Summary |
Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was
a French psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist. Trained as a psychoanalyst
under Jacques Lacan, he worked at the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde
(1955-1992). Founded by Jean Oury in 1953, La Borde became a space for
institutional experimentation, connected to institutional psychotherapy, aiming
to create forms of psychiatric care that undermined patient/analyst
hierarchies, involved patients in the organization of daily life in the
facility (from cooking to cultural activities) and encouraged transversal
group-therapeutic activity. Already in “Machine et structure” (1972) Guattari
began to question the Lacanian dictum of the individual unconscious operating
like a language and substituted machinic desire, group-subject and semiotics
for the idea of a transcendental signifier. He developed schizoanalysis (also
in his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze) and ecosophy as alternative practices
of analysis and theory of subjectivity. He founded the review Recherches (1967-1983), connected to the
Center for Institutional Study, Research,
and Training (CERFI, 1965-1987), both of which combined transversal group
work with research, knowledge production and political activism. In the
aftermath of the 1968-protests, Guattari met Gilles Deleuze and their
intellectual friendship led to several collaborative publications and lasted
until Guattari’s sudden death in 1992. Throughout his career, Guattari
sustained a profound commitment to experimental revisions of analytic practice
and to political activism. He collaborated, among others and in different
contexts, with the Italian autonomy movement, free radio broadcasting (Radio
Alice), Antonio Negri (Communists Like Us
(1985, engl. 1990)) and Brazilian psychoanalyst Suley Rolnik on micropolitics (Molecular Revolution in Brazil (1986,
engl. 2008)). |