Pierre-Félix Guattari was een Franse activist, institutioneel psychotherapeut, filosoof en semioticus die de schizoanalyse en ecosafooi stichtte. Zijn werk, met name in samenwerking met Gilles Deleuze, duikt diep in de complexe relaties tussen de psyche, de maatschappij en het milieu. Guattari's denken wordt gekenmerkt door een radicale kritiek op het kapitalisme en een zoektocht naar nieuwe vormen van organisatie en bevrijding. Zijn benadering combineert een diep begrip van de menselijke geest met een dringende oproep tot ecologische vernieuwing.
A Thousand Plateaus is the second part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. Written over a seven year period, A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for 'nomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement.
Transversality ... think of a field with a fence around it in which there are horses with adjustable blinkers: the adjustment of their blinkers is the "coefficient of transversality." If they are so adjusted as to make the horses totally blind, then presumably a certain traumatic form of encounter will take place. Gradually, as the flaps are opened, one can envisage them moving about more easily. Originally published in French in 1972, Psychoanalysis and Transversality gathers all the articles that Flix Guattari wrote between 1955 and 1971. It provides a fascinating account of his intellectual and political itinerary before Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the ground-breaking book he wrote with Gilles Deleuze, propelled him to the forefront of contemporary French philosophy. Guattari's background was unlike that of any of his peers. In 1953, with psychoanalyst Jean Oury, he founded the La Borde psychiatric clinic, which was based on the principle that one cannot treat psychotics without modifying the entire institutional context. For Guattari, the purpose of "institutional psychotherapy" was not just to cure psychotic patients, but also to learn with them a different relation to the world. A dissident in the French Communist Party and active in far-left politics (he participated in the May 1968 student rebellion), Guattari realized early on that it was possible to introduce analysis into political groups. Considered as open machines (subject-groups) rather than self-contained structures (subjugated groups), these subject-group's shunned hierarchy and vertical structures, developing transversally, rhizomatizing through other groups
An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface) When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
The final work by the author before his death in 1992, Chaosmosis is a radical and challenging work concerned with the reinvention and resingularization of subjectivity. It attempts to embody affective change, the short-circuiting of signification and the proliferation of sense necessary to engage with non-discursive, artistic, poetic and pathic intensities. It includes critical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, information theory, postmodernism, and the thought of Heidegger, Bakhtin, Barthes, and others.
With Anti-Oedipus in 1972, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze instigated one of the most daring intellectual adventures of our time, updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism. Assembled here for the first time, Guattari's notes, addressed to and annotated by Deleuze, reveal an inventive, visionary "conceptor," arguably one of the more enigmatic figures in philosophy and social-political theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries describing Guattari's turbulent relationship with his teacher Jacques Lacan, apprehensions about Anti-Oedipus and personal accounts of his life
This work examines what it means to be a philosopher and attacks the sterility of modern philosophy. Part One explores the nature and scope of philosophy and its relation to social and economic development. Part Two considers other forms of thought: science, art, literature and music.
Argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct
result of the expansion of a form of capitalism and that an ecosophical
approach must be found which respects the differences between various living
systems.
