The Guattari Effect - Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (eds.) - Continuum, Uk, 2011

The Guattari Effect

edited by Eric Alliez

edited by Andrew Goffey

Continuum 2011

A collection of essays from leading experts in a number of fields offering an overview of the work of Félix Guattari.

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The Guattari Effect brings together internationally renowned experts on the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist Félix Guattari with philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, anthropologists and artists who have been influenced by Guattari’s thought. 

Best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, Guattari’s own writings are still a relatively unmined resource in continental philosophy. Many of his books have not yet been translated into English. Yet his influence has been considerable and far-reaching. This book explores the full spectrum of Guattari’s work, reassessing its contemporary significance and giving due weight to his highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, economics, pragmatics, ecology, aesthetics and media theory. Readers grappling with the ideas of contemporary continental philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek and Rancière will at last be able to see Guattari as the ‘extraordinary philosopher’ Deleuze claimed him to be, with his distinctive radical ideas about the epoch of global ‘deterritorialization’ we live in today, forged within the practical contexts of revolutionary politics and the materialist critique of psychoanalysis.

Introduction \ Part 1 Sorties \ Chapter 1: The Schizo Chaosmosis (1991) Félix Guattari \ Chapter 2: The Vertigo of Immanence Interview with John Johnston, June 1992, Félix Guattari \ Chapter 3: On Contemporary Art Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992,Félix Guattari \ Part 2 Critical and Clinical Protocols \ Chapter 4: Analysis, between Psycho and Schizo Jean-Claude Polack \ Chapter 5: The Deterritorializsd Unconscious Peter Pál Pelbart \ Chapter 6: Maps and Refrains of the Rainbow Panther Anne Querrien \ Chapter 7: Guattari and Anthropology: Existential Territories Among Indigenous Australians Barbara Glowczewski \ Part 3 Social and Political Connections \ Chapter 8: Guattari’s Contributions to the Theory of Semiocapitalism Gary Genosko \ Chapter 9: Relaying a War Machine?Isabelle Stengers \ Chapter 10: Gilles-felix Antonio Negri \ Chapter 11: A Schizoanalytical Knight on the Chessboard of Politics Anne Sauvagnargues \ Chapter 12: Repression, Expression, Depression Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi \ Part 4 Ethico-aesthetic Effects \ Chapter 13: From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in GuattariStephen Zepke \ Chapter 14: Going to the Cinema with Félix Guattari and Daniel Stern Raymond Bellour \ Chapter 15: Nothing is Established Forever Pascale Criton \ Chapter 16: Félix Portraits 2010 Annie Ratti \ Conclusion : The Guattari-Deleuze Effect Éric Alliez \ Contributors \ Bibliography \ Index

Eric Alliez, Eric Alliez is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, UK. His publications include Capital Times (translated by G. Abbeele, University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 

Andrew Goffey,

Andrew Goffey is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communications at Middlesex University, UK.

Rhizome (With no return)

From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)

Radical Philosophy 167 (May/Jun 2011)

Eric Alliez

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did notmake this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in the very idea of a ‘foundation’ for transdisciplinarity. The difference induced by the (re-founding) repetition and its pluralization attenuates and relativizes this difficulty without, however, resolving it. This is because founding, as the young Deleuze explained at the start of the ‘Hypokhagne’ course he gave at the Lycée Louis le Grand in 1956–57, is literally to lay claim to (and to root oneself in) a foundation. Thus, it is ‘no longer to relate one’s activity to oneself as an agent’, by opening up the possibility of grasping the necessary passage to a philosophy that gives a right to the foundation – by founding its rights in a re-flexion that renders it possible and necessaryat the most fundamental level. We have to understand that, even if it means appealing to an unconditioned principle, to found is always to determine the indeterminate in an immanent fashion.

Since Deleuze’s course is available on Web Deleuze, I will leave it to readers to discover both the way in which he conducts his enquiry – driving out some nice little monsters – and a principle of repetition that already has very Nietzschean contours (redrawn by the anti-Hegelian Tarde of L’Opposition universelle) and that will take on its full extent only some ten years later inDifference and Repetition. The importance of this Nietzschean reference for our questioning with regard to transdisciplinarity – which also concerns Foucault (both of them passing via Canguilhem) – cannot be emphasized enough in so far as Nietzsche introduces philosophy into a ‘new element’, in a new and anti-classical image of thought through a critique of philosophy.

What I would like to emphasize at the outset, to profit immediately from the instantaneous acceleration it produces (even if it means keeping it in reserve,taking my foot off the pedal), is the fashion in which, taken as the letter of the ‘immanent determination of the indeterminate’, the foundation transpires from a language that establishes a philosophical primacy in immanence that contradicts the ‘strongest programme’ of transdisciplinarity in its most critical relation to philosophy. The codename for this programme is ‘rhizome’. But this does not forbid – rather it calls for – the development of the philosophical foundation in science and the (badly named) human sciences, to which the programme of transdisciplinary research arising from structuralism is attached. ‘No longer to relate one’s activity to oneself as an agent’, Deleuze thus stated in 1956, so as to submit oneself to a foundation that will present itself as a third – the ‘third foundation’, like the French ‘Third Estate’. Deleuze explains that ‘the foundation is the third because it is neither the pretender, nor what it pretends to, but the instance that makes what is pretended docile enough for the pretender.’2 We should hear in these phrases a double, structural and Nietzschean, echo. And, indeed, something of the order of a post-Nietzschean critiqueof structuralism will finally – under the heading of a ‘Nietzsche today’, hurled at the philosophical Order – be given the name ‘nomad thought’. [...]

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