Soft Subversions

by Félix Guattari, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)

This collection of Felix Guattari's essays, lectures, and interviews traces the militant anti-psychiatrist and theorist's thought and activity throughout the 1980s ("the winter years"). Concepts such as "micropolitics," "schizoanalysis," and "becoming-woman" open up new horizons for political and creative resistance in the "postmedia era."

Guattari's energetic analyses of art, cinema, youth culture, economics, and power formations introduce a radically inventive thought process engaged in liberating subjectivity from the standardizing and homogenizing processes of global capitalism.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychology

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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

[javor · Rating 5 out of 5]

denser than chaosophy but a great followup intro book after it. love the pro-terrorism chapters. classic félix i guess. also his piece w/ negri was cool, even if i disagree with some of its conclusions. again, introduces key aspects for queer/feminist/disability/youth organization. good psychiatry stuff again and a good intro for the terminology he builds up in machinic unconscious, chaosmosis, schizoanalytic cartographies, etc. IWC stuff was kinda cool (connected back with marxism through negri, who i don't like) but again, felt too power-focused and not well grounded in a critique of capital. that is, his analysis of capital as a semiotic operator seems on the one hand well-grounded in materialist analysis of language viz. structuring subjectivity, but on the other hand seems to over-abstract the process from its real-world subjectivation (in short he places too much emphasis on symbolic language vs. a-signifying semiotics which ends up weakening the economic analysis, and his description of a-signifying semiotics as pre-signifying matter with lines of flight for alternative subjectivities that resist dominant modes of subjection/subjectivization was not nearly concrete enough. feel like he could've done better though; doesn't mean his analysis was bad or wrong). semiologization does enforce a kind of linguistic power relation, and it was loosely connected with the machinic evolution of capitalism, but he doesn't provide a good way out of this. in my humble opinion. his stuff on the media im similarly torn on.

[Ploetzly · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a guiding light ... i want to read it again ...!

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe more like 3.5 stars. some really good stuff in here, but also some pieces that didn't do anything for me.

if you are already a fan of Guattari, def worth checking out.

[Biaru · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impossible to give a book like this less or more than three stars. You’ll find essays really captivating, while other essays are just going to miss the mark for you. It’s just how it is

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally finished this little booklet, just needed a little time to myself for once and Thanksgiving break did it. Overall, it started off really excellent with Sections I (Schizo-Culture) and II (Minority Politics) but then slipped off a bit in III (Desiring Cinemachines) and IV (Beyond Marx and Freud). That's not to say those sections aren't interesting, but I don't really care much about cinema and section IV was basically Diet Anti-Oedipus; though, to be fair, there were some unique items. Guattari's vision of World Integrated Capitalism is fairly distinct and much more central here than in his work with Gilles Deleuze.
Across the whole, essays were short, very general, and there was a fair degree of redundancy, to be expected of a set of short writings and interviews.
Some highlights:
"Entering the Post-Media Era" - great, rousing closing paragraph
"The Refrain of Being and Meaning" - FG analyzes a dream of his, shows how it goes beyond the bounds of traditional analysis techniques
"In Order to End the Massacre of the Body" - one of several essays about the intersection between queer politics and anti-capitalism

[Kaden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great. Explains his late thought in piercing clarity, I have much more respect for him after reading this.

[Blaaaao · Rating 5 out of 5]

important - all the way. (no time to review, but simply recommend it. super.)