Felix Guattari

From Geography

Latest revision as of 11:42, 24 October 2011

Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a French born philosopher. Guattari spent most of his career working in the clinic La Borde, which is an institutional psychiatric clinic, where he trained under Lcan, also a french philosopher. Guattari remained at La Borde until his death.

He was part of and founded many groups during his time including, the Association of Institutional Psychotherapy, Radio Tomate, La Voie Communiste and also founded the F.G.E.R.I., the Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Researcg which represented his lifelong political commitments.

Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Gilles Deleuze

Felix Guattari met several other social philosophers and activists that shared some of his ideas. However, short after the events of may 1968 in Paris, he met the philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the University of Vincennes. This meeting seems to be a crucial point in the life of Guattari. With Gilles Deleuze, Guattari creates and publishes several works:

Anti-Oedipus (1972), Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991).

Because of the importance of collaboration with Deleuze it’s good to know what kind of philosophy Delueze follows. Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault) and artists (Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was the first-fruit of a remarkable and long-lasting collaboration between the two. It appears to be their most important work since it is their bestseller. Anti-Oedipus was originally intended to be the first volume of a two-volume work. The second volume, which was supposed to be entitled Schizoanalysis, never appeared under that title but was instead "replaced" by A Thousand Plateaus (Gosme-Séguret, n.d.).

Many other (contemporary) key thinkers refer to this product in their own work. For example Michel Foucault, who described this work as “an introduction to the non-fascist life” in his preface to the book. Anti-Oedipus focuses on the relationship of desire to reality and to capitalist society in particular. The book is devided into four sections:

1. The Desiring-Machines. Materialist psychiatry and its modeling of the unconscious in its relationship with society and its productive processes.

2. Psychoanalysis and Familialism: the Holy Family. A critique of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis that focuses on its theory of the Oedipus complex.

3. Savages, Barbarians and civilized man. A re-writing of Karl Marx’s materialist account of the history of society’s modes of production.

4. Introduction to Schizo-Analysis. "Schizo-analysis," a process meant to replace Sigmund Freud's interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality.

At the time of its publication in 1972, Anti-Oedipus had an explosive impact. In a state of high excitement, and still shaken by the events of May 1968, the French intelligentsia greeted this work by a renowned philosopher and an antiestablishment psychoanalyst as a revolutionary brick through the window of psychoanalysis (Gosme-Séguret, n.d.).

The book start up a reorientation of the human sciences (it influenced strongly the cultural, queer and feminist studies). Next to that the book had a fundamental influence in the socio-artistic field and created new lines of flight for a subjective post-modernism, to the extent that "anti-oedipal for many has become a lifestyle, a way of thinking and living" (Michel Foucault).

But even nowadays, almost forty years after its release, the book has lost nothing of its political and philosophical meanings. In these times of global capital and rampant neo-obscurantism, this book seems more relevant than ever before.

Although Guatarri published dozens of books and collections of essays himself and with other intellectuals, he remained in the shadow of Deleuze.

Schizo-analysis

In this section a minor definition is given of Schizo-analysis. Schizo-analysis is a response to Sigmund Freud’s interpretation which had many shortcomings in basis analytic practice. It is a functional evaluation of the direct investments of desire in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical. Schizo-analysis combines the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. It combines the Freudian concept of Libido with the Marxist concept of labour-power and with will to power by Nietzsche. But unlike the psychoanalysis libido doesn't need to be de-sexualized according to the schizo-analysis. The concept of will to power by Nietzsche is very important to the schizo-analysis in relation with desire. Desire is seen as a lack of something that someone has, it can be seen as something negative ("Desiring machines", n.d.). But Nietzsche treats desire as a positive concept, an ambition, a strive to exercise one's will over the other (Denneson, n.d.) and in this sense Nietzsche's concept of will to power was important to the Schizo-analysis.

In contrary to Freud, Guattari believes that [chizophrenia is an extreme mental state induced by capitalism itself. But capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality (Affinity project, n.d.). Because capitalism replaces the belief-system as a building Block of society with quantitative calculations of the market. So we could define schizophrenia as a set of unlimited semiosis is the mind and in society when belief-systems are transformed by the capitalistic system of money (Holland, 1999, p. 2).

We could say it transforms:

    Marxist political economy into social production, and psychoanalysis into desiring production, analyzing the former in terms of          
    industrial privatization and the latter in terms of the nuclear family. These are identical in nature, but different in régime, being 
    isolated under capitalism via the process of alienation. (Appleby, 2000, p. 241)

References:

1. Affinity project. (n.d.). Felix Guattari. Found 29th September 2011, at http://affinityproject.org/theories/guattari.html

2. Appleby, J. (2000). Schizoanalysis and Empiricism. Found 29th September 2011, at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/appleby_pli_9.pdf

3. Denneson, T. J. (n.d.) Society and the Individual in Nietzsche's The Will to Power . Found 29th September 2011, at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/travis_denneson/power.html

4. Desiring machines. (n.d.). Found 29th September 2011, at http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/desiring_machines.html

5. Holland, E. W. (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-oedipus: introduction to shizoanalysis. London: Routledge

6. Gosme-Séguret, S. (n.d.). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Found 29th September 2011, at http://www.answers.com/topic/anti-oedipus-capitalism-and-schizophrenia

7. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oepidus. Found on 29th September, at http://books.google.nl/books?hl=nl&lr=&id=4KCfPtku4qAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=anti+oedipus&ots=rbXHJ4TZ-e&sig=3YcWgH9p1cy5JMRiyKBPIfYmRsE#v=onepage&q&f=false

Contributors

Schizo-analysis published by --JornJoosten 14:08, 29 September 2011 (UTC) Edited by Fenki Evers & Anton de Hoogh --StefanBehlen 13:42, 24 October 2011 (CEST)