Really enjoyed the first chapter, and I think the best expression of Theleweit's method in the book by far. His self-emancipation from systematicization is wielded with intent and force. The further psychoanalytic theoretical discourse and the invocation of Anti-Oedipus I thought was well-argued, but this is as someone with very little context for the ideas Theleweit is engaging with. To me, at least, he seems very adept at this discursive wayfinding, demonstrating an understanding, like a master in a kung fu movie surrounded by combatants, of the proper distance to hold a given idea at any time. Sadly, the second chapter of the book starts with an uninteresting gloss of European psychological development, and I think a tedius over-obsession with obvious symbols and vulgar homologies. There are gems in there, but I was much less attached to his analyses and ideas in the mid-to-late sections of chapter 2--it felt a bit like watching a rhetorical Johnny Chestnut: scarfing down histories and literature without any desire for real metabolism; the details that he paid scrupulous attention in the first chapter now as smooth and slippery as competition hotdogs. Still, he lands the book--if not on his feet at least in a combat roll--with some tighter recapitulations of his framework, and a rough chart of new, fertile channels of desire for him to map in the second volume. I just wish he got there a bit sooner.