Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

most in the intellectual arena: it is precisely because the virtuality of the

future never closes up that Guattari said in a late interview, ‘Philosophy

is essential to human existence’ (2002, 19). And philosophers such as

Bifo and Guattari are, unfortunately, few and far between.

II Friendship and community

One is struck in reading Félixby the profound sympathy and willing-

ness that Bifo exercises in facing the truth about Guattari and their

shared era, but it is a truth that required a deep reflection in order to

state things as Bifo truly understood them, not as some might have

liked them to be. Bifo concludes the autobiographical introductory

chapter by expressing his desire to ‘reconstruct the rhythmic map of

Félix-thought’, and then describes an even greater ambition, to employ

that map to ‘cause harmony to resonate among the chords, the refrains

and the dissonances in the contemporary planetary rhapsody’. Given

such a lofty (some would say utopian) goal, he then proceeds in a

decidedly curious fashion in starting Part I by raising the question of

depression. As we say in note 1 to Chapter 2, the translation we chose

for the chapter title, ‘The Happy Depression’ (for ‘La depressione Felix’)

plays with Guattari’s name and its literal meaning. This choice of real

starting point is, for Bifo, a necessary approach for understanding

Félix-thought and the ‘Félix-machine’, not just the expansion of provi-

sional community but also the possibility of its dissolution. Given that

the book’s final chapter evokes this relationship marvellously in the

title, ‘the provisional eternity of friendship’, we can understand that

Bifo wishes to frame the biography overall in relation to the funda-

mental fragility of existence in which friendship itself has an often

crucial, yet ephemeral status.

So Bifo raises the little-discussed question of depression, or rather,

little discussed in the context, on the one hand, of Guattari and his

political and intellectual commitments and, on the other hand, of the

theoretical concepts of desire and the politics of desiring community

and activism. And little discussed philosophically, he argues: ‘We have

foreclosed [the experience of depression] and made it shameful.’ Things

fall apart, Bifo would say, and so he wants to speak to his friends and

to Guattari’s and consider frankly the consequences of political action

in both of their lives, and how that action was related to a process of

dissolution, also known as depression. As Bifo argues in the interview

published at the end of this book, Guattari was unable to assess his

aging process as well as ‘his feminine side and his depression’ since he

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