Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

sequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.

(What Is Philosophy?, 118, emphasis in the original)

The thicker the infosphere, and the more intense and rapid the pro-

liferation, the more the mind risks drowning in the disorganized

potentiality of the brain, and the more the danger grows that the

rhythm will be broken.

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is

more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that

fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness

or precipitated into others that we no longer master. (What Is

Philosophy?, 201)

Philosophy, like poetry, like schizoanalysis, are creative activities, in

the sense that they do not have to restore a pre-existing order (Platonic

truth or normative psychic equilibrium or the originary order of

things). They undertake a struggle against chaos that is infinite, just as

chaos is infinite. ‘The struggle against chaos does not take place

without an affinity with its enemy,’ Gilles and Félix say. (What Is

Philosophy?, 191)

Irony, play, language, history, singularity

There also is a discourse here on politics. Politics aims at institutional-

izing chaoids, that is, at stabilizing in time the forms that are born

within social and communicative becoming.

The history of civilization is the history of this chaoid petrification

within states, churches, political parties and institutions of all kinds.

During the modern era, this process of fixation of becomings, of

making nomadism sedentary, has reached the fullest intensity and

efficiency.

States are profoundly inserted into the flesh, blood and mind of pop-

ulations. Massacres, genocides, deportations have been permanently

institutionalized within the chaoid-State.

The capitalist economy has brought strength and equilibrium to pol-

itics, but at the same time, it has produced movements of deterritorial-

ization that break the equilibrium and deterritorialize populations,

forms of life, culture, and thus disturb institutions producing a con-

tinuous crisis of the State. Wars in the twentieth century and the plan-

etary state of civil war of this desperate end of the century are the sign

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