Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

GM:This has been the Bush policy, among others. Except that Bush, I think,

lied knowing that he was lying, when he said ‘We are going to war because

they are killing us and want to destroy us, so we will destroy them before

they do’. I think he lied knowing he was lying.

Bifo:I really can’t say. On this, I don’t know if Bush in particular ...

GM:Well, people like Cheney, for example ... but not Americans in

general ...

Bifo:I am not able to judge as to whether there was fanaticism in the

strict sense, that is, about the possibility of obtaining something, of

overvaluing one’s own power, or whether they were just in bad faith. It

is clear that the choice made by the Bush administration drove the

entire West into hell. But who knows if there was from the very start

an awareness that things would have gone like this, or if perhaps they

are such imbeciles to think that you make a lovely war, killing five

thousand people, and at that point they are all bowing in front of you

asking for forgiveness!

GM:Yes, I wonder if finally the American public is not a bit smarter. Then

there are people who nonetheless say that the plan to invade Iraq was already

there, with the intention of the US to get their hands on the oil reserves and

that the Twin Towers attack was really all they needed to implement it.

Anyway, now we are waging holy war, we are in this identarian necessity for

counter-position, we are giving people the chance to feel that we are better

than them. However that might be, I think that schizoanalysis is the only

way to get beyond this ...

Bifo:At least to elaborate the problem!

GM:I believe so quite strongly. So, to reach a conclusion, you said at the

start of the book – and perhaps you have already partially responded to this –

that when Félix spoke to you about committing yourself politically to the

Greens or the Radicals, you said that already since 1977 you had stopped

considering yourself an activist and a political miltiant. So what about now?

Do you consider yourself a political militant?

Bifo:Let’s say, from a pragmatic, factual, biographical point of view,

certainly around the period of the Seattle events, from 1999 to 2003, I

lived through a phase of extremely intense militant reactivation. Today

Interview with Franco Berardi (Bifo) 167

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