A Year in Reading: Jordy Rosenberg

Sometime early in 2018, one morning of the long “bomb cyclone” in New York City—the kind of day where the dawn doesn’t break, but mizzles down through the wind and fog, pearling the air to a flat winter white for a few short hours until Night tips her inkwell and dark bleeds out again—I finally opened Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers, a book that had sat undisturbed on my shelf for three years.  

I was finishing a novel at the time, so I wasn’t reading other novels.  are Guattari’s notes to his collaborator, , in preparation for their opus, But what madness these notes are: raw philosophy as dream diary, griping and sniping about the Parisian intelligentsia, particularly , Guattari’s mentor (but not for long), and quite a bit of agonizing about various love affairs.  Out of this chaotic stew, they created I’d like to say that you cannot read these papers and not conclude that Deleuze and Guattari were very much in love, but that would not be simple enough of a claim.  Rather, you cannot read these papers of which they once wrote. Guattari excreted, Deleuze plugged into the orifice, metabolized the ooze, and a book was born.