Felix Guattari

From Geography

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), Mille Plateaus (1980) and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991).

Anti-Oedipus (1972) is 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. Many other great 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. Materialist psychiatry and its modeling of the unconscious in its relationship with society and its productive processes. 2. A critique of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis that focuses on its theory of the Oedipus complex. 3. A re-writing of Karl Marx’s materialist account of the history of society’s modes of production. 4. "Schizo-analysis," a process meant to replace Sigmund Freud's interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality.

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

Schizo-analysis

In this section a minor definition is given of Schizo-analysis. Schizo-analysis combines the work of Marx, Freud and Nietzsch. It is not only a response to Sigmund Freud’s interpretation which had many shortcomings in basis analytic practice. In contrary to Freud, Guattari believes that schizophrenia 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).

But it also uses the freudian concept of Libido with the Marxist concept of labour-power and with will to power by Nietzsche. It transform:

    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 29 september 2011, at http://affinityproject.org/theories/guattari.html

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

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