Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

depression. If you insist in not wanting to see this fact, you end up

continuing to use tools that prevent you from acting.

GM:Yes, even Antonio Negri, who claimed to have moved past these things,

continues to use the concept of revolution. While in his later work, like Kairos

and Alma Venus,^11 where he actually mentions St Francis of Assisi, he talks

about the need to discuss the end of certain things, and he also deploys some

concepts that are no longer relevant, basically the concept of a revolution

that, honestly, I don’t know who would do, and where.

Bifo:And at this moment optimism of the will seems to me a kind of

hysterical reflex.

GM:This did not seem so much a characteristic of Guattari. It’s true that

perhaps it was revealed in his meeting with Negri because later, in the 1980s,

he wrote some beautiful texts about the present, like The Three Ecologies,

that are not triumphalist, but are rather darker, even depressive; that is, the

end of The Three Ecologiesis rather sad.

Bifo:It’s not a rebuke, but simply a consideration of the fact that

Guattari’s experience brings us to the limit of this reality of depression,

it hints toward it, because it is shown in What Is Philosophy?,but he

doesn’t really get into it to valorize it.

GM:Back to the question about the Greens and the ‘no global’ movement,

what do you think about it? That is, it seems to me that the anti-global

movement – with its questioning of the International Monetary Fund, or of

so-called ‘politics of development’ of the planet – it seems to me that these

movements have emerged to some extent from the inspiration of the Greens

in the 1980s, that is, from the shift of focus from national politics to the

social and political dimension of the Earth. Does it seem to you that this is a

possible political terrain, or do you have doubts about this kind of engage-

ment, does it satisfy you or not?

Bifo:Well, on the conceptual level, I agree completely with you. The

Greens’ kind of thinking, ecological and environmental thinking, cer-

tainly has allowed a necessary displacement. But the so-called ‘anti-

global’ movement, from Seattle onward, my impression is that this

did not succeed in becoming a political proposal. It remained rather

a discourse of critique in opposition to capitalist globalization, but up

to now we are struggling to grasp its propositional, positive content.

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