Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Bifo’s original work, published in 2001, is entitled Félix. Narrazione

dell’incontro con il pensiero di Guattari, cartografia visionaria del tempo che

viene: it translates as ‘Félix. Tale of the encounter with Guattari’s

thought, a cartographic vision of the future’. To the translated text of

this encounter, we add a succinct, critical introduction and a substan-

tial interview with Bifo conducted during the summer of 2005. This

biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari’s polit-

ical practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice

relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari’s writings,

alone and with Gilles Deleuze. One reason why key works from

Guattari’s corpus remain untranslated is their density and general

inaccessibility due to a highly abstract theoretical language. Thanks to

an approach that is at once personal and extremely well informed

about the origins and development of Guattari’s thought, Bifo’s biogra-

phy is quite clear and fairly devoid of the abstract language that char-

acterizes Guattari’s works.

Our approach in this Preface is two-fold: in a first section, we turn

toward the historical perspective on Bifo’s encounter with Guattari, in

order to consider not only their shared political commitment through

militant activism and a common understanding of late capitalism, but

also the significance of the generational discrepancy between the two,

mitigated somewhat by national differences. This historical perspective

leads us to consider the concepts they shared, especially within the

context of Bifo’s work on Italian post-workerist politics. In the second

section, we consider how Guattari and Deleuze together are re-constructed

and inserted into this biography. That is, we have noted in reading Félixa

conceptual level in the encounter of the two friends that is distinct from

merely personal memories. One way of exploring this distinction from

both Bifo’s and Guattari’s perspectives is through a review of Félixin light

of the publication of Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers, the collected

notes written mostly by Guattari in preparing Anti-Oedipus. In light of

these two concise and conjoined presentations, we hope to reveal facets

of the complex web of interrelations that constitute the friendship

between Guattari and Bifo.

I How could ‘Bifo’ meet ‘Félix’?

It was the late Aldo Moro, the Italian statesman kidnapped and ulti-

mately killed by the Red Brigades in 1978, who coined the paradoxical

expression ‘parallel convergences’, in order to describe the trajectory of

the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, the two

Preface vii

9780230_221192_01_prexvi.pdf 10/3/08 11:31 AM Page vii