Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

cured with psychopharmacological means, tools of quick intervention

aimed at restoring productivity to the mind. For the residual popu-

lation excluded from the virtual circuit, psychopathology then becomes

the new condition of normality: an aggressive normality, of which inte-

gralism, nationalism and conformism are common manifestations.

*****

Perhaps the crisis of psychoanalysis is truly derived from the nor-

malization of psychopathology, from the fact that this is becoming

a shared condition. How is it possible to maintain a specific area of

analysis and psychotherapy when the processes of politics, production

and communication seem to coincide with a progressive pathologiza-

tion of social existence?

Naturally I realize how dangerous this position is.

In this way of thinking there is, first, a risk of flattening out indi-

vidual histories, of reducing them to manifestations of a generalized

social pathology and, secondly, we also run the risk of losing sight of

the specificity of social analysis, definitively diluting it within a psycho-

pathological frame. Finally, and more radically, one must ask: who gives

us the right to judge as pathological the form of life that is emerging?

Here we have a problem that we must pose whenever we exer-

cise judgment on the political, psychoanalytical or even aesthetic

plane. What right do we have to consider as barbarous that which

simply escapes our criterion for judgment? Is it perhaps not a question

of an intrinsic limit of the human character in critical thinking? Is

it perhaps not a question of a limit from which we cannot in fact

be freed but that we should admit, simply recognizing our inability

to understand what has already surpassed the limits of humanistic

culture?

*****

When we are horrified when faced with the expanse of little houses

decorated with lawn gnomes that are flourishing, for example, along

the Sicilian coast, what right do we have to pretend that our taste is

objectively superior to the taste of ninety per cent of Sicilians who like

to construct Mexican-style houses with Nordic gnomes between the

valley of temples and the Ionian Sea?

Is there not perhaps an irremediable contradiction between aesthetics

and democracy?

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