Disobedience as ethos: Foucault's reading of The anti-Oedipus

Abstract

This essay approaches disobedience as ethos from the reading of the Foucauldian preface entitled Introduction to a non-fascist life to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, released in 1972. Although written in 1977 for publication in the United States, the prelude written by Michel Foucault gives us the opportunity to problematize disobedience as an ethos. The French philosopher's complimentary look at Deleuze and Guattari's book inserts the work of both in an ethical dimension so that we can think our relationship with desire from an unconscious that abandons its phantasmatic condition to assume itself as a machinic one. In his allegory as a factory of desire, in the clash between the psychoanalysis of the time with an insurgent schizoanalysis, the opportunity opens up for us to observe criticism as a tool to think all these elements with micro-fascisms – contemporary fascisms; be it in their combat or in the assumption of complacent postures towards them. It is in these terms that this essay takes Foucault, reader of The Anti-Oedipus, to think about the possibility of disobedience as an ethos.