Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

refrains that allow an assemblage between a conscious organism and

surrounding semiotic constellations that enter into vibration with it.

A discourse on the investments of desire must take into account the

effects of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that take place

around the subject, attracting it and repelling it.

Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and

deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they

reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial,

residual, archaic ... (Anti-Oedipus, 257, emphasis in the original)

Paranoid investments of desire are determined through the encounter

between a process of deterritorialization (for example, the effects of

capitalist globalization on local cultures) and a movement of reterritor-

ialization that aims at reconstructing marks of identity through stabil-

izing borders, through aggression and the individuation of difference,

and through the criminalization of alterity.

Anti-Oedipusproposes to adopt schizophrenia as the point of view

from which to redefine the task of analysis and psychotherapy. And

schizophrenia is ‘the absolute decodification of flows’.

Schizophrenia is the exploration of semiotic territories by a non-

subjectified flow of assemblages that are not fixed on a definitional

refrain. Thus, it does not ossify any model of interpretation and is not

identified as a closed subjectivity.

In this sense, while recognizing the suffering of this absolute opening,

of this speed of displacement and imagination that does not manage ever

to stop and solidify, Anti-Oedipusmakes of this process its own point of

view, from which it observes the agglutination of the normative social

field as an effect of a territorialization, of a molar redefinition of identity.

What circulates in the social body, in the process of communication?

What is the substance that holds together the symbolic exchange that

motivates human actions?

This substance is abstract; it is desire. It does not suffice to say: what

moves us is money, or what moves us is religion, or ideology. One

must understand how this abstract substance permeates behaviours,

how it is transformed into desire.

The genetic revolution occurred when it was discovered that, strictly

speaking, there is no transmission of flows, but a communication

of a code or an axiomatic, of a combinative apparatus [combinatoire]

informing the flows. Such is also the case for the social field: its

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