ABSTRACT
A lachrymose philosophy around victimhood, the allegedly traumatic nature of ordinary life, the 'fragile child', the 'loving' mother, and the regressive infantilisation of language have become commonplace since Anti-Oedipus. Just five years after 'the summer of love', the very influential Anti-Oedipus is to be regarded as an introduction to the non-Fascist way of life. Levinas goes beyond psychoanalysis, with the father leading the son/daughter out of narcissism beyond Oedipus; leading the father out of his narcissism via paternity, the mystical non-totalising, for-the-other, through being, not through sympathy, that I am my son. Two post-psychoanalytic strands took shape during the past half century. First, the non-erotic infantile logic based in hurt and trauma; second, the 'nonhuman erotic' spirited on by neo-Reichians and anti-Oedipeans with their desiring machines and molecular rhizomal energies. Both strands claim a psychoanalytic heritage; both have polemicised an aspect of Freud to the detriment of his whole opus.
