Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Harry M. Cleaver wrote:

>I don't think Anti-Oedipus was nonsense, but there's
>no doubt it was written in a way that asumed complete familiarity not just
>with Freudian and post-Freudian psychiatry but with many of the classic
>cases as well --something very few people outside the field have.

Well I am actually pretty familiar with that literature, and not just the
classic stuff on Oedipal neuroses, but the pre-oedipal/narcissistic stuff
too. (One of my prized possessions is a Standard Edition of the complete
Freud. Had I written my dissertation instead of dropping out of grad
school, it would have been on the evolution of the narcissistic aesthetic
in American poetry from Emerson through Whitman & Dickinson and onto
Stevens.) And I still found AO preposterously obscure. I think they wrote
it while on LSD (and I'm only partly joking there).

>In the end I found Anti-Oedipus limited by, among other things, a taking
>over of rather primitive Marxist analysis, a la Baran & Sweezy.

What do you find primitive about B&S?

Doug