| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 20th-century philosophy |
| Félix Guattari | |
| Birth Name: | Pierre-Félix Guattari |
| Birth Date: | 30 March 1930 |
| Birth Place: | Villeneuve-les-Sablons, Oise, France |
| Death Place: | La Borde clinic, Cour-Cheverny, France |
| Alma Mater: | University of Paris |
| Institutions: | University of Paris VIII |
| School Tradition: | Continental philosophy, post-Marxism, Freudo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism,[1] [2] |
| Main Interests: | Psychoanalysis, Marxist philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, semiotics |
| Influences: | Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, R. D. Laing, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze |
| Influenced: | Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Antonio Negri, Bryan Reynolds, Michael Hardt, Nick Land, Marcella Althaus-Reid |
| Notable Ideas: | Assemblage, desiring-production, deterritorialization, ecosophy, schizoanalysis |
Pierre-Félix Guattari (pronounced as /fr/; 30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.[1]
Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of northwest Paris, France.[3] His father was a factory manager and he was engaged in Trotskyist political activism as a teenager, before studying and training under (and being analyzed by) the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s.[4] Subsequently, he worked all his life at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde under the direction of Lacan's pupil, the psychiatrist Jean Oury. He first met Oury at a private psychiatric clinic in Saumery in the Loire region at the suggestion of Oury's brother Fernand, who had been Guattari's high school teacher. Guattari followed Oury to La Borde in 1955, two years after it had been established.[5] La Borde was a venue for conversation among many students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and social work.
One particularly novel orientation developed at La Borde consisted of the suspension of the classical analyst/analysand pair in favour of an open confrontation in group therapy. In contrast to the Freudian school's individualistic style of analysis, this practice studied the dynamics of several subjects in complex interaction. It led Guattari into a broader philosophical exploration of, and political engagement with, a vast array of intellectual and cultural domains (philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, architecture, etc.).
From 1955 to 1965, Guattari edited and contributed to La Voie Communiste (Communist Way), a Trotskyist newspaper.[6] He supported anti-colonialist struggles as well as the Italian Autonomists. Guattari also took part in the G.T.P.S.I., which gathered many psychiatrists at the beginning of the 1960s and created the Association of Institutional Psychotherapy in November 1965. It was at the same time that he founded, along with other militants, the F.G.E.R.I. (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study & Research) and its review Recherche (Research), working on philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethnology, education, mathematics, architecture, etc. The F.G.E.R.I. came to represent aspects of the multiple political and cultural engagements of Guattari: the Group for Young Hispanics, the Franco-Chinese Friendships (in the times of the people's communes), the opposition activities with the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, the participation in the M.N.E.F., with the U.N.E.F., the policy of the offices of psychological academic aid (B.A.P.U.), the organization of the University Working Groups (G.T.U.), but also the reorganizations of the training courses with the Centers of Training to the Methods of Education Activities (C.E.M.E.A.) for psychiatric male nurses, as well as the formation of a Fellowship of Nurses (Amicales d'infirmiers) (in 1958), the studies on architecture and the projects of construction of a day hospital for "students and young workers".
In 1967, he appeared as one of the founders of OSARLA (Organization of solidarity and Aid to the Latin-American Revolution). In 1968, Guattari met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Julian Beck. He was involved in the large-scale French protests of May 1968, starting from the Movement of 22 March. It was in the aftermath of 1968 that Guattari met Gilles Deleuze at the University of Vincennes. Then he began to lay the groundwork for Anti-Oedipus (1972), which Michel Foucault described as "an introduction to the non-fascist life" in his preface to the book. In 1970, he created), which developed the approach explored in the Recherches journal. In 1973, Guattari was tried and fined for committing an "outrage to public decency" for publishing an issue of Recherches on homosexuality.[7] In 1977, he created the CINEL for "new spaces of freedom" before joining the environmental movement with his "ecosophy" in the 1980s.
Guattari viewed the primary commodity produced under capitalism as subjectivity itself.[8] According to Guattari, producing consuming subjects with novel desires satisfiable through continuing purchase of commodities and experiences is the precondition to creating a consumer society.
In his last book, Chaosmosis (1992), Guattari returned to the question of subjectivity: "How to produce it, collect it, enrich it, reinvent it permanently in order to make it compatible with mutant Universes of value?" This concern runs through all of his works, from Psychoanalysis and Transversality (a collection of articles from 1957 to 1972), through Years of Winter (1980–1986) and Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989), to his collaboration with Deleuze, What is Philosophy? (1991). In Chaosmosis, Guattari proposes an analysis of subjectivity in terms of four functors: (1) material, energetic, and semiotic fluxes; (2) concrete and abstract machinic phyla; (3) virtual universes of value; and (4) finite existential territories.[9] This scheme attempts to grasp the heterogeneity of components involved in the production of subjectivity, as Guattari understands it, which include both signifying semiotic components as well as "a-signifying semiological dimensions" (which work "in parallel or independently of" any signifying function that they may have).[10]
On 29 August 1992, two weeks after an interview for the Greek television curated by Yiorgos Veltsos,[11] Guattari died in La Borde from a heart attack.[12] [13]
In 1995, the posthumous release of Guattari's Chaosophy published essays and interviews concerning Guattari's work as director of the experimental La Borde clinic and his collaborations with Deleuze. The collection includes essays such as "Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines," cosigned by Deleuze (with whom he had coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), and "Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist." It provides an introduction to Guattari's theories on "schizoanalysis", a process that develops Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis but which pursues a more experimental and collective approach towards analysis.
In 1996, another collection of Guattari's essays, lectures, and interviews, Soft Subversions, was published, which traces the development of his thought and activity throughout the 1980s ("the winter years"). His analyses of art, cinema, youth culture, economics, and power formations, develop concepts such as "micropolitics," "schizoanalysis," and "becoming-woman," which aim to liberate subjectivity and open up new horizons for political and creative resistance to the standardizing and homogenizing processes of global capitalism (which he calls "Integrated World Capitalism") in the "post-media era." For example, he used the term "micropolitics" to delimit a certain level of observation of social practices (the unconscious economy, where there is a certain flexibility in the expression of desire and institution) and, practically, to define, in a segregated world, the field of intervention of "people who work to interest themselves in the discourse of the other."[14]
Note: Many of the essays found in these works have been individually translated and can be found in the English collections.
Other collaborations: