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4

Planetary Psychopathology

Félix Guattari died one night in August 1992. This was when the

illusion of peace evaporated which, in 1989, had accompanied the col-

lapse of the social-authoritarian bloc and the end of the Cold War. The

Gulf War in 1991, and then the development of the Yugoslavian situ-

ation all the way to the explosion of the Serbo-Croatian war, opened a

new world stage. No longer was there a bi-polar front, and therefore

military conflicts were no longer controllable in a centralized manner.

Conflict happened along lines irreducible to global order or a unitary

strategy. Lines of ethnic, religious, Nazi-nationalistic and tribalist sorts

overlapped with the lines of the planetary economic conflict. On the

economic level, the interests of integrated world capitalism (which was

pushing toward globalization) ferociously compressed the living stan-

dard of the masses in the world’s impoverished countries, over which

the international organisms controlling the economy imposed a free-

trade choice that functioned in a catastrophic way, enriching a global-

ized bourgeoisie (or a virtual class integrated into global capital). The

effects were evident in the final years of the 1990s with the collapse of

Russian society, and the economic crises of countries in the Far East,

from Thailand to Korea and even Japan.

In his final book, Chaosmosis, written shortly before his death,

Guattari wrote:

Generally, one can say that contemporary history is increasingly

dominated by rising demands for subjective singularity – quarrels

over language, autonomist demands, issues of nationalism and of

the nation which, in total ambiguity, express on the one hand an

aspiration for national liberation, but also manifest themselves in

what I would call conservative reterritorializations of subjectivity.

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