Duplicity and dualism: Guy Lardreau’s, Christian Jambet’s, and François Laruelle’s readings of “Anti-Oedipus”

Abstract

The article explores the history of several readings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as proposed by representatives of French “angelism” (Guy Lardreau, Christian Jambet) and by François Laruelle, whom the work inspired to develop the “Nietzschean politics” project. Although the writings of Lardreau, Jambet, and Laruelle on this book contain direct objections to some of Anti-Oedipus’s central theses concerning the nature of desire and the politics it determines, this article chooses to focus not so much on the differences in these positions as on the impossibility of reducing “angelism” and “Nietzschean politics” to a set of stances and philosophical propositions (which supposedly become political merely by addressing the topic of power and become affirming as if by mere declaration). The article examines the fate of the concepts of “dualism” and “duality” in these theories, which reveal themselves at the point where the ambiguity and insufficiency of assumed demarcations and terminological distinctions — between the molecular and the molar, the schizophrenic and the paranoid (Deleuze, Guattari), Revolt and Mastery (Lardreau, Jambet, Laruelle), these developed to pluralize philosophical thought and rebel against its inherent authoritarian tendencies – force the thought itself to pass through duality, undergoing a trial by its own object. According to Deleuze, just as not every proclamation of multiplicity is capable of generating it, not every thought of rebellion against necessity is truly resistant — sometimes, on the contrary, it turns out to be submissive in its loudest theses.