Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

and political point of view. His relationship with the Lacanian school

on the one hand and the group analytical practice on the other were

the premises of Félix’s contribution. His participation in the 1968

explosion and then the encounter with Deleuze brought Félix to a

definitive rupture with Lacanian structuralism. The unconscious is not

a structure, but a proliferation.

Anti-Oedipus: Machine and desire

The traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from

the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take,

making us choose between productionand acquisition. From the

moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire

an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look

upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object.

(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 25, emphasis in the original)

The unconscious discussed in Anti-Oedipusis a laboratory, not a theatre.

The imagination overwhelms the imaginary. Deleuze and Guattari

register the passage of the world under the aegis of semiosis because

semiosis is a desiring projection; it is the marking of the world by any

sentient organism crossing the space in which other sentient organ-

isms have already traced their trajectories.

In the language of Anti-Oedipus, sentient organisms can be con-

sidered as machines. Not that there is any pretence of mechanical

reduction in the Deleuze-Guattari concept of machine.

Machines may be defined as a system of interruptionsor breaks. These

breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from reality

... Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual mater-

ial flow that it cuts into. (Anti-Oedipus, 36, emphasis in the original)

With the word ‘machine’, what is meant here is any assemblage

capable of shaping reality according to its rule, a singular cut-and-stitch

that functions according to its own rules.

Reality is the cut and mixoperated by semiotic, or rather desiring agents.

Anti-Oedipus: molecular and molar

Machines and desire constitute a deep, hidden, swarming laboratory in

which the flow of reality is produced at the same time as an imaginary

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