Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

pleasure and so forth ... And then the literary references are so numer-

ous that it is too hard to synthetize them.

GM:So, the existentialization of philosophy and of the concept in William

Burroughs, sure. But what do you think was the role at the end of the 1970s

and then in the 1980s of Guattari’s Italian contacts in the development of

his thought? What do you think about his collaboration with Antonio Negri?

I don’t know if you you know anything about his work with Michael Hardt,

that I think happened starting with his interest for Italy, among other things.

What were the activities through which relations between Italy and France

developed: psychiatric meetings, friendships, political commitments?

Bifo:Well, Guattari came to Italy in the 1970s, in 1974 to be precise,

to some meetings in Milan that Verdiglione organized,^1 and first of all

in Basaglia’s domain.^2 But there is a book which was the first thing that

I saw with Guattari in it, from 1973, entitled Psychoanalysis and Politics,

edited by Verdiglione.^3 These were the years when Verdiglione pre-

sented himself on the Milan scene as a cultural organizer, and so

he organized this meeting in which Guattari participated. I believe its

title was ‘Signifying Semiotics’... Anyhow, at the beginning, he was

following the Italian psychiatric circuit, in which Basaglia was the great

reference

But then, in March 1977, the news arrived – and this has been told

to me many times – that while Bologna exploded with the Autonomia

movement, our reference point, and the reference point for organizing

the Amsterdam Collective, our other collectives and even Radio Alice,

was the fact that people had read Anti-Oedipus. Or anyway they had

heard about it, as it was a rather well-distributed reference text. I read

Anti-Oedipusin 1975, and I remember that the first meetings about

Radio Alice already included references to Anti-Oedipus, when in

reality, they had all read another book, by Guattari alone, that was

published in Italian by Bertani in 1974 entitled Una Tomba per Edipo,

and in French, Un Tombeau pour Oedipe[A Grave for Oedipus], with the

subtitle Psychyoanalysis and Transversality. So let’s say that they knew

that in Bologna there were protesters who instead of crying Long Live

Marx, or Mao, were shouting Long Live Deleuze, Down With Oedipus,

Long Live Deleuze and Guattari.

I met them when I went to Paris in June 1977 following an arrest

warrant, and immediately they told me: ‘You Italians are greatly dis-

cussed in our milieu, since it is well known that Bologna is a place

where Anti-Oedipushas had an impact.’ So they were already paying

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