Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Lacan. In any case, this dual intersection of relatively merged identities

explains the image of the wasp and the orchid, as Nadaud says, a

duality in order ‘to conceive production as an assemblage of differ-

ences’ (The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 20). In other words, they connected to

each other rhizomatically, with their ‘thought and writing ... flying off

in every direction – even if in different ways (in a disordered, flowing

way for Guattari; and a conceptualized, organized way for Deleuze; in

multiple practices for Guattari; and with the solitude of an academic

researcher for Deleuze)’ (21). In contrast to Bifo’s fairly macroscopic

view of the Deleuze-Guattari collaboration, The Anti-Oedipus Papers

is more microscopic, and indeed offers what is commonly termed ‘too

much information’, except for the most ardent schizoanalyst. How-

ever, just as Bifo provides in his idiosyncratic manner an overview of

the arc from Anti-Oedipus toWhat Is Philosophy?, The Anti-Oedipus

Papersprovides insight regarding the genesis of different concepts

appearing subsequently in Kafka. For a Minor Literatureand A Thousand

Plateausas well as in Guattari’s own works.

The Anti-Oedipus Papersconstitutes a record of a brief and intense

moment in time, one that presumably represented at once a peak and

a new phase in the reflection both of Deleuze and Guattari. Bifo came

to know Guattari shortly thereafter, while Guattari was in the midst of

developing A Thousand Plateausand engaging in all manner of parallel

political activities, including support for the Free Radio movement.

So Bifo observed Guattari’s work, close up and then from Italy, as it

moved from the peak period of the late 1970s into the ‘winter years’ of

the 1980s. Following Bifo’s narrative, in contrast to the effervescence

and intensity of the post-1968 collaboration with Deleuze, the final

decade of Guattari’s life was weighted down with the burdens of the

zeitgeist, the expectation of his willing participation, and the demands

of the aforementioned personal relationship.

Bifo’s very personal reflection about his friend thus follows a specific

trajectory from start to finish. As we indicated above, the second chapter,

on happy depression, emphasized the ephemeral nature of friendship,

and in the final chapter, that nature is taken up again, but in a different

way. In closing, Bifo conjoins the key elements that sum up his under-

standing of the works of Félix Guattari, alone and in collaboration with

Gilles Deleuze. He does so by creating a link between concepts produced

through that collaboration, notably the Body without Organs (that Bifo

considers, in his own terms, as a tantric egg), and the final works of these

authors, Guattari’s Chaosmosisand the collaborative What Is Philosophy?.

As we have seen, the collaborative relationship with Gilles Deleuze was

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