Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

I remember Franco Piperno’s perplexity, but I especially remember that

Félix said something ambiguous and showed his approval, saying hastily

something like: ‘let him be, this is his trip’. At the time I was perplexed.

It seemed to me to be almost a kind of psychiatrist’s tolerance for the

strange manifestations of some lunatic. But in reality Félix often pro-

ceeded in this way, seizing immediately an opening, a phrase, an image,

to insert it into a sometimes distant, heterogeneous flow. There’s no need

to agree about a phrase or a word. All this quibbling about the letter of a

text makes no sense, all these disputes about a concept, about a logical

connection.

Any subject of enunciation follows a logic that cannot be judged,

much less disputed. All that we can do with any statement is to accom-

pany the enunciator, place ourselves on the same path as him or her,

go in the same direction if we feel like it, or abandon him or her at the

first turn and pursue our own route.

Sense, style

In a 1988 interview, ‘On Philosophy’, with Raymond Bellour and

François Ewald, Gilles Deleuze spoke about the way he understood

philosophy:

Great philosophers are great stylists too. Style in philosophy is the

movement of concepts. This movement’s only present, of course,

in the sentences, but the sole point of the sentences is to give it life,

a life of its own. Style is a set of variations in language, a mod-

ulation, and a straining of one’s whole language toward some-

thing outside it. Philosophy’s like a novel; you have to ask ‘What’s

going to happen?’, ‘What’s happened?. Except that the characters

are concepts, and the setting, the scenes, are space-times. (Negotia-

tions, 140–1)

Style is the relation between language and its outside; or rather it is

the way that the outside makes itself language. The environment, the

body, clothing, the mask, the game, the relationship, seduction, power:

through this system of dissymmetrical yet intersecting planes, sense

becomes manifest, is placed in motion. We can call style the particular

rhythm with which this whole machine of dissymmetrical planes

moves: the gesture of enunciating, projecting worlds. Sense is in this

style, in this reaching toward the outside. Sense, in effect, is the act of

moving in a certain direction.

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