Giuseppina Mecchia - Anthro-politics: Reconsidering Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This paper introduces the concept of “anthro-politics” as an instrument for political intervention derived from the ethico-political theses of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Taking issue with the prevalent reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s dyptich, I affirm the constitutive value of the ethno-anthropological referent in the constitution of the schizoanalytic subject. Ethnographic materials are part of a vast archive providing Deleuze and Guattari’s with many exempla of modes of subjectivation which both pre-date and escape the powerful grip of capitalist domination. As the dialogue with the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres and more recently, the Deleuzian approach of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro clearly demonstrate, the critique of Capital at the core of Capitalism and Schizophrenia can be rethought from a material perspective on the anthropos, who is neither the subject of Western modernity nor its orientalized Other, but rather the schizoanalytic actor of psycho-social desires.