Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the

passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious.

Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather,

the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed

subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire

and its object are one and the same thing. (Anti-Oedipus, 26, empha-

sis in the original)

Once it is freed from ideological representations of its protagonists,

’68 is the first movement of mass desiring productions, the first refrain

of refrains that has ever been felt on the planet: a deafening refrain, a

gigantic mechanization of Tinguelyian cogwheels that together conjure

up a universe of non-necessary, but possible events. ’68 was in this sense

the first movement without necessity, without lack, without need.

[As Marx notes,] what exists in fact is not lack, but passion as a ‘natural

and sensuous object’. Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the

contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts

within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire;

it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural

and social. (Anti-Oedipus, 27, citation modified to conform to original

French)

Creationism

The theme of desire first articulated in Anti-Oedipusanticipates the

development of subsequent texts. In Chaosmosis, Guattari’s final work,

he speaks of the relationship between desire and rhythm: rhythm is

the modality of projecting the world by a singularity. And desire alone

can assemble a singular rhythm with another singular rhythm. What

Guattari called the refrain is precisely this singularization of rhythm,

this singularity of breathing, of striding, of speaking, of gesturing and

especially of synchronizing oneself with the world. Desire allows a refrain

to tune itself in with another refrain.

When different refrains start singing in tune there occurs a shared

world.

We can call this conception creationism because the world appears

here like the projection of a creative activity that intersects and assem-

bles with other creative activities. The truth is a bridge over the abyss

of sense. But you cannot travel over this bridge if you do not share the

intensive world of whoever constructed it in order to traverse the

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