Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

in depression. And then, nothing, a glimmer of awareness came forth

in the introduction of What Is Philosophy?,when Deleuze and Guattari

speak about old age – that old age allows us to begin to understand.

Guattari was close to 60 years old.

GM:In this, I hear a lot of Deleuze, who was older and certainly having

greater illnesses.

Bifo:There’s also Guattari, who in his final years lived through a very

painful sentimental experience.

GM:Right, with Joséphine, something I knew nothing about.

Bifo:Well, she’s his companion with whom he lived during his final

years. She was a lot younger than him. Well, Joséphine also came from

an experience of drug addiction, so in some ways, she also represented

for Guattari a psychotherapeutic challenge, not only a sentimental and

sexual one. And so that seemed to me an interior event that he chose

not to elaborate except in this moment in the introduction of What Is

Philosophy?It’s an embarrassing topic to take on because really, as I

know well, the Guattarian network did not want to talk about her. She

was perceived as a foreign body: she was quite young, she became ‘the

boss’s girlfriend’, and so she was very isolated from Guattari’s friends.

And then Guattari became isolated from them as well, and so a break

occurred: those who remained with Joséphine, very few, but among

whom I count myself, and many who considered her an idiot who

should not be there ... And so even in this, the relationship with fem-

ininity and with aging, with depression, became a crisis factor within

the political community.

So I have spoken about all of this briefly in the introduction of Félix,

for it might not be very interesting from the existential perspective, but

it interests me greatly from the philosophical and, I would say, also

from the political viewpoint. For historicist thinking and militant prac-

tice refuse to consider depression as a cognitive element, and this is a

limit, one that today, for example, prevents us from being lucid about

understanding the collapse of modern hope. We should understand

that the collapse of modern hope is certainly a disaster, but that it also

contains elements that we should succeed in understanding, granted

that our humanistic, socialist, illuminist, communist values no longer

have any place. And this is depression, when you realize that your

desire no longer has any place in the real. This is the deep core of

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