Félix Guattari > Quotes

“We cannot live outside our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same time, we are bursting out of this situation. The question which poses itself then is one of the conditions which allow the acceptance of the other, the acceptance of a subjective pluralism. It is a matter not only of tolerating another group, another ethnicity, another sex, but also of a desire for dissensus, otherness, difference. Accepting otherness is a question not so much of right as of desire. This acceptance is possible precisely on the condition of assuming the multiplicity within oneself.”
― Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader

“Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it.”
― Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext

“Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.”
― Félix Guattari

“We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes.”
― Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

“Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don’t even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he’ll work it through.”
― Félix Guattari

“There are two ways of rejecting the revolution. The first is to refuse to see it where it exists; the second is to see it where it manifestly will not occur.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977

“There is no such thing as a father in general. There is only a father who works at the bank, who works in a factory, who is unemployed, who is an alcoholic: the father is only the element of a particular social machine. According to traditional psychoanalysis, it's always the same father and always the same mother--always the same triangle. But who can deny that the Oedipal situation differs greatly, depending on whether the father is an Algerian revolutionary or a well-to-do executive? It isn't the same death which awaits your father in an African shanty town as in a German industrial town; it isn't the same Oedipus complex or the same homosexuality. It may seem stupid to have to make such statements, and yet such swindles must be denounced tirelessly: there is no universal structure of the human mind!”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977

“We focus our attention on impending catastrophes, while the true catastrophes are already here, under our noses, with the degeneration of social practices,
with the mass media's numbing effect, with a collective will blinded by the ideology of the 'market', in other words, succumbing to the law of the masses,
to entropy, to the loss of singularity, to a general and collective infantilization. The old types of social relations, the old relations with sex, with time, with
the cosmos, with human finitude have been rattled, not to say devastated, by the 'progress' generated by industrial firms.”
― Félix Guattari

“the question of the one or the multiple once again becomes the most important one, introducing itself into the plane.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“This desire for a fundamental liberation, if it is to be a truly revolutionary action, requires that we . . . overturn the notion of the ‘individual’, . . . our sedentary selves, our ‘normal social identities’, in order to travel the boundaryless territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lies beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and the repertories of normality.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977

“Fitzgerald contrasts rupture with structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying chains. But he also distinguishes it from more supple, more subterranean links or stems of the "voyage" type, or even from molecular conveyances. "The famous 'Escape' or 'run away from it all' is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist." Can it be that voyages are always a return to rigid segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy that you meet when you travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like Melville? Hardened muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself reconstructs the great figures it claimed to escape, but under the microscope, in miniature? Beckett's unforgettable line is an indictment of all voyages: "We don't travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we're foolish, but not that foolish.”
― Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms...

The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius.

The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977

“Extermination or communism is the choice – but this communism must be more than just the sharing of wealth (who wants all this shit?) – it must inaugurate a whole new way of working together.”
― Félix Guattari, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance

“Subjectivity needs movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms and refrains that beat time to carry it along.”
― Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions

“La máquina habla a la máquina antes de hablar al hombre.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethicoaesthetic Paradigm

“Empiricism knows only events and other people and is therefore a great creator of concepts. Its force begins from the moment it defines the subject: a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being. Outside of this machine/Universe coupling, beings only have the pure status of a virtual entity.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethicoaesthetic Paradigm

“The play of intensity of the ontological constellation is, in a way, a choice of being not only for self, but for the whole alterity of the cosmos and for the infinity of times.”
― Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethicoaesthetic Paradigm

“Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“From Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book 5) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is infinite speed. But this speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself—the plane, the void, the horizon. Both elasticity of the concept and fluidity of the milieu are needed.1 Both are needed to make up “the slow beings” that we are.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“As for the other aspect, creative or signed enunciation, it is clear that scientific propositions and their correlates are just as signed or created as philosophical concepts: we speak of Pythagoras’s theorem, Cartesian coordinates, Hamiltonian number, and Lagrangian function just as we speak of the Platonic Idea or Descartes’s cogito and the like. But however much the use of proper names clarifies and confirms the historical nature of their link to these enunciations, these proper names are masks for other becomings and serve only as pseudonyms for more secret singular entities”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“But why do they have to continuously return to this irrational, religious, etc., stuff? Why? In a given state of subjectivity, there is no other way [ ... ]. If in order to exist we absolutely have to have recourse to this kind of thing, it isn't surprising that people rush headlong into it, even if they know that rationally it doesn't hold water.

There's no getting rid of molar strata. Schizoanalysis cannot replace organizations.”
― Félix Guattari

“He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“The Judeo-Christian word replaces the Greek logos: no longer satisfied with ascribing immanence to something, immanence itself is made to disgorge the transcendent everywhere. No longer content with handing over immanence to the transcendent, we want it to discharge it, reproduce it, and fabricate it itself. In fact this is not difficult—all that is necessary is for movement to be stopped.9”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?