Guattari, Félix (1930—92)
French psychoanalyst, political activist, and philosopher. The author of several important works, Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972) translated as Psychoanalysis and Transversality (2015); La Révolution moléculaire (1980), translated as Molecular Revolution (1984); and Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989), translated as Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013), Guattari is ultimately best known for the books he co-wrote with French philosopher Deleuze, Gilles: L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977); Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975), translated as Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986); Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2 (1980), translated as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987); and Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? (1991), translated as What is Philosophy? (1994). Guattari’s contribution to these collaborative works tends to be overlooked, sometimes deliberately so (as is the case with authors like Badiou, Alain and Žižek, Slavoj, who take the view that Guattari was a detrimental influence on Deleuze, distorting his ‘pure’ philosophy in favour of a corrupted politics), but more often out ignorance. This is changing as more and more of Guattari’s works are translated into English. All his major works are now available in English, as are the more esoteric pieces such as his screenplay for a never-made science fiction film A Love of Uiq (2016) and his travel musings on Japan, a country he visited several times, Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan (2015). If the Anglophone world has been slow in recognizing Guattari’s singular contributions, there has been no such tardiness in Hispanophone and Lusaphone realms of Latin America. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay all have Guattari-focused research centres. It is difficult to summarize a career as rich and as varied as Guattari’s, but it can be said that his main intellectual goal was to overcome the limitations of psychoanalysis---as he saw them---by creating a re-engineered version of it. It is often said Guattari rejected psychoanalysis out of hand, but this is incorrect. As he makes clear in several of his works, psychoanalysis remained an essential starting point for him, particularly Freud, Anna’s conception of the unconscious, which he always said was a brilliant invention. However, he also thought psychoanalysis was flawed in two main ways emblematized by Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex: (i) it can only grasp the productions of the unconscious by way of analogy (as symbols of something other than themselves); and (ii) it assumes that the unconscious is concerned only with the psychosexual drama of family relations and not the broader concerns of what he called micropolitical life. Guattari’s work seeks to overturn these two limitations by inventing a mode of analysis he called schizoanalysis, and with that a host of new concepts. His most influential invention was undoubtedly the concept of the *desiring-machine, which underwent a number of different iterations and eventually evolved into the more well-known concept of the assemblage. Gary Genosko, in his illuminating account of Guattari’s work Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (2009), traces the lineage of the concept of the desiring-machine back to Lacan’s concept of the *objet (petit) a---it is both a cause of desire and an alienation of the subject’s desire. Insofar as the subject’s desire is motivated by something they lack, their desire does not come from within; therefore, it is said to be alienated. But Guattari did not agree with Lacan that the objet (petit) a causes desire; rather, he saw it as a representation of desire, a means by which desire becomes visible and tangible to the subject. Thus, in daily life subjects constantly interact with, create, and destroy desiring-machines. The analytic task is to ask how these machines function. Before he met Deleuze, Guattari had already gained notoriety in France as a political activist. He was known in the French press as ‘Mr Anti-’ for his public campaigning for a range of causes from the decolonization of Algeria, the improved treatment of prisoners in French prisons (he was a member of Foucault, Michel’s Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons), the improved treatment of the mentally ill in French psychiatric hospitals, and the establishment of free radio, to gay rights and green politics. In 1973 he outraged national sensibilities by publishing a special issue of the journal Recherches edited by Guy Hocquenghem and René Scherer provocatively entitled ‘Trois milliards de pervers: Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités’ (Three Billion Perverts: An Encyclopedia of Homosexualities). French courts banned it and ordered all copies destroyed. Guattari was also fined 600 francs, but he proudly never paid. More controversially, he collaborated with the Italian Marxist theorist, Negri, Antonio, who was arrested in 1977 on charges of terrorism for his association with the Red Brigades. Guattari also spoke against the extradition from Germany to France of Klaus Croissant, a German lawyer sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof Group; and in the late 1950s and early 1960s he carried cash for the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front), the guerrilla army fighting for independence from French rule in Algeria. As important as Guattari’s meeting with Deleuze was to his intellectual formation and his career, it is arguable that his meeting with Jean Oury (1924—2014) at the tender age of 15 was far more consequential. Oury recruited Guattari to work at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde which he founded in 1953 with the aim of providing a radically new form of care inspired by the work of the radical Spanish psychiatrist François Tosquelles, whose rallying cry was ‘de-institutionalize the institution’. Guattari provides a brief account of his time at La Borde in De Leros a La Borde (2012). The importance of the La Borde experiment has been widely recognized. There is a French documentary, La Moindre des choses (Every Little Thing) directed by Nicolas Philibert, which provides an illuminating glimpse of life there. Guattari’s daughter Emmanuelle Guattari, who spent a large part of her childhood there, wrote a delightful memoir about La Borde too, La Petite Borde (2012), translated as I, Little Asylum (2014). Guattari received formal training in psychoanalysis from France’s most important interpreter of Freud, Lacan, Jacques, achieving the status of ‘analyste membre’ (member analyst) in 1969. This entitled him to practice as a psychoanalyst, something he did for his entire professional career. Although he remained a member of Lacan’s school, the École Freudienne de Paris, until its dissolution in 1980 shortly before the master’s death, Guattari’s relationship to Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis was at best ambivalent. The publication of Guattari’s notebooks, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006), has made it clear just how strained relations were between them, especially after the publication of Anti-Oedipus (even though that work was, in the words of its authors, designed to give Lacan a bit of assistance). Guattari is often linked to the anti-psychiatrists Laing, Ronald David and Cooper, David, but, despite expressing a certain sympathy for their position, he did not agree with their strategies. He shared their view that medical psychiatry is too normative because its basic therapeutic move is to try to restore the patient to something it supposes is a prior state of psychological wellness or normalcy. However, he disagreed with their view that madness is nothing more than a prejudiced social construction of a particular set of behaviours. He argued that this both ignored the actual state of affairs and in doing so put lives at risk because people with severe forms of schizophrenia cannot always cope with the demands of so-called normal life. The aim of psychiatric care, for Guattari, should be to create conditions that enable schizophrenic patients to have a life, but not to determine or decide what kind of life they should have. The concept of the assemblage as a way of thinking about the specificities of living arrangements grew out of this concern. Towards the end of his life, Guattari developed a theory of World Integrated Capitalism, a forerunner to theories of globalization, and a major influence on Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire. He also wrote influentially about the need to integrate the environment into political thinking in Les Trois écologies (1989), translated as The Three Ecologies (2000), and Chaosmose (1992), translated as Chaosmosis (1995). See also anti-psychiatry; actant; Marxism; schizoanalysis. Further Reading: F. Berardi Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008). F. Dosse Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie Croisée (2007). G. Genosko Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (2009). J. Watson Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze (2009).