Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

ment, of politics and of normativity does not indicate the provisional

crisis of a rationality that a new universal rationality ought to succeed (as

both dialectical historicism and progressivist political thought pretend).

No human universality will ever exist anymore. Schizoanalysis starts from

here.

Schizoanalysis is the ability to constitute sociality starting from the

singular recombination of imaginative, mnestic and desiring elements.

The self-constitution of post-human singularities.

The reactive dynamics of territoriality

The pathology with which schizoanalysis concerns itself always arises

at the meeting point between the ecology of the mind and the becom-

ing of the world.

Contemporary history is increasingly dominated by rising demands

for subjective singularity – quarrels over language, autonomist

demands, issues of nationalism and of the nation, which, in total

ambiguity, express on the one hand an aspiration for national lib-

eration, but also manifest themselves in what I would call con-

servative reterritorializations of subjectivity. A certain universal

representation of subjectivity, incarnated by capitalist coloniza-

tion in both East and West, has gone bankrupt – although it’s

not yet possible to fully measure the scale of such a failure.

(Guattari, Chaosmosis, 3)

In the 1990s, the psychochemical constitution of the planet entered

into a dark phase of turbulence. The molecular substances that

were formed in the course of the rapid maceration of modernity

unleashed by ’68 kept compounding, composing and interacting,

finally resulting in a phase that we could consider as a de-volution. The

crisis of industrial labour, the collapse of the authoritarian Socialist

bloc, the digital revolution, the disaggregation of the patriarchal

family, the diffusion of a movement of feminist autonomy that upsets

masculine power, the mediatization of planetary communication,

and all the innumerable local processes of mutation are provoking

a reactionary recouping. Guattari described the aggregate of these

processes by talking about the contradictory and psychotic dynamic of

the movement of deterritorialization and the counter-movement of

reterritorialization.

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