Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze

Description

Felix Guattari was a French political militant, practicing psychoanalyst and international public intellectual. He is best known for his work with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one of the most influential works of post-structuralism. From the mid-1950s onward, Guattari exerted a profound yet often behind-the-scenes influence on institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, radical politics and philosophy. Guattari's Diagrammtic Thought examines the writings that Guattari authored on his own, both before and during his collaboration with Deleuze, providing a startlingly fresh perspective on intellectual and political trends in France and beyond during the second half of the twentieth century. Janell Watson acknowledges the historical and biographical aspect of Guattari's writing and explores the relevance of his theoretical ideas to topics as diverse as the May 1968 student movement, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-liberalism, ethnic identity, microbiology, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology, the mass media, and the subjective dimensions of information technology. The book demonstrates that Guattari's unique thought process yields a markedly Guattarian version of many seemingly familiar Deleuzean notions.

Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French at Virginia Tech University, USA. Her previous publications include Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (CUP, 1999).

"This is an exacting explication of Guattari's key conceptual innovations over the course of his career. What emerges from the furious detail and clean disassembly of the nuts and bolts of schizoanalytic diagrams is an intellectual portrait of Guattari as a militant cartographer of a universe perfused with machines. Watson ingeniously reveals how Guattari hot-wired Lenin and Lacan for the wild ride he took into molecular revolution, the implications of which for emerging species of subjectivity we are only beginning to grasp." - Gary Genosko, Canada Research Chair, Lakehead University, Canada