Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole. [7] The sociologist John Urry sees Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the nomad as having "infected contemporary social thought." [22] Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1-57027-030-9. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...". A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Massumi, Brian. University of Minnesota Press. p.251. ISBN 978-1-85168-637-7.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Trans. Michael Taormina. Ed. David Lapoujade. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents ser. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1-58435-018-0. Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.

See also

David Cooper called Anti-Oedipus, "a magnificent vision of madness as a revolutionary force, the decoding, deterritorializing refusal of fixity and outside definition by schizophrenia (they insist on this term) as opposed to a paranoid-capitalist pole and as a depassment of the oedipian, familial neurotic state of non-existence (paranoid-fascist as opposed to revolutionary schizophrenia - but clearly showing that 'the schizophrenic' is not 'the revolutionary', nor the revolutionary schizoid). These authors effectively used the psychoanalytic language and the discourse of Saussure (and his successors), linguistics against itself in what is already proving to be an historic act of depassment." Elliott, Anthony (2002). Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave. pp.157, 161–163. ISBN 0-333-91912-2.

For example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991) devoted a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari. Some of Guattari's diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004). [48] The philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani wrote that rather than having their confidence shaken by the "provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence" of Anti-Oedipus, the psychoanalytic profession felt that the debates raised by the book legitimated their discipline. [49] Joshua Ramey wrote that while the passage into Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" is "fraught with danger and even pain ... the point of Anti-Oedipus is not to make glamorous that violence or that suffering. Rather, the point is to show that there is a viable level of Dinoysian [sic] experience." [50] The philosopher Alan D. Schrift wrote in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2015) that Anti-Oedipus was "read as a major articulation of the philosophy of desire and a profound critique of psychoanalysis." [51] See also [ edit ] Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 54, 108, 127–128, 325-xx). Deleuze and Guattari argue that there was no specific "turning point" in the theoretical development of Freudianism at which it became reactionary; instead, it contained "revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements" from the start. "We refuse to play 'take it or leave it'," they write. This politically ambiguous mixture of tendencies in psychoanalysis arises, they argue, from its ambiguous relationship with its discoveries: "As if every great doctrine were not a combined formation, constructed from bits and pieces, various intermingled codes and flux, partial elements and derivatives, that constitute its very life or becoming. As if we could reproach someone for having an ambiguous relationship with psychoanalysis, without first mentioning that psychoanalysis owes its existence to a relationship, theoretically and practically ambiguous, with what it discovers and the forces that it wields" (1972, 128). Despite the militancy of the analyses proposed within Deleuze and Guattari's project, they insist that "no political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis" (1972, 415). Guattari developed the implications of their theory for a concrete political project in his book with the Italian autonomist marxist philosopher Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us (1985). For the variable relations between the socius of capital and revolutionary autonomous territorialities, see Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 410). Deleuze and Guattari's " schizoanalysis" is a militant social and political analysis that responds to what they see as the reactionary tendencies of psychoanalysis. It proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments of desire—whether revolutionary or reactionary—in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical. Cross, D. J. S. (2017). "Apocrypha: Derrida's Writing in Anti-Oedipus". CR: The New Centennial Review. 17 (3): 177–197 . Retrieved 2022-07-03. The schizoanalyst doesn't read a text to comment on it; the schizoanalyst reads for the sake of extra-textual currents of desire traversing it. 'For reading a text is never an erudite exercise in search of signifieds, much less a highly textual exercise in quest of a signifier, but rather a productive usage of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, schizoid exercise that extracts [ dégage] from the text its revolutionary power [ puissance]' [...] A text is only a small gear in a much larger machine. The schizoanalyst doesn't 'deconstruct.'

Various means of deterritorializing are alluded to by the authors in their chapter "How to Make Yourself A Body Without Organs" in A Thousand Plateaus, including psychoactives such as peyote. Experientially, the effects of such substances can include a loosening (relative deterritorialization) of the worldview of the user (i.e. his/her beliefs, models, etc.), subsequently leading to an antiredeterritorialization (remapping of beliefs, models, etc.) that is not necessarily identical to the prior territory. Deterritorialization is closely related to Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts such as line of flight, destratification and the body without organs/BwO (a term borrowed from Artaud), and is sometimes defined in such a way as to be partly interchangeable with these terms (most specifically in the second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus). Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression and social oppression. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale." When they insist that a social field may be invested by desire directly, they oppose Freud's concept of sublimation, which posits an inherent dualism between desiring-machines and social production. This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Anti-Oedipus develops a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and Freudo-Marxism (with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social).