? I feel like writing about what I've understood and talking about it is very helpful in understanding, so I'm sorry if this has been asked before.

So I was following pretty well in the first section, but already with the first few sentences of the second section, I couldn't understand what conflict they were talking about.

I've got The Interpretation of Dreams, Capital, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Is that necessary? I'm not a very disciplined reader so it's a big project, might not work. Question is: is it even worth it to jump straight into Anti-Oedipus?

Which version do you like the most? Why?

Also, pitch invaders should be banned for a season or something. As a Celtic fan, disgusting behavior no matter team.

I get that Hearts couldn't win after the 4th goal, but it's still very unsportsmanlike.

I love it, don't get me wrong, but as I'm lusting to Weezer for the first time, it feels really familiar. Either it's something that's gone trendy sometime or it's similar to something else.

Anyone know a song that is similar? Would love some help thank you.