Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

GM:Why do you think that today, in the international academic world but

especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, there is a great renewal of interest in

the Italian political thought of the 1970s? Why, at the beginning of the

twenty-first century, are we talking about post-workerist thought, beyond

Guattari if you like?

Bifo:Well, this is the most important question, and it has nothing to

do with the past, of course. It is about our present. I have the impres-

sion that we would like to understand what Anglo-American political

thought has been looking for in French post-structuralism and Italian

‘workerism’, from the 1990s onward. Well, there are several trivial

answers to this: the great success of Empire...

GM:Yes, but why did it have this success? That is the question, right?

Bifo:Precisely, this answer is not an answer. All right, I think that the

issue is quite different. What is the conceptual innovation common to

French post-structuralism and Italian ‘workerism’? In my opinion, it is

the rethinking, if not the abandonment, of the issue of subjectivity

itself. Suddenly – well, actually it took about thirty years for the

process to come to completion – suddenly subjectivity ceases to be

what it had been in the modern tradition, from Hegel onward. It no

longer is the strongest, founding element of the social experience, and

starts to be understood as the product of a chemical composition of

sorts, containing social – and this is what happens in the Italian work-

erist tradition – psychic, desiring and affective elements – and this is

what happens in French post-structural thought. In other words, the

strong element common to these two fields of thought is the rethink-

ing of subjectivity, which is now totally emancipated from the rigid-

ities of structuralism but also, and this is a more subtle passage, from

historicism. As Guattari used to say, there is no subject, there is a sub-

jective action, or rather a process that creates subjectivity.

Now, why does this impress us today, in 2005? I think that this

happens because today, in the digital era, in the anthropological, more

than political, mutation that we are experiencing, especially in the

Anglo-American world, we are finally realizing that there is no subject.

On the social and psychological stage there is a process of perpetual

composition and decomposition of elements, of mixing singularities,

which gives birth to temporary subjectivations. Now, I think that this

is an element coming to the surface precisely in the era of the techno-

logization of the social relation, that is, when the technological, the

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