Whence the adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus. Three adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways:
1. The political ascetics, the sad militants, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth.
2. The poor technicians of desire - psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and sympton - who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack.
3. Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism [...]. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
[...]
The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
- Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
- Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
- Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
- Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
- Michel Foucault, Preface to
Anti-Oedipus
Amazing that this appears so much more inspiring, creative and far-sighted than what present day neo-Leninist supposed revivalists of class-politics are cooking up.
Even revolutionary groups deal gingerly with the fascisizing elements we all carry deep within us, and yet they often possess a rarely analyzed but overriding group 'superego' that leads them to state, much like Nietzsche's man of ressentiment, that the other is the evil [...], and hence that they themselves are good. This conclusion is reached as an afterthought and a justification, a supremely self-righteous rationalization for a politics that can only "squint" at life, through the thick clouds of foul-smelling air that permeates secret meeting places and "security" councils. The man of ressentiment, as Nietzsche explains, "loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble." Such a man, Nietzsche concludes, needs very much to believe in some neutral, independent "subject" - the ego - for he is prompted by an instinct of self-affirmation and self-preservation that cares little about preserving or affirming life, an instinct "in which every lie is sanctified." This is the realm of the silent majority.
- Mark Seem, Introduction to the same text
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