Félix Guattari

born April 30, 1930, Colombe, France
died August 29, 1992, near Blois

French psychiatrist and philosopher and a leader of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which challenged established thought in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology.

Trained as a psychoanalyst, Guattari worked during the 1950s at La Borde, a clinic near Paris that was noted for its innovative therapeutic practices. It was at this time that Guattari began analysis with the celebrated French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose reevaluation of the centrality of the “unconscious” in psychoanalytic theory had begun attracting many disciples. In the mid-1960s Guattari broke with Lacan, whose thinking he felt remained too closely tied to Freud’s, and founded his own clinics, the Society for Institutional Psychotherapy (1965) and the Centre for Institutional Studies and Research (1970).

Inspired by the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, Guattari collaborated with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) to produce a two-volume work of antipsychoanalytic social philosophy, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In volume 1, Anti-Oedipus (1972), they drew on Lacanian ideas to argue that traditional psychoanalytic conceptions of the structure of personality are used to suppress and control human desire and indirectly to perpetuate the capitalist system. Schizophrenia, they continued, constitutes one of the few authentic forms of rebellion against the system’s tyrannical imperatives. In place of traditional psychoanalysis, they recommended a new technique inspired by the antipsychiatry movement, “schizoanalysis,” in which individuals are analyzed as libidinally diffuse “desiring machines” rather than as ego-driven Freudian subjectivities.

Volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is characterized by a self-consciously disjointed, paratactic style of philosophical inquiry, reflecting the authors’ conviction that the “linear” organization of traditional philosophy represents an incipient form of social control. The work is presented as a study in what Deleuze and Guattari call “deterritorialization”—i.e., the effort to destabilize the predominant, repressive conceptions of identity, meaning, and truth. The authors conclude by glibly dismissing Western metaphysics as an expression of “state philosophy.”

Ever conscious of the most minute fissures in the social order and searching for creative ways to undermine fixed ideas and inherited truths, Guattari became an advocate of “molecular revolutions” in life and thought. In so doing, Guattari joined the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault in proclaiming the death of the traditional (Marxist) intellectual, who aimed at a “total social revolution.” Instead, new inspiration would derive from the struggles of heretofore marginalized groups, including homosexuals, women, environmentalists, immigrants, and prisoners. Guattari’s third and final work cowritten with Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, was published in 1991.

Richard Wolin