Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction GARY GENOSKO Continuum Fe´lix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction TRANSVERSALS NEW DIRECTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY SERIES EDITOR Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick CONSULTANT EDITORS Eric Alliez, Richard Beardsworth, Howard Caygill, Gary Genosko, Elisabeth Grosz, Michael Hardt, Diane Morgan, John Mullarkey, Paul Patton, Stanley Shostak, Isabelle Stengers, James Williams, David Wood. Transversals explores the most exciting collisions within contemporary thought, as philosophy encounters nature, materiality, time, tech- nology, science, culture, politics, art and everyday life. The series aims to present work which is both theoretically innovative and challenging, whilst retaining a commitment to rigour and clarity and to the power and precision of thought. Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy Manuel DeLanda Fe´lix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction Gary Genosko Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida & the Body John Protevi Politic forthcoming Philosophy in the Age of Science & Capital Gregory Dale Adamson On an Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature Iain Hamilton Grant After Schelling FE´ LIX GUATTARI An Aberrant Introduction GARY GENOSKO CONTINUUM The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 www.continuumbooks.com First published 2002 Ą Gary Genosko 2002 Index compiled by Adam Bryx and Jerry DePiero All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-6033-X (hardback) ISBN 0-8264-6034-8 (paperback) Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Representing Guattari 29 French Laing or New Szasz? 30 Dissensus and Postmodernism 36 Deleterious Deleuziana 41 Subjectification 49 Transversality: Overview/Extension/ Interpretation 54 Chapter 2. Transversality 66 Beyond Transference 68 Coefficient 76 Theory of Groups 82 How to Get Out from Behind the Couch 91 Transversality in the Later Guattari 99 Group Eros 107 Chapter 3. Japanese Singularity 122 Itinerary and Documents 125 Transversal House 143 Face and Machine 146 Dismantled Photographic Portraits 148 The Question of Japanese Singularity 151 v CONTENTS Chapter 4. Mixed Semiotics 155 Glossematic Detour 155 Diagrams 178 Assemblages 185 Chapter 5. The Four Functors 194 Preliminary Concerns 194 Transversal Ontology 200 Closing Statement 217 Neither One 218 Nor Two 218 But Some of Three 219 And Definitely Four 219 And More 220 References 229 Works Cited 229 FFG/IMEC: Archival Materials 237 Japanese Translations 238 Guattari’s Writings in English: Articles and Books Listed Historically 239 Index 250 vi List of Figures 4.1 Modes of semiotization 167 4.2 Seven semiological redundancies 175 4.3 Angle of signifiance 175 4.4 Variations on triangles 184 4.5 Six general types of fields 187 4.6 Four general types of mixed assemblages of enunciation 188 5.1a Assemblage of the four functorial domains 204 5.1b Expanded field of the four functorial domains 204 5.2 Processual cycles of smoothness and striation around the four functorial domains 212 vii Acknowledgements Much of the research for this book was made possible by a grant from the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, Lakehead University. This allowed me to procure materials, set up my Web-based ‘The Guattari Project’, and visit the Fonds Fe´lix Guattari in Paris. Special thanks are due to Monsieur Jose´Ruiz-Funes at the Institut me´moires de l’e´dition contemporaine, Paris, for his assistance, and Emmanuel Videcoq for his personal reflections on Guattari and French Green politics. Hiroshi Kobayashi kindly provided me with bibliographic infor- mation about Japanese translations of Guattari’s work. I would like to thank Tim Adams for his professional contributions and industry in mining the most obscure veins of the Guattari literature, and for arranging my presentation at the Faculty of Archi- tecture, University of Auckland. I am grateful for the patience and encouragement of Tristan Palmer at Athlone/Continuum, and series editor Keith Ansell Pearson, as well as Brian Massumi’s very helpful and generous comments on the manuscript. I had been planning to write a book on Guattari for some time, at least since I published The Guattari Reader in 1996. My recent work with Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton on The Three Ecologies and the three Taylor & Francis volumes of Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments gave this project a much needed boost of energy. Finally, this book could not have been completed without the support of Rachel Ariss. viii Abbreviations PT (1972) Psychanalyse et transversalite´, Paris: Franc¸ois Maspero. MRr (1977) La Re´volution mole´culaire, Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres/ Recherches. IM (1979) L’Inconscient machinique, Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres/ Recherches. MRu (1980) La Re´volution mole´culaire, Paris: Union ge´ne´ral d’e´ditions. MRp (1984) Molecular Revolution, trans. Rosemary Sheed, London: Penguin. AH (1986) Les Anne´es d’hiver 1980–1985, Paris: Bernard Barrault. CS (1989) Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris: Galile´e. CLU with Antonio Negro (1990) Communists Like Us, trans. Michael Ryan, New York: Semiotext(e). Chy (1995) Chaosophy, ed. Sylve`re Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e) Chs (1995) Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press. GR (1996) The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. SS (1996) Soft Subversions, ed. Sylve`re Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e). 3E (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone Press. AO with Gilles Deleuze (1977) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, New York: The Viking Press. ix ABBREVIATIONS K with Gilles Deleuze (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ATP with Gilles Deleuze (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Why with Gilles Deleuze (1994) What is Philosphy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press. FFG Fonds Fe´lix Guattari, Institut me´moires de l’e´dition contem- poraine, Paris. x This book is dedicated to Marlene Genosko This page intentionally left blank Introduction Pierre-Fe´lix Guattari (1930–92) neither fits into our carefully mani- cured academic divisions nor settles comfortably into the valorized betweens of the interdisciplinary fashions of the season. Despite the recent publications of English translations of two books, The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis, Guattari remains unknown, unless it is through his problematic subsumption as a partner of Gilles Deleuze. Even under such less than desirable conditions, Guattari’s influence may be said to be quite strong but unacknowledged, and poorly understood. Guattari’s major theoretical statements remain untranslated. In his native France the binarization of his life and work has already been achieved: activist or intellectual, but not both. The judgement that he was an activist, despite his work with Deleuze, may have made him a star, but kept him outside the orbit of intellectuality (one residual effect of this has been to unearth more and more of Deleuze’s politics). In the English-speaking world, Guattari has occasionally been poorly mounted as a specimen of postmodernism. This has become a category of convenience for all those thinkers that lack a proper place and from whose legacy it is difficult to convince granting organizations and administrators that profit may be realized. ‘No doubt,’ Guattari once admitted (SS 70), ‘a certain kind of politics and a certain social implosion have occurred. But I believe that there is a collective, unformed search, from above and below, for another kind of [micro] politics.’ I consider Guattari to have been both an activist and an intellectual and will draw a transversal line between them. Guattari was, in the best sense of the word, a drop-out. By this I not only mean that he abandoned the study of commercial pharmacy (see his notes, circa 1948, FFG N08–29), but also that he never received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, breaking off his studies to pursue a career in psychoanalysis. Guattari was 15 when he met Jean 1 FE´ LIX GUATTARI Oury, through Jean’s brother Fernand, and by the time he reached 20 years was taken under Jean’s wing, visiting him first at the psychiatric clinic of Saumery. Only three years later Guattari would assist in the foundational work at La Borde and help write the clinic’s ‘Constitution de l’An 1’ the year it opened in 1953. Guattari’s career was also shaped by the friendly tutelage of another master, whom he had met when he was just 23, Jacques Lacan (it was not until 1962 that Guattari ‘graduated’ to a training analysis [didactic] with Lacan, joining the Ecole freudienne de Paris [EFP] as an analyst member in 1969). From the two, then, Guattari got a life and career – the absolute master (Lacan), and the master of a dangerous Lacanian heterodoxy (J. Oury). Guattari’s formative intellectual milieu was Lacanian. Long-time member of the La Borde medical staff Jean- Claude Polack once observed ‘When I first arrived at La Borde one didn’t have the right to speak if one had not gone over Lacan with a fine tooth comb’ (in Oury et al. 1977: 21). Clearly, Guattari was an adept. And, in a way, he never abandoned either of them, working with Oury at La Borde until the end, and despite the machinations of Lacan’s sinister son-in-law, retained his membership in the EFP.