Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Guattari addressed the decomposition of the subject, a mutation in

the very concept of the subject. It is not the molar constitution of the

subject that interested him, Guattari said, nor the Freudian universal

Unconscious mathematized by Lacan, nor the molar dialectic of

classes. What interested him was the process of subjectivation that

always follows singular pathways.

There is no subject, but rather the process of subjectivation. Sub-

jects become through the juxtaposition of psychic, linguistic,

imaginary, biological and historical elements. And this juxta-

position is molecular in character, proceeding through the encounter

and conjugation of heterogeneous components (biological, media-

tic, logical, affective, machinic and organic). Guattari abandons

the universalism of the dialectic and of psychoanalysis by oppos-

ing the idea of a constituted subject with the idea of a process

of subjectivation having a molecular, singular and combinatory

character.

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In A Thousand Plateaus, the Guattarian molecular inspiration meets the

Deleuzian principle of plural ontology. In the concept of the Body with-

out Organs (at the centre of A Thousand Plateaus), there is a Deleuzian

inspiration, the idea of a projective and multiple ontology, and there

is also a Guattarian inspiration in the idea of molecularity, of the sub-

segmental proliferation of matter.

Up to Anti-Oedipus, Guattarian thought is a work of decomposition of

the social, the psychic and the linguistic object. Guattari worked on this

compositional (or decompositional) cognitive model of language and of

sociality, seeking to find (through his text, Psychanalyse et Transversalité/

Psychoanalysis and Transversality) which psychic segments are at work

in the formation of subject-groups and subjugated groups, which social

segments are at work within the formation of the Unconscious, and

so forth. Social processes, just like natural processes, cannot be explained

on the basis of identitarian molar oppositions, but on the basis of

the proliferation of mutagenic agents, of their decomposition and

recomposition.

The Body without Organs

Let us take this most mysterious and strangest concept, the Body

without Organs, that Deleuze and Guattari adopted from Artaud in

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