Rhizomatic urbanism
Introduction
Félix Guattari (French pronunciation: (); Villeneuve-les-Sablons, March 30, 1930-Cour-Cheverny, August 29, 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, philosopher, semiologist, activist, novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. He founded schizoanalysis and ecosophy. He is known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, especially Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Close to Jean Oury and his brother Fernand, he worked throughout his life at the La Borde clinic, a prominent center of institutional psychotherapy. He followed for a long time the seminar of Jacques Lacan, who was his psychoanalyst. He distanced himself from "Lacanism" through his collaboration with Gilles Deleuze (he is the inventor of the term "deterritorialization").[1] A left-wing militant,[2] Guattari has supported numerous minority causes in the context of globalization (supporting the Palestinians in 1976, the Italian workerists in 1977, the process of re-democratization of Brazil from 1979, etc.).
Philosophy
Félix Guattari does not believe that it is possible to isolate the unconscious element in language or structure it within significant horizons. On the contrary, the unconscious refers to an entire social, economic and political field. The objects of desire are determined as a reality coextensive with the social field (and consequently with that defined by political economy).
A cartography of subjectivity, to have an analytical scope, must, according to him, get rid of every ideal of scientificity. This cartography would be based on a forceful critique of the methods of subjectivation subordinated to the identity regime and the model of representation, on what psychoanalyst and collaborator Suely Rolnik calls "the discomfort in difference."[3] Guattari's ethics consists of opposing ontological constructivism to this ideal at all levels, both in the case of apprehension of ethological levels in babies and in that of the existential function of rock in young people, and even in that of pathic apprehension in psychosis, in which the most diverse semiotic components can be included (incorporation of science or the media as elements of the modern family novel, for example). Therefore it should be accepted that the psyche is the result of multiple and heterogeneous components. It develops the verbal register, but also the non-verbal means of communication, the relationships with the architectural space, ethological behaviors, economic statutes, ethical and aesthetic aspirations, etc. This implies that subjectivity cannot be taken as something given, configured by the universal structures of the psyche, but, on the contrary, it allows us to assume differentiated mechanisms of subjectivation. This is because the unconscious is not structural, but processual; It cannot be referred only to family and daily tasks, to said "family novel", but also to technical and social machinery. It cannot only be directed towards the past, but also towards the future.