Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

GM:So let us return to Guattari. One of the questions that we have is about

Guattari’s language. That is, over twenty-five years his writing maintained a

high level of complexity, with many neologisms, and he created temporary

and flexible semiotic systems, within which the same word could change its

meaning. How did you find your bearings in this complexity? When you

wrote your book Félix, what was the process you followed? Did you just read

all Guattari, and did you undertake a philological study? Or did you proceed

like they described working on A Thousand Plateaus, that is, did you skip

around and grab what you could?

Bifo:OK, first, about the neologistic machine: this continuous inven-

tion that they theorized – and I say they because Deleuze is important

in thinking about these questions, even if the invention of words was

due more to Guattari than to Deleuze. The neologistic machine is not

simply a stylistic oddity: it really is the idea according to which con-

cepts are tools that allow us to cut up reality according to desire, need

... So inventing and constructing a word means elaborating something,

means grasping tools in order to see things in a different way.

GM:This is an enormous undertaking in reality.

Bifo:Absolutely. It is true, the creation of concepts, of words that consti-

tute concepts is also something that allows you to understand the ways

that literature, philosophy and poetry fundamentally do the same work.

GM:So how did you manage to engage with this discourse?

Bifo:Well you asked me how I read them. I think I read lots of Deleuze

and Guattari in the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Then, when

I started to write this work, my relationship with their texts became

really impressionistic, here and there, a little like a tool box. While the

neologistic activity, something that I certainly learned from Deleuze

and Guattari – especially Guattari – this type of invention of words is

something I really tried to shift into the domain of cyberculture. That

is, to invent concepts capable of expressing the complexity of the rela-

tionship between technology and society. In the 1990s words began to

proliferate, words that tried to conceptualize this new techno-social

territory, and this is something that certainly came from Guattari’s

lessons.

GM:And you also learned to some extent to write in this way.

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