Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972--1977 (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Félix Guattari
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1584350601
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 (including the appendix to Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and "How Martians Make Love," a roundtable discussion with Guattari, Lotringer, Catherine Clément, and Serge Leclaire from 1972 (still unpublished in French). This new, expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze) 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."
concrete situations down to a simple alternative of classes or camps. It will no longer pretend to find all the answers in the action of a unique revolutionary party standing as a central depository of theo retical and practical truth. Therefore, a micropolitics of desire would no longer present itself as representing the masses and as interpreting their struggles. Which does not mean that it would condemn, a priori, all party action, all idea of party line, of program or even of centralism, but
schedule and holidays. A very elaborate "grid," or table, with dual-entries for the amount of time and the type of task, was used to account for those, in particular, who worked on a rota basis and to ensure that nursing, supervisory, and ordinary custodial activities were made compatible. In order to manage such a schedule, it became necessary to put a group of supervisors in place with an overall view of the needs of the institution and, in some respects, to assume the function of a chief of
chotherapy. But these experiments are extremely minor and very precarious at the mercy of an untoward shuffling of posts for their principal directors. When the iron curtain was falling over Eastern Europe, an opportunity was lost to sweep our own front door by liquidating all the bureaucratic archaisms that prolong the more absurd and harmful psychiatric institutions. Only a veritable "de Statization" of French psychiatry can allow the development of a climate of emulation between various
Freudian unconscious (whose reductionist interpretations, based on normalized noetic structures patterned on dominant coordinates and signification we cannot condone) only gives us access to a universe of transformations of an incorporeal nature: when everything appears to he stratified and definitively crystalized, it introduces virtualities of meaning and praxis that are extrinsic to the opposition realitylrepresentation. For example, if it happens that a patient tells his analyst about a
promotion of such a subj ectivity of difference, of the atypical, of utopia, our epoch could topple into atrocious conflicts of identity, like those which the people of ex-Yugoslavia have undergone. "52 The disastrous implosion which ex-Yugoslavia experienced, as well as the dangers of generalized warlike violence on a planetary scale seen in the war against Iraq, led Guattari in the '90s to oppose such logics of vicious oppositions with the greatest rigor and to debate this topic further with