Notes on:
Osborne, P. (2011) 'Guatareuze?' ( A review of Dosse
F. (2010) Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New
York: Columbia University Press). New
Left Review 69: 139 -151.
Dave Harris
Biography is controversial in philosophy, since
the work of philosophers seems to make their life
irrelevant, yet it is common to describe work with
the names of individual philosophers.
Usually, the banalities of every day life simply
do not reveal the secret of the thought.
However, sometimes biography can be used itself in
a philosophical manner, by philosophers.
Instead, we usually get 'the cultural history of
ideas' applied to individual lives, a
chronological succession of events as an attempted
context. Inevitably, others are involved,
except for particular recluses. Some good examples
are given (140), including biographies of
Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan. Here
philosophical ideas are presented in a suitable
way. Some other good examples have addressed
collectives.
Dosse is a pioneer with this double
biography. His early work on the history of
structuralism was controversial, and attacked by
the likes of Balibar. He used interviews,
'racy' narratives, and 'limpid' prose, to attempt
to popularize opaque debates, and counter '"hyper
formalism"'. This work comes at the height
of public attention for Deleuze. It proceeds
by cheerfully ignoring the work of Deleuze and
Guattari on the dissolution of the subject, and
this is a problem. This technique arose from
'a commercial decision'(141), and from a technique
to manage, in an 'industrial manner', huge amounts
of material including interview material found in
other work. The high work rate can itself be
seen as 'a literary effect of sorts', somewhere
between journalism and history. There also
unintended comic moments, probably from the
translation.
The work on Guattari is the most interesting,
probably because he is less well known, and as an
activist, he was more connected to the events of
the day, especially compared to Deleuze's
own phantasy about living like an 17th century
philosopher [in the second
book on Spinoza, apparently].
Nietzsche is central to the connection with
Guattari, and helped Deleuze connect to the
times. In return, Guattari was able to
briefly live the life of philosophy.
In terms of biography, Deleuze's father was a
petty bourgeois dabbling with fascism. His
elder brother Georges was a resistance martyr, and
Gilles seemed mediocre by comparison. He
broke totally with his family as a result.
He was brilliant at lycée and became a member of
various elite salons frequented by
philosophers. He studied at the Sorbonne and
subsequently taught in some elite lycées.
Guattari was in a family that moved around France,
first in his father's search for somewhere to
convalesce after being gassed in the War, and then
to run a series of small businesses, each of them
unsuccessful. His father was a right winger
as well. Guattari was precocious
politically, and attended pcf meetings at the age
of 14, although he was temperamentally drawn to
anarchism. He got into psychiatry through
the brother of one of his school teachers, and
ended at La Borde. He read Lacan to escape
from the boredom of his studies in pharmacology.
Dosse relates Guattari's life in terms of the
history of a 'relationships, groups and events',
and Deleuze's 'as a series of texts'(143).
The intersections are difficult to narrate, and
Dosse resorts to 'stock narrative tropes'- the two
were unlikely to meet because they live in
different worlds, and when they did, this produced
some magic consequences. 'This is the theory
of Deleuze-Guattari the surrealist object', like
the famous chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella. However, the meeting was
actually brokered by a mutual friend, and the two
exchanged letters for several months before they
actually met, with Guattari sending some articles
on Lacan, having been impressed by Logic of Sense.
This happens quite a lot, where the stock
narrative is contradicted by the actual
stories. Dosse pursues a thematic account
rather than a chronological one, and has a
privileged story to tell which does not always
correspond to the mass of information he has
worked with. Dosse himself seems 'to more or
less disappear from his text'[a realist trope,
'modernist impersonalism']. The real
interest, how philosophy and psychoanalysis became
intrinsically connected, is not well treated, and
has to be examined by looking at the actual
material.
Perhaps surprisingly, Guattari was originally a
disciple of Lacan, and was one of the first to be
admitted to take the seminar without medical
training. As a result, Lacan is the real
'hinge of this story', constituting the very 'and'
that connects Deleuze and Guattari, for Osborne
[literarly referring to the 'and' relation in
Logic of Sense, the series, the conjunctive
disjunction]. In Logic of Sense,
Lacan appears in the discussion of serialization,
referring to the communication between two
separate series by something that's always in
excess to one and lacking in the other. The
model is Lacan on Poe, where a missing letter
[epistle] helps link two episodes in the
story. The relation between D and G is
similarly, 'a strange double headed thing: both
lacking and in excess' (145), but Dosse misses
this.
Both Deleuze and Guattari are interested in
Lacan's position 'at the limits of
structuralism'. Guattari helps Deleuze move
away from 'ambivalent structuralism' in L of S,
by replacing the idea of structure with that of
machine. However, Deleuze was already
exploring the limits of structuralism for himself
in an earlier essay, referring to the elements of
structures as impersonal singularities rather than
subjects. Guattari helped Deleuze to explore
the implications for therapy and political
practice. The notion of the unconscious as a
machine provided the breakthrough for the
collaboration, and apparently Guattari got this
from a Lacan seminar. It replaced
structuralist theory, and also 'carried with it
the hopes of a practice of permanent therapeutic
and political revolution'(146): Guattari embodied
this practice.
Deleuze prefaced section of essays by Guattari,
noting that political activism and psychoanalysis
combined in his person: there was no simple
meeting of people. This is what inspired
Guattari to relate to Deleuze, and initiated his
own philosophical explorations in the jointly
written pieces. Political militancy affected
his own psychotherapeutic practice, which in turn
into 'novel philosophical problems about
subjectivity, desire and the social'.
Deleuze was distant from psychotherapeutic
practice, and elaborated Guattari's designs into
concepts [apparently, this is how Deleuze himself
described it].
When they composed
Anti Oedipus, 'Deleuze obliged
Guattari to write each day, mailing him the
results after 4.00, for Deleuze to rework.
They would then meet on Tuesday afternoons.' [Here
G apparently had writer's block, although he is
described elsewhere as a manic writer, working in
rushes] There is nothing in the myth that Guattari
was an idiot savant. Guattari formed
relations with a number of groups, from the pcf to
the Fourth International, moved between
institutional analysis of the clinic and reading
Lacan, creating his own study and research
groups. Before meeting Deleuze, his
intellectual trajectory 'was largely a journey
from Sartre to Lacan', trying to develop the
notion of the group subject. Guattari was
notorious for forming and breaking up groups,
because the intellectual effort to apply Lacan
directly to political groups was unstable (147)
[there is a nice example of Lacan-based policy in
one group to refuse the separation of public and
private lives, and to take responsibility for
desire by asking for a salary that you thought you
could justify. There also endless meetings,
'experimental practices of collective
reflexivity']
It's possible to see psychological themes in
Guattari's life, like 'maternal fixation', the
fear of loving your mother displaced and dispersed
on to multiple objects. This led to
promiscuous sexual practice within La Borde, also
justified as egalitarianism, which produced 'a
string of emotional casualties'. Radical
equality between psychologists, porters and
patients led to job sharing, but the overall
'method was "militant centralism"'Guattari
admitted, produced by his 'charismatic
authoritarianism'. Everyone found it
difficult, but it did have some good therapeutic
effects and some conceptual productivity,
especially in developing 'the concept of
"transversality"'.
This emerged in the discussion about the
difference between groups subjects and subjected
groups [big in AO and explained in Chaosmosis].
That was to replace the Freudian idea of
transference, and to build a group
unconscious. The organizations Guattari
founded turned the idea into working methods,,
including transdisciplinary work in the humanities
and social sciences [especially his Centre for
Institutional Study, Research and Training
-- CERFI]. They even got some government
research contracts in urban planning or community
development, and publications were produced that
were well read. Osborne sees a parallel with
the Frankfurt Institute.
The relationship with Lacan is seen as oedipal,
with the relationship with Deleuze breaking
it. After this, Lacan appears as 'an abusive
monster' (148), mistreating patients. Once,
Guattari insisted that anyone working at La Borde
underwent analysis with Lacan and attended the
seminars. Lacan treated them with his
notoriously really brief sessions. He also
tried to poach a paper by Barthes which Guattari
had offered to sponsor - and then never published
it. Lacan also appointed his son in law as
his successor rather than Guattari, all of which
prompted the term to Deleuze.
Deleuze met Lacan in Lyon, where he also met
Francis Bacon. L behaved strangely, refusing
all alcohol, and asking to be taken home, then,
later drinking half a bottle of vodka at
dinner. He behaved rather churlishly, and
back at Deleuze's house displayed '"paranoid
recriminations against everyone wanting to steal
his ideas"'. The meeting with Bacon took
place just after Deleuze's book on him was
published. Again, there was a disastrous
discussion, but competitions set in between them
to dominate the discussion. Osborne thinks
this is more than just problems when two
specialists meet, and displays an 'image of
rivalrous -- even sadistic --- self sufficiency'
(149). Deleuze described Bacon afterwards as
displaying power and violence as well as charm and
restlessness, reflecting 'an unconscious desire to
reduce the artist to a figure in one of his own
paintings', a further sign of 'underhand
rivalry'. This was rooted in Deleuze's
identification of his own philosophy and Bacon's
art, with its Nietzschian concept of art as a
matter of forces, percepts and affects.
Deleuze was in competition with Bacon. Bacon
might have let him win because he had already owed
a lot to Deleuze for his reputation. Osborne
also identifies an 'ironic revenge' in connecting
philosophy and artistic practice, because it
implies that Deleuze's claims to have developed a
properly contemporary philosophy looks weak
compared to the radical forms in contemporary art.
Deleuze then left to go to Paris 8, established
after the events of 1968. 'Deleuze played no
part in the protests', and spent the summer away
from Paris working on his doctoral thesis.
He also lost a lung to tuberculosis. He met
Guattari while convalescing. He moved to
Vincennes, where Foucault ran the department, and
there met followers of Althusser and Lacan
including Badiou, Balibar, and Rancière. It
was a Maoist dept, intending to make sure that
theoretical Marxism Leninism dominated as an
official department policy, producing extensive
surveillance of the political content of other
classes. Deleuze was a particular target,
which might explain Badiou's own 'self serving
book on Deleuze' (150). The Department could
be seen as a kind of academic version of
Guattari's experiment in group analysis, and was
similarly both authoritarian and radically
libertarian, as well as in permanent crisis.
Deleuze thrived, apparently.
This was when they wrote AO and Thousand Plateaus,
although Rhizome was published first as a
separate book. They also wrote the book on
Kafka. These were 'spectacularly successful,
highly original, theoretical works' (150),
focusing on the workings of desire within the
social, prompted by May 1968. The works can
be described as 'at once founding and exhausting
their own genre'. Later, in What is Philosophy?,
Deleuze and Guattari argued that philosophy was
all about producing concepts, and that's what
these texts did. AO produced concepts
like desiring production, desiring machines and
BWO, before criticizing oedipal mystification and
developing the notion of
deterritorialization. The coding of flows of
desire was seen as important to the formation of
the social, producing a new history of state
forms, and a 'semiotic account of value and the
money form'. There were notions like
schizoanalysis, the molar and the molecular.
Desire was freed from the notion of lack and
individuals, and turned into an investigation of
'the libidinal investment of the social
field'. The arguments were both
philosophical and transdisciplinary.
TP is both more radical and more 'avowedly
pragmatist', with its serial montage of singular
concepts, like the rhizome [Osborne sees this as
the 'anti dialectical equivalent of the negative
dialectical "constellation"']. Concepts were
offered like segmentarity, the abstract machine,
faciality, becoming, the minoritarian, refrain,
war machine and smooth spaces. Massumi
suggested that the point was not whether all this
was true but whether it worked [the rejection of
simple truth in favour of what is interesting or
singular is explained best in the Deleuze book on Leibniz in my
view]. The question is what it works for,
though, a question which can lead back to the
connection between truth and practice again.
The book on Kafka celebrates the concept of the
minor in the context of Kafka's writing, and
introduces other conceptual singularities like
connectors, assemblage and agency.
These works have been extensively commented upon
by 'the middle tier of an academic publishing
industry' (151), increasingly marketing its works
'via authorial branding'. They have not as
yet produced 'theoretically significant new
productions', unlike post Foucaldian
approaches. Instead we get 'largely, simply
fetishistic terminological repetition'. The
conditions of both reception and production have
degenerated in academic life, but Guattari remains
particularly obscure. What Dosse should have
done is offered a philosophical reading of
Guattari's contributions.
However, some other material Dosse borrowed can
provide an intellectual sketch to show how much
more we need to know about Guattari, and how his
thoughts went beyond 'the historical conditions of
their production'. This might reverse the
usual view of the importance of the two, producing
what Lauzier called not 'Delari' but
'Guattareuze'.
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