Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

chaos in different ways. (What Is Philosophy?, 208, emphasis in the

original)

The activity of connecting – thought, creation, movement – should

not be conceived as the instauration of an order. The activity of con-

necting does not presuppose any pre-existing connection, nor should it

be proposed as the finality of an optimal, rational connection, nor as

consensus.

In effect, the activity of connecting is the desire, the condition of an

itinerary that is invested with sense solely for whoever undertakes the

trip.

What does friendmean when it becomes a conceptual persona, or

a condition for the exercise of thought? Or rather, are we not talk-

ing of the lover? Does not the friend reintroduce into thought a

vital relationship with the Other that was supposed to have been

excluded from pure thought? (What Is Philosophy?, 3–4, emphasis in

the original)

The pretext of constructing thought as a rigorous exercise of formal

rules, the naïve illusion of logical reduction does not understand the

essential aspect of philosophical thought, which consists in following

the line of infinity, in translating into concepts the uninterrupted

activity of conceptualizing the relationship with chaos. Pure thought,

from Kant on to logical positivism, deluded itself in establishing a pure

constitution of the Ibeyond the tumultuous, unstoppable, material,

physical and neurological relations between the brain and the circum-

stantial world.

Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite.

The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without

losing the infinite into which thought plunges (in this respect chaos

has as much a mental as a physical existence). To give consistency

without losing anything of the infinite... (What Is Philosophy?, 42)

The philosopher’s activity consists in tracing the signs that might

give consistency to the surrounding chaotic constellations (physical,

psychic, political, geographical, relational, linguistic, aesthetic, emo-

tional). Concepts are these signs, and they allow movement within the

chaos of worldly and infrapsychic objects as if these had an order.

Order is a projection of chaosmosis that is realized through the chaoid

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