François Dosse | Félix Guattari & The “Molecular Revolution”: Italy, Germany, France

  In 1976, the Basque country was restless— certainly on the Spanish side of the border, where ETA,1 the Basque separatist movement, was engaged in an armed struggle against the powers of Madrid. Félix Guattari was dreaming of building a federation of regional protest movements, which could open up secondary fronts and weaken the Nation-State. Despite his extensive network of contacts, he never managed to realize this perilous project, which was located on the cusp between democratic combat and terrorist action.     The Italian May ’68: 1977 Guattari and his friends were, however, bathing in a veritable fountain of…

Félix Guattari | Militant Incidences

  1 On the Question of “Primordial Bureaucratic States”1 Since you have asked me to elaborate on my thoughts about stylites and other dendrites, I will take a stab at laying out some of the connections here. Mystics—Coptics, Syrians and other, express their desire to return to the roots, the roots of the primordial Empire: the Ur-State (there is a wordplay like this in the book by Lacarrière).2 In their own way, they’re championing the Asiatic State. The Egyptians and the sons of Trojan warriors never could take being fucked with and eliminated by barbarians and pirates like the Greeks,…

Félix Guattari | Genet Regained

    Perhaps the massacres at Chatila in September 1982 were not a turning point. They happened. I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation, nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future, unsuspected cancer, or of a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book. The matter became more pressing when some political prisoners urged me not to travel to France. Anything not to do…

Félix Guattari | Schizoanalytic Cartographies

Schizoanalytic Cartographies represents Félix Guattari’s most important later work and most systematic and detailed account of his theoretical position and his therapeutic ideas. // Andrew Goffey identifies the text as being “perhaps one of the last big books of French ‘theory’ – that extraordinary efflorescence of thinking that occurred in the wake of the events of 1968 …

Félix Guattari and Radio Alice

La Radio Siamo Noi Félix Guattari | Millions and Millions of Potential Alices Félix Guattari | Popular free Radio etc. ⇒ PDF   Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology ⇒ PDF     Félix and Alice in Wonderland: The Encounter between Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi and the Post-Media Era Michael Goddard Introduction: The Enigma of the Post-Media Era   Towards the end of his life, Felix Guattari made several enigmatic suggestions about the emergence of a Post-Media era that would have the effect of displacing or at least decentring the hegemony of the mass media as we still know them today. Some of these…

Fernand Deligny | The Arachnean and Other Texts

The originality of Deligny’s theoretical and practical position consists precisely in what can be called a “suspension of interpellation,” in which one can also see a fundamental point of intersection with the inaugural gesture of psychoanalysis, over and beyond the explicit oppositions, as will become clear. One might say that to “the theoretical anti-humanism” professed by Althusser, Deligny opposed an authentic “practical anti-humanism” that dismissed “men,” the humans-that-we-are, shored up by what Deleuze called a “thought image” of themselves, a flattering, ready-made image, dominating and exclusive, in favor of a narcissistically and socially less satisfying “human,” possibly mute and idle, but in reality more richly endowed with practical recompositions.

Gerald Raunig | For a new political ecosophy [F. Guattari: The Three Ecologies]

‘Three Ecologies’ are Guattari’s political manifesto at the end of a decade he himself called the “winter years.” His interpretation of these years speaks to our present in many ways. Not only does the specter of Donald Trump appear in the text, as cynical actor of speculation, gentrification and the completely unchecked displacement of poorer groups from Manhattan and elsewhere […]

Pragmatic/Machinic: Discussion with Félix Guattari [by Charles J. Stivale]

  The following discussion with Félix Guattari took place in his apartment in Paris. With the help of a number of friends, I had prepared a set of questions, and had contacted him to see if he might be available to answer some of them.\1 He responded immediately, and left messages with the friend in Paris in whose apartment I would be staying. Prior to the trip, I also had contacted Gilles Deleuze to arrange an extended interview, and although his schedule and health prevented him from agreeing to a long session, I did visit him at his apartment the…

Gilles Deleuze | Postscript on the Societies of Control

1. Historical Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the…

Gilles Deleuze | Control and Becoming

Negri: The problem of politics seems to have always been present in your intellectual life. Your involvement in various movements (prisoners, homosexuals, Italian autonomists, Palestinians), on the one hand, and the constant problematizing of institutions, on the other, follow on from one another and interact with one another in your work, from the book on Hume through to the one on Foucault. What are the roots of this sustained concern with the question of politics, and how has it remained so persistent within your developing work? Why is the rela­tion between movement and institution always problematic? Deleuze: What I’ve been interested in…

Italy 1977-8: Living with an earthquake – Red Notes

  Italy 1977-8: Living with an earthquake – Red Notes A pamphlet from a time when a very high level of class struggle dominated Italian society. Despite their differences – the state, church, fascists, Communist Party and unions were all united in opposition to the the radical social movement.    A. Preface We have called our pamphlet “Living With An Earthquake”. This earthquake is not just the crisis at Government level – it is a quite new political upheaval affecting the whole of Italian society. We have produced this pamphlet because it is vitally important that the out­side world should…

Maurizio Lazzarato | Marcel Duchamp and The Refusal of Work

MARCEL DUCHAMP AND THE REFUSAL OF WORK  PDF   MAURIZIO LAZZARATO Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. [1] These societies lead us beyond disciplines, because they put in place policies regarding the government of conducts that are exercised through the management of heterogeneities and the ‘optimization of systems of differences’ – that…

Tiqqun | This Is Not a Program

“’77 wasn’t like ’68. ’68 was anti-establishment, ’77 was radically alternative. This is why the ‘official’ version portrays ’68 as good and ’77 as bad; in fact, ’68 was co-opted whereas ’77 was annihilated. This is why, unlike ’68, ’77 could never make for an easy object of celebration.”
— Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro

Ralph Rumney | The Consul

Ralph Rumney | The Consul PDF Ralph Rumney has been in constant flight from the wreckage of postwar Europe. Crossing paths with every avant-garde of the past fifty years, he was one of the founding members of the Situationist International. Rumney’s traveling companions — Guy Debord, Pegeen Guggenheim, Asger Jorn, Michèle Berstein, Bernard Kops, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Félix Guattari, E.P. Thompson, Victor Brauner, and many others — are recalled in the oral history with sharp intelligence and dry wit.         The Consul: Contributions to the History of the Situationest International and Its Time…

Félix Guattari; The Anti-Œdipus Papers

Félix Guattari; The Anti-Œdipus Papers Full book Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze’s collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Œdipus. “The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory,“ wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Œdipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the las half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and “constructivist“ vision of capitalism:“Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down.“ Few…

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari | May ’68 Did Not Take Place

  In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. In physics, Ilya Prigogine spoke of states in which the slightest differences persist rather than cancel themselves out, and…

Félix Guattari; The Capitalist Revolution

  THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION Fundamental political and micropolitical stakes are ‘negotiated’ through this Collective equipment function in so far as it retains a preponderant place in the formation of the collective power of capitalist labour. But the transformation of ‘polymorphous’ desire into useful activity, into deterritorialised labour and the exchange over which it presides, doesn’t go without saying. Capitalism has only been able to realise this transformation – and thus to place the libido in its service – under particular historical conditions. After the ‘black hole’ of the thirteenth century, the ‘Peace of God’: a religious machine The birth of…

Félix Guattari; Bourgeoisie and Capitalist Flows

  BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS The bourgeois machine One ought to distinguish here between the apparent Power [Pouvoir] of the nobility and the real power [puissance] of the bourgeoisie. At the molecular level, the real power of processes of deterritorialisation tends to escape from molar Power. The tacit equilibria, the networks of interdependence, didn’t stop being worked over, called into question, by the deterritorialised semiotic budding of the urban bourgeoisie. From this point of view, the ecclesiastical theory of ‘three orders’ (the division of society according to a divine plan into workers, warriors and people of prayer is an illusion:…

Félix Guattari; A Molecular Revolution

  A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION   The third industrial revolution The breaks between professional life, leisure and education, between private life and public life, the valorisation of serious mindedness, even being self-sacrificing, when it is a question of labour, seem to constitute the very foundations of every society. Despite the evolution of the techniques and modes of organisation of production, in ‘experimental’ sectors in particular, the traditional imagery of the ‘world of work’, the faciality traits of the manual labourer of the nineteenth century – those of the miner or the railworker for example – continue to serve as the basis…

Deleuze/Guattari; How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?

  At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any Tate, you make one, you can’t desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don’t. This is not assuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but…

Félix Guattari | IN FLUX

  Maurice Nadeau: Could you briefly explain how your collaboration came into being? Félix Guattari: This collaboration is not the product of a simple meeting of two individuals. Aside from a combination of circumstances, we were also led to it by a whole political context. Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties, and even a certain distress in the face of the turn of events after May ’68. We are part of a generation whose political consciousness was born in the enthusiasm and naiveté of the Liberation, with its conspiratorial mythology of…

Deleuze & Guattari; Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium

    Actuel: When you describe capitalism, you say: “There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathology, of this madness, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning, and that’s where its rationality comes from.“ Does this mean that after this ‘abnormal’ society, or outside of it, there can be…