It is in fact in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the Marxist Left
was being attacked in France on the wave of the supposed failure of
May ’68, but neither Bifo nor Guattari stopped their conceptual work,
even while their more militant political activism was being challenged
in myriad ways. Only during the 1980s did the generational difference
between the two friends play an important role with regard to their
individual choices as militants: Guattari seemed to keep a stricter com-
munist revolutionary rhetoric and engagement during his collabora-
tion with Antonio Negri, who arrived in Paris in 1983 and authored a
book with Guattari in 1985, Les Nouveaux espaces de liberté(Communists
Like Us) (Guattari and Negri 1990). At the same time, Guattari became
increasingly involved with the French Green movements, even accept-
ing to run, however unsuccessfully, as a candidate for one of their
political formations. While always remaining quite close to Guattari,
Bifo did not share his friend’s activism during those years since, as we
will see later, he was convinced that one must accept the inevitable
‘depression’ resulting from having lost at least some of one’s personal
and political struggles.
The two, however, continued to share the same fundamental interest:
the affective, ecological and political consequences of what Guattari called
the post-mediatic era or, alternatively and depending on the context,
Integrated World Capitalism. The publication of The Three Ecologiesand
of Chaosmosisbears witness as much to Guattari’s continuing reflection as
to his activist support of mediatic initiatives such as participation in the
project of Radio Tomate or his involvement in the Alter 36-15 Minitel
initiative.^6 The influence of Bifo and his other Italian ‘comrades’ remained
therefore of vital importance for Guattari’s political and conceptual
development during the 1980s and up to his death in 1992. And it is
undoubtedly through Félix Guattari’s enduring influence that the media-
tion between Italian autonomist and ‘post-workerist’ theories and prac-
tices and the Anglophone world was made possible, a filiation process
that is now attracting a considerable critical interest.
It is therefore quite comprehensible that one of the few books on
Félix Guattari is written by an Italian political activist and social critic.
Moreover, and of even greater importance, the ‘parallel convergences’
that brought them together have not ceased to operate after Guattari’s
death. During the 1990s, Bifo continued to publish on many of the
themes he had explored with his older friend, and to take part in
media-oriented political practices. The continued timeliness of his
intellectual engagement is making Bifo one of the most interesting
thinkers of our time. Persistence might in fact be what is needed thePreface xi9780230_221192_01_prexvi.pdf 10/3/08 11:31 AM Page xi