on to continue: the anarcho-recombinatory, molecular evolution.
Gilles and Félix’s thought allows us to read in the sequence of the ’68
and the ’89 ruptures the discovery of a new historical horizon and the
definitive closure of the nineteenth-century historical horizon.
In the full force of the storms that, starting in 1989, have overwhelmed
the order of the Cold War which had firmly gripped the world in the vice
of bipolar terror, someone said that history had ended. With this they
meant that an era of peace was starting in which liberal democracy was
destined to spread out across the planet without meeting any obstacles or
opposition, and that the new, powerful information technologies had
made power transparent.
Never was a prediction more contradicted by the facts because, as we
know, the 1990s have brought on to the scene the re-emergence of
nationalisms and ethnic and religious integralisms, and history has
come back with its irreducible complexity and all the intricate foolish-
ness of intention. The disappearance of any possible social alternative
has brought the people to a rancorous regression while the develop-
ment of the digital communication network tends to completely
detach the process of formation and exercise of power from the territ-
orial and physical dimension of society.
Nonetheless, there was a kernel of truth in this very erroneous
prediction.
Between ’68 and ’89, the modern promise of the linear development
of progress lost all foundation and credibility. The promise of modern
history is a promise of universality that at a certain point was contra-
dicted. This is why the totalizing, historical cocoon that tried to
contain the intelligent life of the planet within the categories of tech-
nique and spectacle has become a kind of full body armour.
The proliferation of different forms of life and sources of communi-
cation requires breathing outside the armour of economical, political
and imaginary totalization. In a word: we have to think outside the
historical dimension, understood as the moderns did, a process of
reduction to a single totalizing perspective.
Anti-Oedipustried to conceptualize this tendency, abandoning the
paths of historicism and telling us about the proliferations of collective
agents of enunciation. In order to complete this displacement success-
fully, Anti-Oedipusrethought in an original manner the entire problem-
atic of the unconscious. Here the contribution of Félix to the
rhizomatic machine was essential. While Deleuze in his earlier work
had worked on the philosophical deconstruction of subjectivity and of
the mind, Guattari had worked on this same object from an analytical74 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_09_cha08.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 74