SOURCE: A review of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in New Republic, Vol. 177, Nos. 26 & 27, December 24-31, 1977, pp. 36-37.

In the following unfavorable review of Anti-Oedipus, Cantor asserts that the book lacks concreteness and is “an extraordinary failure.”

There is—by definition—no tradition that can include utopian speculations; there are only works. And some of the works are famous: Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, N. O. Brown's Love's Body, R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience were popular this last decade (a time so unsure of its own traditions as to have a profound taste for such things). But despite their popularity these works appear to take place on the margin, to speak to rather than from the traditional disciplines. Laing, an anti-psychiatrist psychiatrist, left the profession to study meditation in Ceylon. Marcuse was denounced as “petit bourgeois” by every established Communist party. Brown, according to Harold Bloom, is a...