Oh, so you mean “Anti-SOCRATES”!

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together.  Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” The deservedly famous opening line of A Thousand Plateaus. The punch of the line comes from the at-first striking image of two people in a room constituting a crowd.

It turns out, though, that this idea is as old as the hills. In Book 4 of The Republic Socrates suggests that there are multiple elements that make up each person, that each of us is several. When Glaucon is unsure, Socrates spends several pages arguing the case. Take a thirsty person, he says, who decides not to drink. This person must have two different elements operating, since one element cannot do two opposite things at once (want drink and not-want drink) (439b). Socrates goes on to declare that there are three elements of the soul: rational, spirited, and desiring. And he badly wants to convince Glaucon of something more: that the rational element should rule the other elements. In the just (or good) person, Socrates implores us to accept, the desiring element will agree that the rational element is superior to the other elements and that the rational element should rule (442d).

And so Deleuze and Guattari’s opening line turns out to be less thrilling than it appears. We have known that each of us is several for thousands of years. What D&G have against Socrates is his passionate mission to bring the desiring element under the control of reason. The two of them wrote Anti-Oedipus together to do precisely what Glaucon and Adeimantus fail to do: raise a resounding cry against Socrates’ insistence that reason should rule desire.

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