Guattari and Us

I write this as a psychoanalyst working in the same tradition as Félix Guattari, Lacanian, and as a Trotskyist, active politically in the same tradition as your man. Guattari has tended to be eclipsed in academic writing by his co-author Gilles Deleuze. I was prompted to draw up this balance-sheet of Guattari's contribution by an invitation to participate in a BBC Radio 3 programme ‘Free Thinking’ on Deleuze and Guattari, broadcast on 8 April 2021 (in which I was only able to use ten percent of my notes in a recording that was then edited down to half the length of the original before broadcast).1

Félix Guattari, comrade, member of the Fourth International, was born in 1930, an active Trotskyist from 1948 to 1964, and critical psychiatric psychoanalytic researcher, writer and activist, an ecosocialist, until his death in 1992.2 Guattari is often best-known for his collaboration with the five-year-older philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the usually misunderstood book Anti-Oedipus, translated into English five years later (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972/1977). The two were both avid readers of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre before they met, but it was Guattari who brought radical psychotherapeutic practice and political critique - Freud and Marx - into the explosive mixture that eventually went under the heading of ‘schizoanalysis’. Guattari's (1984) work exemplifies potentialities and limits of breaking from medical models of ‘mental health’ under capitalism.

Contexts

To understand better how Guattari translates, and does not, into the English-speaking world, which now more than ever defines on a global scale the parameters of theory and treatment of distress, we need to grasp some key elements of the context in which the ‘Anti-Oedipal’ critique and alternative operated in France.

Asylums

The lunatic asylum has long been understood by the left as incarceration, and has functioned as a kind of prison for many in distress in the English-speaking world. It is this under