Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

contemporary research into ethology and ecology. Daniel Stern, in

The Interpersonal World of the Infant, has notably explored the pre-

verbal subjective formations of infants. He shows that these are not

at all a matter of ‘stages’ in the Freudian sense, but of levels of sub-

jectivation which maintain themselves in parallel throughout life.

He thus rejects the overrated psychogenesis of Freudian complexes,

which have been presented as the structural ‘Universals’ of subjec-

tivity. Furthermore, he emphasizes the inherently trans-subjective

character of an infant’s early experiences, which do not dissociate

the feeling of self from the feeling of the other. A dialectic between

‘sharable affects’ and ‘non-sharable affects’ thus structures the emer-

gent phases of subjectivity. A nascent subjectivity, which we will

continually find in dreams, délire, creative exaltation, or the feeling

of love ... (Chaosmosis, 6)

Guattari here traces a conception of psychogenesis which is not

structured, like the Freudian one, but singularizing.

In Freud, psychogenesis is represented as the manifestations of

psychic complexes preconstituted by the play of impulses and forms of

repression (and Lacan formalized this play finally by representing it as

a mathème, as a linguistic game, rather than as the magma of psychic

organicism).

Guattari eventualized psychogenesis: psychogenesis is this becom-

ing singular, and the word ‘become’ must then be used in the plural

(‘becomings’) because becomings are projected universes emanating

from singular psychogeneses. This does not, in fact, mean that one

has to deny any cognitive and practical value to Freudian discourse.

Instead, rather than consider it as a description of the universal human

psyche, Guattari proposes to see it as a creation, as a modality of semi-

otization of the unconscious world, as a mythological tale that shapes

and illuminates at the same time.

In the same way that Christians invented a new form of subjectiva-

tion (courtly chivalry and romanticism, a new love, a new nature)

and Bolshevism a new sense of class, the various Freudian sects have

secreted new ways of experiencing – or even of producing – hysteria,

infantile neurosis, psychosis, family conflict, the reading of myths,

etc. (Chaosmosis, 10)

The Freudian model is not understood here as an imperatively

universal model, but as a model of semiotization of intra-individual

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