Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

nized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that

verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the

totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing

absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day – with

occasional breathing spells – would teleologically be the absolute of

suffering. (Negative Dialectics, 320)

Hegel is starkly turned on his head: there is no truth at the end of the

historical process, no positive totality beyond contradiction, no history

beyond prehistory. The conclusion of the process of modernity is not the

positive totality that ’68 had thought to bring about. On the contrary, it

is the deployment of an absolute lie in the form of totalitarianism, indeed

of totalitarianisms. Archaic totalitarianisms of the land, of blood, of race,

even the utopist ones of class, of socialism, of the party, and finally the

most powerful and totalizing totalitarianism: the totalitarianism of money,

of value, of the code: the totalitarianism of communication.

Anti-Oedipus: desire and territoriality

Desire can never be deceived. Interests can be deceived, unrecognized

or betrayed, but not desire. Whence Reich’s cry: no, the masses were

not deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what has to be explained.

It happens that one desires against one’s own interests ... (Anti-Oedipus,

257)

The process of subjectivation is constructed around the investments

of desire.

The subject does not come first before desire; rather, it is desire that

trails after a trace that we can call subjectivation. There is no subject

that desires, but a field of assemblage in which organic, machinic, his-

torical, sexual, etc., segments abound. Desire is the force that guides

processes of assemblage [agencement] and sets in motion the process of

subjectivation while directing it.

If I recall well, they do not yet speak about refrains [ritournelles] in Anti-

Oedipus, but the concept of the refrain – that Guattari had just elaborated

in his 1979 The Machinic Unconscious [L’Inconscient machinique], and then

in A Thousand Plateaus– is essential for understanding how the process

of subjectivation works in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. In fact, it is

through the refrain, that is, through a singular semiotic flow capable of

creating assemblages with the surrounding semiotic landscapes, that the

process of subjectivation is realized. This process is concretized through

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