“Dark World, Growing Desert: Towards a Desert Symptomatology in Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus”

In a 1989 television interview, part of L’Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze comments on rich and poor cultural periods, describing the conditions that make the present moment a cultural desert—a period marked by the disappearance of culture (specifically in the forms of film and literature) and a general lack of creativity. Though he maintains that poor periods are not permanent, that they inevitably give way to rich periods, here, over thirty years later, the symptoms of desert periods persist and in many cases have worsened. A new desert symptomatology is required in order to navigate these persistent and growing deserts of the present epoch. I begin to establish such a symptomatology with a more relevant model of the desert, one borrowed from Deleuze’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus, the first of his works to be co-authored with Félix Guattari. Unlike the periodic desert of L’Abecedaire, the desert in Anti-Oedipus grows ceaselessly, existing as a central ecosystem inhabited by the text’s concepts. As part of this new desert-centric reading of Anti-Oedipus, I extrapolate upon three other concepts from the text—the body without organs, schizophrenia, and desert-desire—as examples of three species who can thrive in the desert. Beyond explicating the concepts’ suitability for the desert, I offer tendencies of Deleuze & Guattari’s creative philosophy as alternatives to the desert-thinking of the present era, so as to ultimately reposit the authors’ optimism that one day the earth will become a place of healing, even in a desert period operating on different terms.