I would say that I am recently again in a phase of mobilizing militant
energies, if I may express it like that. But beyond the fact that each
person can find his or her energies in certain moments and less so at
other times, or that each person thinks he or she can be useful at some
moments more than in others, beyond this, I would say that already
during 1977 I began to be convinced about something that I then
learned at the heart of Anti-Oedipus: the fact that our task is not to put
our will to work. Our task is to create modes of catalysis, translation
and transmission of a socially dispersed desire. Thus, it is not so impor-
tant that you devote four hours a day to your activity of convincing
people of this or that. It is more imporant that in your existence, your
work, the actions you accomplish, etc., you succeed in doing some-
thing, as Wu-Ming would say, of a mytho-poetic character, that is,
succeed in condensing social desire in mytho-poetic form. Mytho-
poetic would be precisely in the sense of producing a shared narration,
that is like ‘Look, this guy is doing something that makes him happy,
that makes him content, makes his life fun: why don’t we also do what
he is doing?’ This is what we should succeed in doing. It’s more of an
exemplary role, almost a monastic one if you will, precisely the idea
that it is not about being militants, about carrying the truth to those
who never received it: no, it is about being happy, about communicat-
ing happiness: this is the true duty of a militant. We don’t always
succeed. It is not enough to want it in order to succeed.GM:We aren’t always happy either ...Bifo:Certainly, but the real political problem for me is this: to succeed
in communicating mytho-poetically, that is, through a narration that
might possibly be shared, a possibility of happiness. Happiness then is
a word that nobody knows what it means,a possibility of harmony
with the flowing of time, with one’s own being in relations, etcetera.GM:This then was finally what Félix Guattari was doing. He wanted to
be one with the present. To do so, he never ever gave in to nostalgia, did not
lose himself in reflecting about the past. The present was for him the most
important thing.168 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_14_inte.pdf 10/3/08 11:37 AM Page 168