Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

psychogenetic processes: mixed marriage, for example (one between a

man of the Brahmin caste and a woman of the Kastri caste) can put in

motion chains of interdictions and impurities with the highest patho-

genic potential. But pathogenic processes must then be studied in a

specific situation, through a method of singularization, and not at all

through a method of psychogenetic universalization.

Guattari synthesized the schizoanalytical method in this way:

My perspective involved shifting the human and social sciences from

scientific paradigms toward ethico-aesthetic paradigms. It’s no longer

a question of determining whether the Freudian Unconscious or the

Lacanian Unconscious provides scientific answers to the problems

of the psyche. From now on these models, along with the others,

will only be considered in terms of the production of subjectivity

• inseparable as much from the technical and institutional appar-
  atuses which promote it as from their impact on psychiatry, uni-
  versity teaching or the mass media ... In a more general way, one
  has to admit that every individual and social group conveys its
  own system of modelising subjectivity; that is, a certain cartography


• composed of cognitive references as well as mythical, ritual and
  symptomatological references – with which it positions itself in
  relation to its affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage its
  inhibitions and drives. Psychoanalytic treatment confronts us with
  a multiplicity of cartographies. (Chaosmosis,10–11)

The process of the cure cannot be understood (as familializing

psychoanalysis or normalizing psychiatry does) as a reduction of the

deviant psyche to behavioural, linguistic and psychic norms recognized

by society. It must be understood, on the contrary, as the creation of

psychic nuclei able to make habitable a certain psychic cartography,

as a singularization that can be happy (felice) in itself. This is the task

of schizoanalysis: to follow delirium in order to render it coherent and

sharable, to open it to friendship in oneself and to friendship with the

other. To dissolve the identitarian nuclei that petrify the refrain, to

assemble the refrain with other refrains. To reopen the channel of

communication between the individual drift and the cosmic game.

Linguistic nomadism

Guattari’s thought can be described as a strategy of singularization of

the psychogenetic process, but also in the same way, as a strategy of

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