Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Felix did not pay attention to depression, neither as a philosopher,

nor as a psychoanalyst.

And we can easily understand why. The methodology [démarche] of

the Anti-Oedipusis not easy to reconcile with the possibility of delving

into depression. Depression is not just a condition among others, in

which a machinic unconscious is assembled, made of existential and

chaosmotic fragments proceeding from anywhere to everywhere else.

The Anti-Oedipusdoes not know depression; it continuously over-

comes, leaping with psychedelic energy over any slowing down and

any darkness.

*****

But there is a time for depression.

And we shouldn’t underestimate its cognitive potential. Of course,

depressive intelligence is paralyzing. It gives rise to the feeling of an

immense discrepancy between sense and the everyday, and to the

feeling of the dispersion of desiring energy in the contact with the

world in time.

The investment of desiring energy is the origin of sense.

The world in time is the dispersion of this energy.

The activity of the philosopher is the fabrication of concepts.

Concepts are a concretion of desiring energy.

They give sense to the world, singularizing it and projecting desire in

such a way that it might become the world.

But the world flows and disperses itself.

Concepts no longer grasp configurations, they no longer project

sense in a shared reality.

The dissolution of shared experience is the entropy we have lived

starting from a certain moment in time – we could say from the very

beginning, but more intensely, painfully, rapidly, catastrophically

during the 1980s. The Winter Years.^5

The winter years are this, they are the time when the contradiction

dissolves.

The places of existential trajectory become poorer, more rarefied and

artificial, because concepts are losing their hold. Or maybe concepts

lose their hold because the sites of our existence have become more

rarefied, poorer, more artificial and ungenerous.

The desiring community is a chaoid, a provisional organizer of

chaos, a fragile architecture composed of shared happiness and common

vision.

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