Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

abyss. It is not a question of sharing his reasoning, nor of expressing

agreement, because it is not a question of the content of an argument-

ative activity. It is a matter of conceptual creations, that is, of pro-

jections capable of creating a world, of constructing traversable bridges.

The truth does not consist in finding a sense around which to con-

struct consensus, but consists in projecting worlds endowed with sense

for whoever shares the intensity that is the motor of this projection.

Guattari felt a certain distaste for the big words of traditional philo-

sophy, such as truth and freedom, and yada yada yada.

******

The idea that the collective process can be configured as the realization

of an implicit truth in history is the Hegelian heredity from which the

’68 consciousness was unable to free itself. In the period following ’68,

precisely when it seemed that the dialectical project was about to be

realized, the dialectical illusion dissolved and society became ever less

reducible to a global project. From that moment onward, speaking

about truth – to seek a truth, a finality, a positive destination from the

intricacies of collective events – became increasingly improbable. From

that moment onward, only the communities of friendship (not of

membership) could produce sharable social life.

Unfortunately, in the political history of the last decade, the ’68 gen-

eration understood this too late. After having hurriedly abandoned the

totalitarian idols of the twentieth century, it replaced dialectical truth

with cynicism, converted over to any conformism and stooped to any

academic, political and spectacular baseness.

But friendship remains the richest lesson of the history of the move-

ments. And friendship means a provisional community that is not based

on any common origin, on any written destiny, on any historical necess-

ity, but instead only on provisionally assembling refrains. It means love

for the same situations, pursuing the same provisional objectives, taking

pleasure in following the same path together, or failing together, and

falling.

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