Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

If a connection exists between the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and

the becoming-sensible of society, we must not consider it an extrinsic

fact, an accidental political-activist adaptability of their concepts. This

thinking functions like a semiochemistry, and that is why it is close to

real movement. This is a thought that doesn’t conceive itself as a coher-

ent system, but rather as a mutagenic apparatus, one that acts linguist-

ically, conceptually, neologistically on the collective conscious organism

with which it enters into contact. This is a thought that functions by

unleashing an unpredictable chain of links.

Molecules and events

‘DG thought’ is a compound combination of molecularism and even-

tualism, that is, a semiochemical viral apparatus.

We can try to see how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari produced

both together and separately. What did Deleuze bring to rhizomatic

thought with his work on the history of philosophy and particularly

on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson? And what did Guattari bring with

his work on institutional psychoanalysis, on collectivities of enuncia-

tion, on political subjectivation, and on molecular desire?

Deleuze brought the event, Guattari brought the molecules.

Deleuze brought a deconstruction of ontology: the relation between

Being and Subject that is the basis of metaphysical construction from

Plato to Hegel is dismantled by Deleuze piece by piece in his pre-1968

books, in his studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza and Kant.

But it is Guattari who brought a whole language deriving from

chemistry, alchemy, pharmacology, hydraulics and even electricity, as

well as, obviously, from political activism.

And it is thanks to all of these conceptual implements contributed

by Guattari that the rhizomatic machine begins to operate, because it

is through this whole machinery of flows and swarms, it is thanks to

this biological and psychochemical teeming, that one can imagine

processes of subjectivation, where the history of philosophy had only

seen the Subject, and a multiplicity of reversible and non-totalizable

becomings (les devenirs) where the history of philosophy had situated

Being.

******

Deleuze and Guattari’s radical innovation starts with Anti-Oedipus,

where the work that each of them had done separately starts to bear

96 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography

9780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 96