Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

From the crisis of psychoanalysis what emerges is schizopolitics, a

politics understood as therapy of the collective functioning of language

and as the dissemination of therapeutic flows in the circuit of social

communication.

In the modern era, the political was the order imposed by rational

will on the ensemble of imaginary, projective and communicative phe-

nomena. Rationality – that is, the capacity to choose between alter-

native decisions according to a universal criterion – guided the will

• that is, the capacity to pursue a plan and to impose it on the course
  of mental, communicative and material events. None of this exists any
  more. The signs that constitute the shared world of the Infosphere are
  too numerous and too quick to be critically analysed and understood.
  Consequently, the conditions no longer exist for a rational decision
  about their complex order, and they exist even less for a voluntary
  orientation of the course of global events.

*****

The course of global events thus presents itself as a psychopathological

chaos in which individual and even collective minds lose any ability to

guide their own destiny. Psychic suffering is derived from the feeling of

rampant inadequacy between the pretext of a voluntary and rational

finality of action and the reality of random and inconsistent move-

ment, the reality of an imaginary deprived of order and hierarchies. It

is the legacy of modern rationalism that produces a feeling of inade-

quacy in the collective mind.

*****

Schizoanalysis suggests another way of relating to politics. No possibility

for rational selection exists, nor for voluntary finality. Schizoanalysis pro-

poses to abolish any normative reference to rational judgment.

Schizoanalysis institutes the criterion for a singularity of judgment

that is parallel to the singularity of communicative flows and existen-

tial aggregates.

No social coherence exists any more; rather, singular processes of

socialization exist, and they can assume their own self-governance

only if we are able to free ourselves completely from the normative and

organizational reference to the social aggregate.

We must declare human society dissolved, because humanity no longer

has any reason to remain together. The disappearance of universal judg-

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