Books by Felix Guattari

A new, expanded, and reorganized edition of a collection of texts that present a fuller scope to Guattari's thinking from 1977 to 1985.This new edition of Soft Subversions expands, reorganizes, and develops the original 1996 publication, offering a carefully organized arrangement of essays, interviews, and short texts that present a fuller scope to Guattari's thinking from 1977 to 1985. This period encompasses what Guattari himself called the "Winter Years” of the early 1980s—the ascent of the Right, the spread of environmental catastrophe, the rise of a disillusioned youth with diminished prospects for career and future, and the establishment of a postmodernist ideology that offered solutions toward adaptation rather than change—a period with discernible echoes twenty years later. Following Semiotext(e)'s release last season of the new, expanded edition of Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, this book makes Guattari's central ideas and concepts fully available in the format that had been best suited to Guattari's temperament: the guerrilla-styled intervention of the short essay and interactive dialogue. This edition includes such previously unpublished, substantive texts as "Institutional Intervention” and "About Schools,” along with new translations of "War, Crisis, or Life” and "The Nuclear State,” interviews and essays on a range of topics including adolescence and Italy, dream analysis and schizo-analysis, Marcel Proust and Jimmy Carter, as well as invaluable autobiographical documents such as "I Am an Idea-Thief” and "So What.”

Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus."The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde (created in the 1950s).

Throughout a large part of the 1980s, F\u00e9lix Guattari, known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and his experimental and groundbreaking practices in psychotherapy, decides to shift his experimental work into a different medium of artistic and creative thought practice: the world of science fiction. Part self-analysis, part cinematic expression of his theoretical work, Guattari\u2019s screenplay merges his theoretical concepts with his passion for comic books, free radio movements, and film. So begins Guattari\u2019s journey to write a screenplay wherein a group of squatters makes contact with a superior intelligence coming from the infinitely small Universe of the Infra-quark (UIQ). Guattari worked feverishly on his film, attempting to secure a budget, traveling to Hollywood, and enlisting the help of American screenwriter Robert Kramer. But the film would never see the light of day. Through the important archival work of artists, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Guattari\u2019s script is now published here, for the first time in English.

An early work that lays the foundation for establishing a "polemical” dimension to psychoanalysis.We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...—from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in SchizoanalysisIn his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious (originally published in French in 1979), Félix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a "polemical” dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political—the "machinic”—potential of the unconscious. To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract ("hyper-deterritorialized”) mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as "faciality” and "refrain,” which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century.