Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics

Explosante

by Félix Guattari, Rosemary Sheed (Translator), David Cooper (Introduction)

«No hay tiempo para la espera o para el temor, hay que buscar nuevas armas». Esta frase de Gilles Deleuze resume a la perfección el proyecto de La revolución molecular, quizás el libro más ambicioso de su amigo, el pensador Félix Guattari. Y si hay que buscar nuevas armas, aquí hay un auténtico arsenal: no es sólo un libro fundamental de la teoría política contemporánea, sino también de las prácticas emancipadoras presentes y futuras. De la política al psicoanálisis, de la economía al cine y al lenguaje, Guattari desmonta la lógica del dominio que gobierna en los distintos ámbitos (los partidos políticos, las escuelas, los hospitales, la familia, la sexualidad, los medios de comunicación...), allí donde se miniaturizan y actúan con mayor fuerza los poderes represivos. Pero nos muestra cómo también es allí donde la vida «bloqueada» de un individuo, o del cuerpo social paralizado por la miseria y el miedo, puede dar un giro, cómo las voluntades pueden encadenarse, aliarse y osar lo más difícil: la revolución molecular.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, 20th Century, Psychoanalysis

320 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1977

About the author

Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deleuze, while from a working-class family, was severely asthmatic and had a strange condition whereby he couldn't touch things with his fingers without pain, causing him to grow extremely long fingernails. He largely stayed in bed. Guattari was the activist. For a long time I took the "Deleuze bad, Guattari good" position - and I'm not sure I ever really abandoned it, though I still look at Guattari with some ambivalence. But most of his interventions are addressing very practical political problems - the notion of "machines", which is his contribution, not Deleuze's, was originally a way to think about non-vanguardist forms of political organization - and in context, was immensely helpful and creative. Even if under Deleuze's influence it then became a key part of the non-dialectical ontology occasioned largely by Deleuze's hatred of Hegel. This book gives you a sense of what Guattari was like on his own, with concerns very much overlapping those of Gregory Bateson and other anti-psychiatrists of the time, and is very much worth the perusal just on that basis.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a very brief time many years ago, the celebrated and sorely missed American anarchist anthropologist David Graeber was on GR. He reviewed, I believe, 47 books. Due to the platform’s parameters and Professor Graeber’s settings, there is no way now to see what those books were — other than to stumble upon his reviews in the course of things. It is a small hope of mine to find those 47 books. This is one of them.

[La Central · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mientras algunos repiten aquello de que un fantasma recorre Europa –para bien o para mal–, otros insisten en contestar que el marxismo está trasnochado. Se verá que el problema de Guattari es ajeno a esta disyuntiva. De entrada, su escritura es compleja, no escatima en referencias a la teoría política ni al psicoanálisis, y elabora un conjunto de textos que hacen alusión a su contexto más inmediato: el ciclo de luchas de los sesenta y los setenta, donde la desconfianza del partido en pos de la autonomía, el feminismo, el ecologismo o las luchas raciales fueron parte de una explosión que, con la llegada de los ochenta, fracasaría con rotundidad, no sin abrir una brecha muy rica hacia otras maneras de entender la politización de las vidas.

Con su colega y cómplice Gilles Deleuze, Guattari escribió los dos tomos de Capitalismo y esquizofrenia, que han nutrido de armas conceptuales a los que buscaban una política que no se mezclase con órganos burocráticos o peldaños de jerarquías. La revolución molecular incide, de hecho, en que ninguna transformación del mundo se dará sin el cambio de nuestras vidas: de cómo las vidas son mantenidas, cuidadas, golpeadas, de cómo nacemos y morimos, de cómo trabajamos y nos enamoramos, de las soledades compartidas y las comunidades desoladas.

Ahora, con esta primera traducción al castellano de los textos de Guattari, en un contexto social y político que clama a gritos la necesidad de tejer vidas en común que se sostengan sin ahogarse, es cuando leer a Guattari toma un tono entre naíf y exigente, pues la descripción de lo que él veía en el horizonte es nuestro mundo estrellado en los cuerpos de muchos. Así, ¿seremos capaces de tomar en serio aquella sentencia lapidaria de Mil Mesetas: «devenir todo el mundo es crear multitud, crear un mundo»?

[Kaden · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Molecular Revolution, Guattari has three conceptual innovations that have profoundly influenced me: 1) structures exist alongside things and 2) his desiring critique of Marx & Freud. Of which, I believe, are compatible (if not essential) with a contemporary Marxist orientation.

1) This is undoubtedly Guattari's strongest concept. Its what contemporary Guattari scholars (cf. Gary Genosko, etc) often point to as a major differentiating factor between him and his intellectual partner Deleuze's Spinoza-inherited pantheism, and a concept that has given life to new materialism, contemporary ecological studies, etc. Simply put (and it is quite a simple concept), structures are produced in the same field as 'things'. They do not, as in idealist philosophies (cf. Stalin, Althusser, etc), form an invariant 'base' to things, but have to actively dominate things in order to assure their continued existence. The things they actively dominate or determine do not totally fall under their control, there is no 'complete' single articulation of things because structures are always different than the things they determine. Likewise, the parts do not exist without their structures. (From here emerges Guattari's concept of double articulation, a form of signifying domination that empties out the signifier). Importantly, structures are not intersubjective and actually exist in history and the present. Thus, from what many critics consider an ahistorical philosophy emerges, in my interpretation, one of the strongest commitments to analyzing historical structures. (There are two major caveats to this, though: 1) DeleuzoGuattarian analysis tends to be very abstract in contrast to historical materialism and 2) Guattari has an idiosyncratic view of truth that varies greatly from text to text -- in Chaosmosis, his final major work before his death, he does argue for a truth of the event / whereas in earlier essays he sometimes argues that everything that exists is true.) This view of structure (although varying in its commitment to 'real history' & and a critique of ideology) is, in my view, genuinely dialectical.

2) The first section gives us a good view of where Guattari preceded later Marxist ideas, but where does he differ? He primarily differs in an unfortunate yet fruitful misreading of Marx. Its unclear (to the best of my knowledge) whether Guattari was aware that his reading inadequate, but he likely wouldn't care anyways as he didn't see much value of revitalizing Marx & Engels qua true Marx & Engels. For me on the other hand, I think its important to fight a +100 years of anti-communist propaganda especially in a place (the US) with little communist history in mainstream consciousness. (Guattari was in a far different situation and WAS likely aware that his reading of Marx was primarily informed vis-a-vis the dominant PCF). Anyway, his critique is that Marx's theoretical work was too caught up in the immediate production process at the cost of understanding all that was excluded from it -- a critique many Marxists have taken in stride, and understood that the continuation of Marxist thought is to expand the critique outside the narrow confines of industry. Guattari alternatives to the Marxist-Leninism espoused by the party were paltry. Generally being some sort of Freudian-Marxist synthesis that confines analysis to two transcendent constellations: class or family. These things, for Guattari, are semiotics that are placed beside us (to dominate) and do not exhaust our subjective/personal/artistic movement.

Now, for a little critique. Guattari was insanely naive regarding money and technology. He generally takes a extremely pro-techonological view that stresses that its always expressed within assemblages, thus technology itself isn't bad per se, it rather opens possibilities for new future. (I find this very interesting in contrast to Baudrillard, also a semiotician, who characterizes the prototypical pessimist view). While this is true in a limited sense, Guattari's view overlooks that Science or Technology are not neutral, and in fact historical categories and methodologies. (He shows awareness of this in Molecular Unconscious). And for money in particular, he abandons Marx's monetary theory (dialectic of value/exchange-value) in favor of viewing it as an a-signifying point-sign... Sigh, I guess its to be expected of the "post-"Marxist reaction against the Communist establishment (and the revolutionization of "post-Fordist" production). Yet I still find myself wishing Guattari had recognized more explicitly how the state and the market (& money) form a double-articulation (albeit one that is contradictory) and cannot be separated. I think D&G left second-order contradictions far too hastily (in a, IMO, one-sided rejection of Hegel) -- i.e. they didn't stress the essentially mixed nature of reality enough. This also would have let D&G write a far better theory of anthropology in AO (the current one is probably the weakest part of their book, harboring a thinly-veiled progressivist narrative of history). I suppose this is me wishing they held closer to Marx and class politics... unfortunately I doubt Guattari's conceptual innovations could occur without such a movement.

[Manuel Alejandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

¿Sigue siendo el capitalismo un sistema que sólo se centra en la producción de bienes materiales? No, sino que también se encarga de limitar y dirigir el deseo para sostenerse y Guattri lo describe perfectamente con el concepto de “capitalismo mundial integrado”, vislumbrando las lógicas que son necesarias para mantenerlo a través de diferentes instituciones como la escuela, la familia, el estado, etc. dejando en claro, de esta manera, que no existirá una verdadera revolución hasta que no haya una liberación total del deseo, no entendido como carencia, sino como una capacidad creadora y no unívoca.

[Cary Stough]

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