Felix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology Hanjo Berressem For my daughter, Keyla and my wife, Nadine FÉLIX GUATTARI’S SCHIZOANALYTIC ECOLOGY Hanjo Berressem Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Hanjo Berressem, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Warnock by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5075 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5078 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5077 5 (epub) The right of Hanjo Berressem to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Overture vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xiii INTRODUCTION: GUATTARI AND ECOLOGY 1 1. ECOGENESIS 23 2. SCHIZOECOLOGIC CARTOGRAPHIES 51 3. ECOSOPHIC TIMES AND SPACES 125 4. SCHIZOANALYTIC ECOLOGY 183 CONCLUSION: RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW 233 Bibliography 239 Index 248 Overture Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast library is useless. Strictly speaking, one single volume should suffice: a single volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten type body, and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. (At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that any solid body is the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) This silky vade mecum would scarcely be handy: each apparent leaf of the book would divide into other analogous leaves. The inconceivable central leaf would have no reverse. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (88) IN 1984 THE German avant-garde rock band Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris) released their fourth album, which was titled, somewhat ironically, Our Debut. When the follow-up album, released in 1986, was called Six, this didn’t make things any easier. In 1987, the band published a note that explained the ‘missing’ fifth album. Our Debut and Six, the note read, ‘are constructed so that they correspond to one another in music, text and arrangement and comprise a unity if one plays them at the same time from the first piece on, on two record players with their respective A- or B-sides. The parallel pieces are the same length to the minute, from one track to the next, and offer a variety of textual, musical and semantic interactions. By playing both LPs together the invisible fifth LP, an immaterial LP emerges in the mind of the listener’ (Tödliche Doris 2019). I have tried to achieve a similar effect with Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology and Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy. Although each book can be read as an individual text, the two correspond to one another in such a way that when they are read together, an immaterial book emerges in the mind of the reader. Within the overall field of structural and thematic reso- nances between the two books, I will mark specific conceptual overlaps and cross-references by: square brackets, arrow, Deleuze, page number. Where I discuss co-written texts, I will reference them as Guattari and Deleuze in Félix Guattari’s viii 1 OVerture Schizoanalytic Ecology and Deleuze and Guattari in Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy. While Gary Genosko noted in 2002 that when Deleuze and Guattari is ‘reversed as Guattari and Deleuze, it is a political reordering, an act of resistance, a dangerous heterodoxy’ (42), in light of the growing interest in Guattari, especially after the ecological turn, this is, fortunately, no longer necessarily the case today. As Franco Berardi notes, ‘there is a Deleuze without Guattari, and a Guattari without Deleuze, and then there is the rhizomatic machine put in motion by the encounter between the two’ (2008: 43). If I reverse the conventional order of names in Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, therefore, I do so purely for reasons of symmetry. Abbreviations Abbreviations used throughout the text correspond with the key below. Works by Félix Guattari B: Molecular Revolution in Brazil C: Chaosmosis MR: Molecular Revolution MU: The Machinic Unconscious SC: Schizoanalytic Cartographies SS: Soft Subversions TE: The Three Ecologies Works by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze AO: Anti-Oedipus TP: A Thousand Plateaus WP: What is Philosophy? Works by Michel Serres BP: The Birth of Physics G: Genesis All translations from German and French sources are mine. INTRODUCTION: GUATTARI AND ECOLOGY A graph, . quadrilateral, depicting a new definition of the Unconscious by transforming four basic entities: the Flows, the Machinic Phylum, the Existential Territories, the Intangible Universe. Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (187) We thus decided not to consider situations other than through the angle of crossroads of assemblages (carrefours d’agencements), which secrete, up to a certain point, their own coordinates of metamodelization. Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (215) Subjectivity is manufactured just as energy, electricity, and aluminium are. Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil (47) We have the unconscious we deserve! Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious (9) On the Origins of Guattari’s Ecosophy THE LIFE AND the work of Pierre-Félix Guattari – who was born on 30 April 1930 in Colombes and died on 29 August 1992 in his room at La Borde, the experimental psychiatric clinic near Cour-Cheverny in the Loire Valley that formed his life’s profes- sional and institutional spine from 1955 to his death – might be said to fall into three interrelated phases. The early Guattari is predominantly a psychoanalyst, although he never separated psychoanalysis from political theory and political practice. In his first collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, whom he met at the University of Vincennes in 1969, these psychopolitics are Guattari’s main contribution. While the question 2 1 FÉLIX GUATTARI’S SCHIZOANALYTIC ECOLOGY of psychoanalysis pertains in particular to Anti-Oedipus (1972), Guattari’s presence in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) concerns predominantly politics and political theory. The latter also define his early collections Molecular Revolutions (1977) and The Machinic Unconscious(1979), and find their most sustained expres- sion in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), his third collaboration with Deleuze. Guattari’s middle years, which span roughly the period from the early to the late 1980s, are dedicated to practising psychoanalysis at La Borde, to cultural criticism, and to political activism. Often refered to as the winter years that followed the inter- minable spring of the 1960s – Les Années d’hiver: 1980–1985 is the title of a collection of magazine and newspaper articles, interviews and conference papers published in 1986 – these years were overshadowed by Guattari’s struggle with the depression that Franco Berardi chronicles in the chapter ‘La depressione Félix’ of Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008), and that Gary Genosko writes about in ‘Happy Depression: Franco Berardi and the Unpaid Bills of Desire’ (2015). It was as if the cultural and political milieu, as much as his personal circumstances, had quite literally brought Guattari down. To get a feel of these moments of darkness, which started well before the 1980s, one only needs to read some of the entries from Guattari’s journal that were published in The Anti-Oedipus Papers. The entry for 6 October 1972 is particularly bleak: ‘I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. “The furniture” slides, the table legs wobble . Writing so that I won’t die. Or so that I die otherwise. Sentences breaking up. Panting like for what. Fanny won’t type this anymore. Marie-Josée. Happy, cheery. Another connection. Arlette is in Germany. Anxiety. Her libidinal space being organ- ized elsewhere. Rip. Writing. Pitch-black night. Blue black ink. M. Cantoni pen merchant. Blue blood’ (2006: 399). However, while much has been made of that depression, the winter years are also the time of the conceptualization and the composition of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, which was published in 1989 but is already an explicit reference in Guattari’s seminar held on 9 December 1980 and published in Soft Subversions as ‘The Schizoanalyses’. At that point, Guattari describes it as a ‘crossroads of assemblages (carrefours d’agencements) which secrete, up to a certain point, their own coordinates of metamodelization’ (215). In this light, les années d’hiver might also be read, more positively, perhaps, as les années divers. The diverse years, or the years of diversity. Below the both political and personal cold spells of that period runs the creation of Guattari’s conceptual monument to diversity: of what I consider to be his magnum opus. The late Guattari of The Three Ecologies (1989) and Chaosmosis (1992) is an ecol- ogist, although What is Philosophy? (1991), his final collaboration with Deleuze, shows that this ecology is eminently and deeply philosophical. Throughout these phases, of which the first two are treated exhaustively and with great acumen by Janell Watson, Introduction: Guattari and Ecology 1 3 Guattari was a political activist who wrote prolifically on literature, painting, film and architecture. Of the many Guattaris – the psychoanalyst, the philosopher, the scholar of the arts, the cultural critic and the activist – I believe that the most lasting one will be the ecologist. This is not to say that the other Guattaris are in any way less important, but rather that, although they operate in different conceptual theatres and even though the explicitly ecological enters Guattari’s work only towards the end of his career, they are in actual fact different versions of the ecologist.