Guattari: Works

Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari's groundbreaking theories of "schizo-analysis": a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia--which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of (...) mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion. Chaosophy includes such provocative pieces as "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist," a group of texts on Guattari's collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, and "How Martians Make Love," a roundtable discussion with Guattari, Lotringer, Catherine Clément, and Serge Leclaire from 1972. This new, expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse and a range of additional essays, including "Franco Basaglia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist," "The Transference," "Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement," "The Place of the Signifier in the Institution," and "Three Billion Perverts on the Stand.". (shrink)

The ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and activist analyst Felix Guattari are transforming disciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences. These three volumes gather together classic essays that demonstrate the richness of these fascinating and important thinkers influence. The set incorporates: * key essays by an international selection of theorists and practitioners * the development of implications for the built environment * the first ever collection of critical material on Guattari * long out-of-print and hard to find materials.

Resumo: Algumas das mais interessantes teorizações do marxismo têm origem nos grandes fracassos do marxismo, dando conta de uma fidelidade com potencial emancipatório dessa idéia que excede largamente o saudosismo do passado e a adaptação ao presente.É o caso de Les aventures de la dialectique, o livro de Merleau-Ponty, onde procede-se a uma reavaliação das apostas marxistas da época. A problematização das idéias de progresso e de sentido oscilava, então, entre a rejeição incondicional da revolução , a defesa tímida dos (...) seus valores e a redefinição das instituições de esquerda .Mais de 40 anos depois, autores tão diversos como Slavoj Žižek, António Negri, Alain Badiou e Jacques Rancière voltam a jogar esse jogo, onde a herança do marxismo ocidental é dividida entre pretendentes à uma revolução pensada como acontecimento, como crítica, como projeto ou como instituição.O quê é o marxismo contemporâneo? Repetindo o gesto de Merleau-Ponty, e a partir destas perspectivas , o que procuramos são elementos para a redefinição de uma nova pragmática militante, capaz de acolher a imponderabilidade de novos saberes, de novas técnicas e de novos dados políticos. Palavras-chave: Dialética - Movimento - Instituição - Merleau-Ponty - Holloway - Guattari - Virno - Žižek.: In 1955 Merleau-Ponty made a reevaluation of the Marxist stakes of his time. Problematization of the ideas of progress and meaning that was in-between the refusal of the revolution as historical fact, the shy defense of its values and the redefinition of left-wing institutions.More than 40 years after, philosophers as diverse as John Holloway, Félix Guattari, Paolo Virno, Daniel Bensaïd and Slavoj Žižek, play that very game once again, dealing with the legacy of revolution, and thinking it as event, movement and institution.Repeating the gesture of Merleau-Ponty, and from those open perspectives, we try to find elements for the redefinition of a militant thought able to embody the imponderability of new knowledge, new techniques, new political data. (shrink)

Postmodern philosophers may flirt with pragmatics, but they remain trapped within a structuralist conception of speech and language, which prevents them from articulating subjective facts to the formations of the unconscious, to the realm of aesthetics and micropolitics. One should start again from the basic fact that concrete social devices deal with much more than mere linguistic performance : they are made up of ethological and ecological dimensions, of semiotic, economic, aesthetic components, of bodily fantasies irreducible to linguistic semiology, displaying (...) a multitude of disembodied universes of reference, which do not easily fit within the coordinates of our ruling empiricism. (shrink)

This study seeks to identify a coalition of philosophy and literature in the work of Franz Kafka, and begins with a grounding of his output in the philosophical context from which it emerged. This relatively under-researched philosophical backdrop consists in Kafka's study, at university and in a discussion group, of philosophical positions derived from the "descriptive psychology" of Franz Brentano. Kafka was hence conversant with several philosophical agendas, notably those of logic, Gestalt psychology, and a nascent form of phenomenology, which (...) all derived their impetus from Brentano's work. The initial issue, therefore, is that of assessing the extent of a purported influence of such theories on Kafka's texts. What emerges as a "strategy" of Kafka's work is the aesthetic exploitation of such positions; a tactic which constitutes an almost parodistic subversion of these early forms of phenomenological thought. Thus on the one hand it is implied that the narrative technique of Kafka's work, and in particular the representation of consciousness and its "world", is derived from Brentanian thought, and on the other that this influence is modulated in a specific direction, which renders these texts so singularly amenable to post-structuralist thought. My project consequently proceeds to examine the post-structuralist response to Kafka while juxtaposing this analysis with the grounding of his work in proto-phenomenology. Central to this stage of the study are Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, and the scrutiny of their perspectives will be organized by the themes of authorship, interpretation, power, and desire. The exploration of the "deconstructive" standpoint, represented primarily through Blanchot and Derrida, will be guided by an account of why such a stance seems to be accommodated so readily by Kafka's work, and also of the extent to which his texts could be said, on the basis of the influence of Brentanian thought, to resist such appropriation. (shrink)

Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:Introduction to Schizoanalysis ISBN - 9780415113182Patrick Hayden, Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricismof Gilles Deleuze, Studies in European Thought XV ISBN - 9780820438566.

In a cluster of books published originally in 1977, the two editions of La Révolution moléculaire, and L’Inconscient machinique, Guattari elaborated a typology of semiotic systems framed in a Peirce-Hjelmslev hybrid conceptual vocabulary. Reading across these three books I want to flesh-out a-signifying semiotics in relation to an infotech strand on the machinic phylum inspired by one of Guattari’s favourite examples of the kind of semiosis put into play by a-signifying signs : credit and/or bank cards. Guattari’s innovation was to (...) develop a-signifying signs in a typology of sign types but with respect to the problem of the relationship between material and semiotic dimensions in the age of planetary computerization and globalization. (shrink)

This dialogue took place at the beginning of the process through which Lula became president of Brazil. It analyses the empowerment capacity of the Workers’ Party: it is made of collective discussion and free speech, working class embedding, openness to the whole society, welcome to minorities, respect and distance front other parties, sense of uniqueness. The French socialist party lacks those qualities, which one could, find also in Solidarnosc.

« The vertigo of an alternative Japanese path: Tokyo renounces its role as Eastern capital of occidental capitalism and becomes instead, the Northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World. ».

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping (...) onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns. (shrink)

At the turn of the 1980s, Félix Guattari became interested in the Free Radio movement . He then became directly associated between 1986 and 1991 with the Minitel service entitled “3615 ALTER”, initiated by the a collective including C31, an association of critical IT specialists currently editing the journal Terminal. Contrary to the traditional Left, Félix Guattari was less interested in a critique of the content of the media and of their political instrumentalization than in their form and mode of (...) social organization. The proliferation of machine-arrangements was expected to make possible new technological articulations likely to generate innovative assemblings. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 551-552, July 2012.

Revisiting Guattari's visits to Japan in the 1980s during the country's ‘bubble economy’, this paper investigates from a personal perspective the Radio Homerun mini-FM station as well as other stops on Guattari's Tokyo ‘pilgrimage’. Guattari's reception and influence in Japan is contextualised through the writer Kõbõ Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada, in addition to the groundbreaking work of Tetsuo Kogawa, against the backdrop of the rise of postmodernism. Similarities between Guattari's sense of Japan and Brazil are then broached.

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

This short document, appearing for the first time in English translation, concerns the prospects of a made-for-television cultural mini-series inspired by select episodes in Kafka's works. A window is opened onto Guattari's curatorial ambitions, cinematic projects, and theory of minor cinema, bringing into focus how he translated theoretical preoccupations into the cultural sector with reference to diverse semiotic media.

Félix Guattari visited Japan on a number of occasions during the 1980s. These visits consisted of invited lectures and a series of conversations and collaborations with Japanese intellectuals, artists, and architects. His collaborative writings with Deleuze, particularly the Kafka and Rhizome books, began to appear in Japanese translation in the late 1970s. By the mid-eighties, however, Anti-Oedipus was available for Japanese readers. The year 1985 saw the publication of Guattari's conversations and co-authored papers with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka collected under (...) the title of Velocity of Light, Fire of Zen: Assemblage 1985. This was followed in 1986 with the translation of Guattari's jointly authored volume with Antonio Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. In the same year, the colourful volume Tokyo Theatre: Guattari in Tokyo appeared. This volume includes the present translation. It also contains multiple contributions by leading Japanese intellectuals, especially ‘neo-academicist’ types like Akira Asada who were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in the first two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (shrink)

Nietzsche : by way of an introduction -- Winnicott : the psychoanalytic family -- Anti-Oedipus : reading, listening, analysing -- Process notes : productions and syntheses -- Sophocles : under the sign of nemesis -- Cixous : the unseen seen -- Dôsirand : the transitional subject.

Introduction: Cartographies in becoming -- The happy depression -- Integrated world capitalism -- Planetary psychopathia -- Postmediatic affect -- User's manual-- Deleuze and the rhizomatic machine -- Why is anti-Oedipus the book of the '68 movement? -- Kafka, hypertext, and assemblages -- The tantric egg -- Chaosmosis -- The provisional eternity of friendship.

This is the first detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari--"Mr. Anti" as the French press labelled him--the friend of and collaborator with..

What is the value of interdisciplinary theory? Are there any boundaries left which social theory must recognize? This book argues that the vital questions in theory are being posed and followed at the interdisciplinary level. Our awareness of this is curtailed by the institutional organization of social theory which still tends to assume a canon and clear boundaries. According to Gary Genosko, postmodernism has provided the main challenge to institutional myopia. Yet postmodernism is too often treated as an aberration or (...) a blind alley. The challenge for social theorists today is to develop and practice `undisciplined theories' which constantly question the limits of the canon and expose the porous character of boundaries. The book contains rigorous and original analyses of the writings of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, McLuhan, Freud and St Augustine. The author uses these materials to point the way to credible forms of undisciplined theory. Three tasks emerge as urgent issues for social theory: the need to think and feel ambivalence; to track the circulation of anomalies in theoretical texts; and to learn from the fascination with interpretative boundlessness. Undisciplined Theory will be of interest to academics of social and cultural theory. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal elaborar uma crítica do sistema sexogênero,tal como ele foi construído e sustentado pelo modelo tradicional dadiferençabinária edipiana entre os sexos. Para isso recorre-se prioritariamenteaalguma categorias dos pensamentos de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, taiscomoas de devir e multiplicidade, as quais permitem fundamentar uma outravisãodas sexualidades, que recusa o modelo da identidade. Taisproposições,articuladascom o conceito de intervenção proposto por Judith Butler,possibilitamainda a formulação de uma política radical de subversão nãoapenasdos gêneros identitários, como também da identidade (...) molar dassubjetividadescomo um todo.This article aims to elaborate a critical vision of the sex-gender system as itwas constructed and sustained by the traditional model of binary Oedipaldifference between sexes. To do so, it preferentially runs over some categoriesof Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thoughts, as becoming and multiplicity,as they permit to ground another vision of sexualities, which refuse theidentity model. These propositions, linked with the concept of agencyproposed by Judith Butler, enable the formulation of a radical policy ofsubversion not only of genders identities as well as subjectivities’ molaridentity in general. (shrink)