lived his political and philosophical engagement in a heroic, ‘real men’
mode of thinking: ‘There was the prevalence of the sense of historical
presence, of historical duty, of the dialectic, which made it impossible
for him to grasp the cognitive element that is present within depres-
sion’ (Interview, 159).
Bifo is also not afraid to confront the intersection between Guattari’s
socio-political and philosophical engagement and the personal, since
‘this story of [Félix’s] depression ... we called it Josephine’, that is,
Guattari’s life partner from 1986 onward. As Bifo admits in the interview,
‘the Guattarian network [of friends] did not want to talk about her’
(Interview, 160); an isolation occurred, then a break with friends, and
Bifo concludes, ‘so even in this, the relationship with femininity and with
aging, with depression, became a crisis factor within the political com-
munity’ (160). Yet Bifo’s perspective on the importance of depression
remains grounded in the philosophical and political, because depression
has a deep core, he maintains, in the ‘collapse of modern hope’, as one
realizes that his or her ‘desire no longer has any place in the real’ (160).
However, this dire situation does not justify blinding oneself to these cir-
cumstances since such blindness results in an ‘impotence of political will’- ‘I am not saying that depression has a political origin, nor do I want to
forget Josephine. I just want to say that depression is born out of the
community’s immediacy.’
This conjuncture with which Bifo opens his reflection inspired by a
friendship with Guattari also points toward the important collaboration
of Guattari with Deleuze. As Bifo understands their work, notably in Anti-
Oedipus, ‘the concept of desire [as the productive power of the uncon-
scious] is linked to a youthful utopia deriving from Romanticism, a utopia
which we should not disavow but cannot worship either’. Hence, Bifo
argues for conceptualizing both sides of desire, as both productivity and
as ‘tension [that] is destined to fall, to die down’. This mature perspective
is why Bifo comprehends the Deleuze-Guattari collaboration in its total-
ity, contrasting the initial collaboration with the final one by evoking
their words on friendship at the start of What Is Philosophy?, and he sees
in this latter work the ‘elaboration of a senile utopia’. On the basis of just
such a ‘sharing of experience’ and ‘understanding of its hallucinatory and
thus impermanent character’, he says, we might envision clearly ‘the dis-
solution of the dependency and the attachment translating desire into
depression’ – in short, ‘the way to nirvana’ – ‘the condition for being able
to live desire while transcending it at the same time.’
These perspectives, taken solely from Chapter 2 (and from related
material in the interview), draw attention to the manner in which Bifo
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