TEXTS AND INTERVIEWS 1972-1977 ix uattari Edited by Sylvere Lotringer Introduction by FranQois Dosse Translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins <e> SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Copyright © 2009 Felix Guattari and Semiotext(e) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com Special thanks to Robert Dewhurst, Emmanuelle Guattari, Benjamin Meyers, Frorence Petri, and Danielle Sivadon. The Index was prepared by Andrew Lopez. Cover Art by Pauline Stella Sanchez. Gone Mad Blue/Color Vaccine Architecture or 3 state sculpture:before the event, dur­ ing the event, and after the event, #4. (Seen here during the event stage.) 2004. Te mperature, cartoon colour, neo-plastic memories, glue, dominant cinema notes, colour balls, wood, resin, meta-allegory of architecture as body. 9 x 29 1/4 x 18" Design by Hedi El Kholti ISBN: 978-1-58435-060-6 Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America ontents Introduction by Franc;ois Dosse 7 PART I: DELEUZEIGUATTARI ON ANTI-OEDIPUS 1. Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium 35 f 2. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 53 3. In Flux 69 4. Balance-Sheet for "Desiring-Machines" 90 PART II: BEYOND AN ALYSIS 5. Guerrilla in Psychiatry: Franco Basaglia 119 6. Laing Divided 124 7. Mary Barnes's "Trip" 129 8. The Best Capitalist Drug 141 9. Everybody Wants to be a Fascist 154 10. La Borde: A Clinic Unlike Any Other 176 11. Beyond the Psychoanalytical Unconscious 195 PART III: MINOR POLITICS 12. To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body 207 13. Three Billion Perverts on the Stand 215 14. I Have Even Met Happy Drag Queens 225 15. Becoming-Woman 228 PART IV: CINEMACHINES 16. Cinema of Desire 235 17. Cinema Fou 247 18. The Poor Man's Couch 257 19. Not So Mad 268 PART V: SCHIZO-CULTURE IN NEW YORK 20. Molecular Revolutions 275 21. Desire is Power, Power is Desire 282 22. Gangs in New York 291 Bibliography 297 Notes 301 Index 311 o���:s�111�1��I����11 KUTUPHANESI 0918419 Fran�ois Dosse INTRODUCTION OSOPHY Chaosophy gathers a senes of scattered texts by Felix Guattari according to several themes accessible to an Anglo-Saxon reader­ ship: first, there are clarifications on the singularity of the writing machine assembled with Gilles Deleuze, which lasted from 1969, when they met, to the publication in 1991 of Wh at Is Philosophy? Second, the texts from 1977 give an idea of what the private La Borde clinic, in which Guattari worked, was like, and of his ambivalent relationship with antipsychiatry. Third, the texts collected in subsequent volumes (1977-1985 and 1986-1992) will allow us to better understand his important role in the Italian autonomists' movement, and his relationship with a triumphant modernity. Guattari never allowed himself to lament a world which we have lost. Rather, always displaying a critical spirit, he tried to bounce back in order to chart innovative paths leading to the most creative processes of subjectification possible: ''I'm hyperpessimistic and hyperoptimistic at the same time."! D&G: A Writing Machine After May 1968, Deleuze intended to bring a philosophical answer to the questions raised by Lacanian psychoanalysis. His meeting with Guattari offered him a magnificent opportunity. Moreover, in 1969 his health already was seriously impaired by the 7 operation he had the year before. More than one of his lungs had to be removed. As a result, his tuberculosis worsened and chronically weakened his respiratory system until he died. He was exhausted in the full sense of the term by which he will later characterize the work of Samuel Beckett-an exhaustion which offered an opening and allowed for a true meeting, a presence for the other and a fruitful relationship. Meeting Guattari would be crucial for reviving his vital forces. As for Guattari, he disclosed his own weaknesses to his new friend, revealing aspects of the inhibition which led to his "extremist misfiring."2 The basis for this writing disorder, he admitted, was a lack of consistent work and theoretical readings, and a fear of diving back into what he had left fallow for too long. To these failings he added a complicated personal history with an upcoming divorce, three children, the clinic, conflicts of all kinds, militant groups, the FGERl ...3 As for the theoretical elaboration itself, Guattari considered "concepts mere utensils, gadgets."4 For example, he used the concept of "vacuolar group" as a way of bringing out something less oppressive within militant organizations, also more conducive to rethinking singular phenomena. Guattari invented his concept of "transversality" in order to unsettle so-called "democratic centralism"5 in favor of "effectiveness and a breathing."6 From their first encounter, both of them immediately identified their critical target: "the Oedipal triangle" and the familial reduction brought about by psychoanalytical discourse, the critique of which became the core of Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972. From the beginning their relation was located at the heart of theoretical stakes, based on an immediate friendship and intellectual affinity with an equal rigor on both sides. However, this friendship would never be fusional, and the use of vous would always be de rigueur between them, although they otherwise readily used the tu form. Coming from two different galaxies, each respected in their difference the other and his singular network of relations. What made the success of their joint intellectual endeavor possible was the mobi­ lization of everything that made their personalities different, sharpening contrasts rather looking fo r an artificial osmosis. Both had a very high idea of friendship. Guattari had admittedly been apprehensive of meeting with Deleuze face-to-face. He was more at ease working with groups, and would rather have involved his friends from the CERFF and integrated them in their collabora­ tion. Putting their first book together, especially, mostly involved an exchange of letters.8 This writing protocol upset Guattari's everyday life, and he had to immerse himself in a kind of solitary work he wasn't used to. Deleuze expected him to go to his work table as soon as he woke up, jot his ideas down on a piece of paper (he had three ideas a minute) and, without even rereading it, send him the products of his reflections in their rough state. Deleuze thus subjected Guattari to a kind of asceticism which he believed necessary for him to overcome his writing problems. Guattari fully went along and locked himself up into his office, working like a horse to the point of getting writers' cramp. Instead of spending his time directing his groups, he fo und himself confined to his lonely study every day until 4 p.m. He only went to La Borde in the late afternoon,always in a rush because he always had to be back to his house in Dhuizon around 6 p.m. The director of the clinic, Jean Oury, experienced this change as an intolerable desertion. Usually omnipresent in the daily life of La Borde, Guattari had to remove himself from all the activities at the clinic and devote himself to his work with Deleuze. According to the writing arrangement they adopted fo r Anti­ Oedipus, Guattari would send preparatory texts which Deleuze would rework and polish into their final versions: "Deleuze said that Felix discovered the diamonds and he was cutting them fo r him. Guattari only had to send him the texts as he wrote them and /9 Deleuze would arrange them. That's how it all came about."9 Their joint task therefore involved the mediation of texts far more so than dialogue or live exchanges, even though Guattari occasionally met with Deleuze in Paris on Tu esday afternoons, after Deleuze gave his class at the Vincennes University in the morning. In the summer months, it is Deleuze who went to Guattari's in order to work with him. On several occasions, Deleuze and Guattari described their joint work and its singularity. After the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Guattari said of their writing duo: "Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than of accumulating our uncertainties, and even a certain distress regarding the turn of events afterMay '68."10 Deleuze also commented: "Oddly, if we tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it is precisely because we wrote in tandem. Neither one of us was the madman or the psychiatrist, it was necessary to be two to release a process ... The process is what we call a flux."ll From this exchange, a genuine work machine was born, and from th en on it was impossible to identify what belonged to one or to the other because this machine was not a simple sum of two individuals. It only seemed to reside in a "two of us" that the cosignature of the book evokes, yet it fu nctions more profoundly in a "between-two" capable of creating of a new collective subjectivity. In their machinic bifurcation, the true sense of these notions lies in the interval of their respective personality. To try and identify the father of such and such concept, as Stephan Nadaud wrote, would be "to completely disregard an essential concept in their work: that of assemblage."l2 Their entire writing machine relies on positioning a collective assemblage of enunciation as the true father of the concepts invented.