Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

been pronounced, and that consciousness must rediscover in the pro-

cess of its historical realization.

The method of history is the method of this necessity that abolishes

singularity and experience.

*****

To this method – we know all too well – the suffering singularity

refuses to submit (albeit desperately, since modernity does not leave

the single any way to escape); furthermore, questioning the past about

the innumerable possibilities that it has annulled and suppressed is the

complete opposite of the historical method and of politics. Modernity

turns on a machine to reduce the diversity of human existence, or

more precisely a machine producing a kind of homologization that

idealistic philosophy assumes as perfect, while in reality modern

history shows it to be interminable and totalitarian. The totality is

never realized as the becoming true of particularity, but limits itself to

suppressing particularities by overwhelming them with a policing

machine.

The defeated, the deported, the exiled, the persecuted, the exploited,

the disturbed all rebel against this reduction and this idea of necessity.

This historical necessity is the sanction of an intolerable suffering, of

the humiliation and annihilation of singular life.

How is it possible to tell the story of all that hasn’t happened in

history? How is it possible to recount all of these nullified events, all of

these negated existences, all the forms of life and consciousness that

never reached completion because they were destroyed and eliminated

by historical necessity, by the force of what had to happen just because

of the hypostasis and divinization of economic laws?

The living singularity is suppressed to make room for history. The

experience of the living and conscious organism is annulled in order to

make a path for the Subject.

The living substance is that being which is truly subject, or what is

the same thing, is truly realized and actual solely in the process of

positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from

one state or position to the opposite. As subject it is pure and simple

negativity ... True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-

identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other, and is

not an original and primal unity as such. It is the process of its own

becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and

56 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography

9780230_221192_08_cha07.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 56