Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

This is what Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical creationism consists

of, allowing us to see beyond the horizon of the twentieth century,

beyond the horizon of historical thought.

From Hegel onward, the concept of truth was withdrawn from the

gnoseological field in which it had flourished in the course of the pre-

ceding history of Western philosophy and was then reintroduced in

the historical field. The problem of truth for Hegel is no longer that of

the correspondence of the thing to the intellect (adaequatio rei ad intel-

lectum) that Hegel denounced as a purely intellectual construction.^2

That means that the problem of truth is no longer definable, that is, in

purely cognitive or representational terms, but dialectically, in terms of

realization, of fulfillment.

‘In my view ... everything depends on grasping and expressing the

ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well,’ Hegel wrote in

the fundamental ‘Preface’ to The Phenomenology of Mind(80).

The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential

nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own

development. Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a

result, that only at the end is it what it is in truth. (The Phenomenology

of Mind, 82)

The truth is not the adaptation of the mind to the already given

reality for the simple reason that reality is ‘not given’. The reality that

interests the dialectic is not the reality of immediacy, but that of a

process of mediation, the becoming true that is only realized through

the ‘work of the negative’, through historical, political struggle,

through the transformation of the given and the realization of the

idea.

This essential lesson of dynamic Hegelianism nourished the generation

that prepared ’68 in Europe, in Germany, in Italy, and even in France and

in the USA, however differently. It is a matter of dialectical and revo-

lutionary thinking that pulses vividly in the pages of The Phenomenology

of Mindas much as in Hegel’s later systematic works, and that was

brought forth by the excavation work of authors such as Hyppolite,

Kojève, Adorno and Marcuse.

The dynamic re-reading of Hegel filtered into the ’68 culture through

works such as Reason and Revolutionby Herbert Marcuse:

Reality is the constantly renewed result of existence; the conscious

or unconscious process in which that which becomes something

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