More Background

I thought I would provide more background about AO. AO was written in response to the May '68 riots that took place in France and the subsequent student/worker uprisings that almost demolished France as a country. As such, D&G made pointed efforts to confront the institutions that crystallized to enslave and bog down human freedom and it culminated in the critiques of a very specific period, mainly that of Freud. If we use Freud as a mitigating lens we can start to trace those moments that Freud incorporated into his theory of humanity (which in my view posited the human, as Josh pointed out, as an energy system) and also included Darwin's idea of humans as animals, Fechner's scientific psychology, Hemholtz conservation of energy and so forth.
In response to these developments, AO seeks first and foremost to tackle Freud and along the way engage Marx and Neitzche (we see this in the beginning where we keep the idea of production, industry etc from Marx and engage in the Neitzchian "doing without a doer") Odeipus, then, is any institution (family, gov't, etc) that enslaves man's will to act and posits a moment of subjugation to a higher authority. In their eyes, the only way to engage the enemy (tactics) is to desubjegate, through the power of language; essentially using the master's tools (language) to dismantle the master's house. This is what, I believe, makes AO so hard -- the signifiers keep shifting and are never fully grasped, defined or articulated. Everything is pure surface. One thing to keep in mind as we move ahead.