view, in his way of handling concepts, but even from a philosophical
perspective Guattari brings in an activism, a kind of materialism, a
sense of the pragmatic aspect of concepts that, in a way, Deleuze didn’t
possess before ... And this is why I believe it is worth emphasizing their
specificity.GM :But why an Italian book? Why you, and not a French intellectual?
Why not a French friend of Guattari?Bifo:Because Guattari’s friends were not philosophers. Well, he also
had friends who were philosophers, but mostly his friends were artists,
different kinds of druggies, crazies, and finally among his many, many
friends he has been remembered in other ways. Jean-Jacques Lebel
wrote plays in honour of Guattari, then there is a work of art which is
a heart in a garbage bin, a machine full of plants. Gérard Fromanger,
the painter who lives in Siena – one of the greatest contemporary
French painters – created many works thinking about Guattari ... After
his death, there has been a flourishing of these kinds of works. One
also should remember that Guattari lived – and kept living even after
his death – more as the guru of a community of oddballs than as a rep-
resentative of academia. He’s is not a maître-à-penser[master thinker],
but rather, in a certain sense, a maître-à-vivre[life master].
But I also think that one could give another kind of answer. In the
French publishing world, in the French cultural world, which in the last
twenty years has suffered from a great crisis of cynicism, Guattari is seen
as an interloper of sorts, as a madman who penetrated the philosophical
field preaching deviant and heretical principles. We should state things
clearly and just say that since the so-called ‘New Philosophy’, in France
we have seen the growth of a deep political conformity which has spread
to the vast majority of academia and the publishing world. The French
publishing industry is extraordinarily conformist, certainly more than the
Anglo-American one. A French publisher I spoke with just a few years ago
told me that Deleuze and Guattari are certainly present in the French
bookstores, but as writers belonging to a past era, not to the current one.
Whereas anyone who has read Deleuze and Guattari knows very well that
there are no authors that are more contemporary, or actually more
‘future’, than those two. In France, the idea is that quality resides in
Bernard Henry-Lévy, which means the complete banalization of journal-
ism, the abandonment of conceptual thought and, most of all, of any
non-conformist way of thinking. These seem to be the best reasons to
understand why the French philosophers don’t talk about Guattari.142 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_14_inte.pdf 10/3/08 11:37 AM Page 142