The first English translation of a crucial work of twentieth-century French philosophy, in which Felix Guattari presents the most detailed account of his theoretical position.
During their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were two of France's most prominent thinkers, and their work continues to be a vital and influential part of critical theory. The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work. Unique in its emphasis on Guattari, both in conjunction with Deleuze and independently, this volume features an essay by Deleuze himself and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Guattari's and Deleuze's work. The body of work explored here spans three decades and cuts across the lines of philosophy, political theory, geography, literature, aesthetics, and even the applied sciences. Readers unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari will gain a broad sense of their work from these pages; specialists will discover new and different methods of understanding the contributions of these writers. The essays map out a set of applications that, rather than explain Deleuze and Guattari, aim to extend and reinvent their thought in new and "real life" domains, from cinema to the Gulf War, from quantum mechanics to the L.A. riots, and from Israel's deportation of Palestinians to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's masochism. Overall, the collection demonstrates the wide range of potential applications of Deleuze's and Guattari's theories and expands current readings of their work.
As an analyst, philosopher and militant, Félix Guattari anticipated decentralized forms of political activism that have become increasingly evident around the world since the events of Seattle in 1999. Lines of Flight offers an exciting introduction to the sometimes difficult and dense thinking of an increasingly important 20th century thinker. An editorial introduction by Andrew Goffey links the text to Guattari's long-standing involvement with institutional analysis, his writings with Deleuze, and his consistent emphasis on the importance of group practice - his work with CERFI in the early 1970s in particular. Considering CERFI's work on the 'genealogy of capital' it also points towards the ways in which Lines of Flight anticipates Guattari's later work on Integrated World Capitalism and on ecosophy. Providing a detailed and clearly documented account of his micropolitical critique of psychoanalytic, semiological and linguistic accounts of meaning and subjectivity, this work offers an astonishingly fresh set of conceptual tools for imaginative and engaged thinking about capitalism and effective forms of resistance to it.
Guattari's final book is a succinct summary of his socio-philosophical outlook. It includes critical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, information theory, postmodernism, and the thought of Heidegger, Bakhtin, Barthes, and others.
Hanjo Berressem establishes the notion of a schizoanalytic ecology as the most consistent conceptual spine of Félix Guattari's work. He covers the whole range of Guattari's solo work and the books co-authored with Gilles Deleuze, primarily a rigorous explication and analysis of 'Schizoanalytic Cartographies'.
An early work that lays the foundation for establishing a “polemical” dimension to psychoanalysis. We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...—from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis In his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious (originally published in French in 1979), Félix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a “polemical” dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political—the “machinic”—potential of the unconscious. To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract (“hyper-deterritorialized”) mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as “faciality” and “refrain,” which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century.
This book examines Félix Guattari, the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and radical activist, renowned for an energetic style of thought that cuts across conceptual, political, and institutional spheres. Increasingly recognised as a key figure in his own right, Guattari’s influence in contemporary social theory and the modern social sciences continues to grow. From the ecosophy of hurricanes to the micropolitics of cinema, the book draws together a series of Guattarian motifs which animate the complexity of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most enigmatic thinkers. The book examines techniques and modes of thought that contribute to a liberation of thinking and subjectivity. Divided thematically into three parts – ‘cartographies’, ‘ecologies’, and ‘micropolitics’ – each chapter showcases the singular and pragmatic grounds by which Guattari’s signature concepts can be found to be both disruptive to traditional modes of thinking, and generative toward novel forms of ethics, politics and sociality. This interdisciplinary compendium on Guattari’s exciting, experimental, and enigmatic thought will appeal to academics and postgraduates within Social Theory, Human Geography, and Continental Philosophy. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This book provides a thorough application of theoretical ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to a series of examples drawn from contemporary film and new media arts. Chapters demonstrate examples of how to do schizoanalysis in philosophically informed cinema studies, new media, and arts based education. Schizoanalysis, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in distinction to Lacanian psychoanalysis, provides an imaginary basis to address the precarity of the contemporary world order: from the growing populism with its authoritarian fascist tendencies to the growing concerns regarding climate change within the Anthropocene. Part I of this book initiates this understanding through cinematic examples. Part II calls for a schizoanalytic pedagogical imagination, which is needed to provide insight into the structures of desire as they circulate in media, especially videogames, and the tensions between analogue and digital technological manifestations. Such pedagogy enables an understanding of the ‘new materialism’ where nonhuman and inhuman (AI) agencies are taken into account. To this end schizoanalytic pedagogy calls for a ‘new earth’ of transformed values and relationships.
Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze's symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging 'materialist landscape'.
The schizoanalytic method and the lines of flight that it has inspired align with contemporary feminist concerns and practices in productive and revealing ways in this ground-breaking collection. To address the relevance of schizoanalysis for contemporary developments in new materialism, affect theory, transnational feminism, political ontology, feminist critiques of globalization and capitalism, feminist pedagogy, and ethics, the overarching questions explored are: What can schizoanalysis do for feminist theory? What would a feminist schizoanalysis look like? Is it possible to perform a schizoanalysis of feminism? How do schizoanalytic-feminist alliances create new ways of understanding the future, sexuality and bodily transformation, political resistance, new subjectivities, and ethical relationships? Highlighting the strength, richness, and diversity of feminist perspectives this collection shows how issues of re-conceiving desire, theorizing embodiment and materiality, interrogating the status of sexuality and difference, decentring feminist practice to be inclusive of transnational and de-colonial concerns, critiques of binary logic and gender, transversal politics, and the need for new political visions in light of advanced capitalism are all enhanced by this alliance.