Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

The community I am describing is not based on the origin, on the

past, on the ties with the earth, the blood or identity. It is the pro-

visional community that founds itself on the possible, on desire, on

intention, on the promise, on expectation.

Provisional communities, this is what I am talking about. The move-

ments of 1968 started a provisional, nomadic community which then

slowly decomposed and dispersed itself.

The dissolution of sense is parallel to the dissolution of an imme-

diate recognition.

Desire and depression are united by imperceptible ties

It seems to me that in the notion of desire there is a hidden relation

with the Christian and Romantic traditions – a relation that is not

completely rescinded in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. This is

an idea which is already present in the discourse of Georges Bataille in

the notion of expenditure(dépense): a transgressive excitement, a mobi-

lizing tension, an energetic investment in the future. Desire is the

utopian tension projecting consciousness onto the world; it is the

origin and motivation for the projection into the world. Depression is

rooted in this tension.

By that I don’t mean that we should abandon or liquidate the notion

of desire that in Anti-Oedipuswas the productive power of the uncon-

scious. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that desire means tension, and

that tension is destined to fall, to die down, given the irreducibility of

existence, the decomposition of organic matter, our being-for-death.

The concept of desire is linked to a youthful utopia deriving from Rom-

anticism, a utopia which we shouldn’t disavow but cannot worship

either.

Anti-Oedipustalks about the productivity of the unconscious. The

world emerges from the desiring factory as a flow of shared illusions.

This reality is the product of a shared desire.

But Hindu thought calls this shared illusion maia, a notion that

should be integrated, I think, with the concept of desire. Buddhism,

which stems from the Hindu tradition and develops it further, elab-

orates the notion of enlightenment or awakening, which is similar to

nirvana: the clear understanding of impermanence, of the empty and

delusional character of reality. (In the Western tradition we also find

some references to this modulation of energetic investment: Stoic

thought looked for happiness in ataraxia, in the suspension of desire,

in the active interruption of worldly tension).

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