Abstract

The aim of the present article is to pinpoint the issues involved in the analysis of the economy of “primitive” societies, as carried out by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. To do so it focuses on a logic of debt (Nietzsche) rather than on a logic of reciprocity (Lévi-Strauss). Deleuze and Guattari’s critical discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s ethnology can thus be related to the problematization of kinship, understood as a system of alliance and filiation relationships, which is formulated within French Marxist anthropology (E. Terray, C. Meillassoux) on the one hand, and Edmund Leach’s critical anthropology on the other. This double mediation helps to show that in Anti-Oedipus, what Deleuze and Guattari seek to identify are the political strategies at work in economic relations. In the present instance, this means the finite alliance strategies operating in “primitive” societies and which are deeper than trade and production relationships.