Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

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Interview with Franco Berardi

(Bifo)

by Giuseppina Mecchia

Bologna, 11 July 2005

Giuseppina Mecchia:Why do you think that your 2001 book, Félix, is the

first monograph devoted to Félix Guattari? Why was it written by an Italian

intellectual and political activist? And when did you start writing it?

Franco Berardi (Bifo):Well, let’s start from the end. I thought about

writing something on Félix exactly at the end of August 1992, just

a few days after his death, while we were going to the Père Lachaise

cemetery for the burial. I was walking with a friend of ours, Xavier

Delcourt, and I told him that we had to start working on telling people

about Félix. And I started right away and worked on it for a very long

time. Actually, at a certain point, I talked to Paolo Fabbri, who at the

time was teaching in Bologna, about the need to write something on

Guattari. So, there isn’t a specific time when I worked on the book, I

kept writing for almost ten years. I started in 1992 and then I just kept

writing and rewriting. Because, after all, it is not a theoretical book or

an academic book: it is really a sort of narrative.

Then, why isn’t there a body of work on Guattari? This is a good

question, and there are several answers for it: first of all, it is true –

even if we might regret it – that Guattari lives in the shadow of the

couple Deleuze and Guattari. This is why there are many books on

Deleuze that are actually books on Guattari. There is this flattening out

of the couple Deleuze and Guattari on the part of the academic com-

munity, which has accepted Deleuze in its midst while Guattari is this

embarrassing fellow traveller about whom much less is known.

But in fact, if you think about Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateausor

What is Philosophy?, that is, the books they wrote together, you realize

immediately that Guattari’s contribution was truly decisive, even from

a purely philosophical point of view. Surely from a linguistic point of

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