Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

a single process. Then at a certain point we understood that the dia-

lectic was a logical trap that little by little had ensnared us and pre-

vented us from seeing the world, the swarm of events and persons,

of solitudes and encounters without meaning, without loyalty, and

without foreseeable conclusions.

Thirty years after his renaissance, Hegel seemed buried. He still is, in

a certain sense, and we can affirm without fear of rebuttal that nobody

will ever be able to exhume his body.

And yet (a miracle of this perfectly circular thinking) it seems imposs-

ible to move beyond it, because that thinking wished itself to be and

was the thought of overcoming (Aufhebung). This is the essential point

for a definition of modernity, which is a world of forms in constant

overcoming, and thus appears impossible to be overcome.

This is what I say when I say Hegel: the totalizing thought of over-

coming that both sweeps away and maintains.

Today, I know, Hegel seems to be the distant residue of an era in

which one could think in terms of totality and totalization through

overcoming. Today we speak rather of globalization, of globality. And

we cannot think of two more diverse, more distant concepts (not anti-

thetical, mind you, but simply other) than these: globality and totality.

The concept of totality implies a process in which the parts disappear

and at the same time are maintained, they are negated in order to be

recognized as a simple moment of a higher synthesis in which the

parts are both negated and maintained. We are dealing with an essen-

tially historical concept. Totalization is the process through which

whatever is given as separate comes to be dissolved and subsumed, that

is, translated into its negation, thanks to which it finds its spirit, its

vocation, and its truth.

The concept of globality is rather a functional concept that implies

integration, intersecting, combinations and interfaces. These have nothing

to do with negation or with overcoming. Parts remain what they are,

and nobody cares what your spirit is made of. What is important is that

you can interface your surface with the surface of another entity, of ano-

ther part. Globalization means functional integration of parts that main-

tain their independent partiality and nevertheless function together,

thanks to interfaces that do not change their interiority, but connect by

recombining together. In globalization, we participate in the connections

between discreet and recombined elements, while in Hegelian total-

ization, we observe the work of negation accomplished by a continuous

ensemble from which a new ensemble continuously emerges. For me,

to encounter Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, to acquire their way of

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