Preface: Thought, Friendship and
Visionary Cartography
Giuseppina Mecchia and Charles J. Stivale^1
In one of Gilles Deleuze’s final texts, a brief remembrance from August
1992, entitled simply ‘For Félix’, the eminent philosopher and writing
partner concludes that Guattari’s work ‘is waiting to be discovered or
rediscovered. That is one of the best ways to keep Félix alive’. Deleuze
has already insisted that he refers not to their collaborative work, but
precisely to Guattari’s writing on his own. So, Deleuze closes his state-
ment by reflecting: ‘Perhaps the most painful aspects of remembering a
dead friend are the gestures and glances that still reach us, that still
come to us long after he is gone. Félix’s work gives new substance to
these gestures and glances, like a new object capable of transmitting
their power’ (2006, 383). It is fitting, then, that Franco Berardi, known
familiarly as Bifo, frames his reflections on Guattari’s work in terms of
the power in the gestures and glances that constitute their enduring
friendship.
In like fashion, the project to prepare an edition of these biograph-
ical reflections, written originally in Italian, is inspired by our friend-
ship with Bifo and other readers of Guattari. Although the works of
Gilles Deleuze have been translated and have generated an entire
market of critical works, anthologies and guides to his thought, Félix
Guattari has not achieved the same public exposure, especially given
that very few writers have undertaken a serious engagement with his
thought.^2 Besides the importance of making Guattari’s works better
known, we are also inspired by the experience of Guattari’s practice
lived by Bifo and expressed in his biography. As he explains in the
introductory chapter, his book stems first from his acquaintance with
Guattari’s writings and political engagement in the context of Bifo’s
own activism in Italian autonomist politics in the 1970s and then his
exile from Italy and direct collaboration with Guattari in Paris from
1977 onward. In light of the importance that Guattari placed on the
political activities in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, we propose to
bring forward the way that Bifo illuminates the Italian political experi-
ence in relation to Guattari’s life and thought.
vi9780230_221192_01_prexvi.pdf 10/3/08 11:31 AM Page vi