Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Together they constitute one of the most influential philosophical interventions of the late twentieth century, reworking the relationships among desire, capitalism, and political organization.
Anti-Oedipus argues that desire is not a lack (as in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) but a productive, machinic process. Capitalism works by decoding and deterritorializing social flows while simultaneously recapturing them through the market and the state. The Oedipal family structure serves this recapture by reducing desire to familial triangulation. Schizoanalysis is proposed as an alternative that follows desire’s productive connections rather than interpreting them through representation.
A Thousand Plateaus extends this framework through a series of independent “plateaus” — essays that develop concepts including the rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialization, the body without organs, the war machine, and smooth and striated space. The work resists linear reading and proposes a mode of thought organized by connection and heterogeneity rather than hierarchy and sequence.