In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon figured out how to channel our schizophrenic, fragmented, and psychic desires into art. Even crazier, he showed how governments study, map, and feed our desires back into systems that dehumanize and remove us from all meaning.
Pynchon captures this perfectly on an artistic level; however, he doesn’t have time to explore it in depth, as Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel, not a philosophy book. Luckily, there is a philosophy book that studies how the machine creates schizophrenia, how the machine remaps our desires, and sells them back to us, and that book is Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
I’ve wanted to talk about Anti-Oedipus for years, and so today I’ll be synthesizing Pynchon and Deleuze together, and diving deep into a section of Gravity’s Rainbow.
This is a pretty wild video, and I’m excited to get back in the Pynchon game. Thank you, guys, for the support, and see you soon in the next video!
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