Essays and articles that trace Guattari's intellectual and political development before Anti-Oedipus. Originally published in French in 1972, Psychoanalysis and Transversality gathers all the articles that Félix Guattari wrote between 1955 and 1971. It provides a fascinating account of his intellectual and political itinerary before Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the ground-breaking book he wrote with Gilles Deleuze, propelled him to the forefront of contemporary French philosophy. Guattari's background was unlike that of any of his peers. In 1953, with psychoanalyst Jean Oury, he founded the La Borde psychiatric clinic, which was based on the principle that one cannot treat psychotics without modifying the entire institutional context. For Guattari, the purpose of “institutional psychotherapy” was not just to cure psychotic patients, but also to learn with them a different relation to the world. A dissident in the French Communist Party and active in far-left politics (he participated in the May 1968 student rebellion), Guattari realized early on that it was possible to introduce analysis into political groups. Considered as open machines (subject-groups) rather than self-contained structures (subjugated groups), these subject-groups shunned hierarchy and vertical structures, developing transversally, rhizomatizing through other groups. Psychoanalysis and Transversality collects twenty-four essays by Guattari, including his foundational 1964 article on transversality, and a superb introduction by Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems.”

Essays and articles that trace Guattari's intellectual and political development before Anti-Oedipus. Originally published in French in 1972, Psychoanalysis and Transversality gathers all the articles that Félix Guattari wrote between 1955 and 1971. It provides a fascinating account of his intellectual and political itinerary before Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the ground-breaking book he wrote with Gilles Deleuze, propelled him to the forefront of contemporary French philosophy. Guattari's background was unlike that of any of his peers. In 1953, with psychoanalyst Jean Oury, he founded the La Borde psychiatric clinic, which was based on the principle that one cannot treat psychotics without modifying the entire institutional context. For Guattari, the purpose of “institutional psychotherapy” was not just to cure psychotic patients, but also to learn with them a different relation to the world. A dissident in the French Communist Party and active in far-left politics (he participated in the May 1968 student rebellion), Guattari realized early on that it was possible to introduce analysis into political groups. Considered as open machines (subject-groups) rather than self-contained structures (subjugated groups), these subject-groups shunned hierarchy and vertical structures, developing transversally, rhizomatizing through other groups. Psychoanalysis and Transversality collects twenty-four essays by Guattari, including his foundational 1964 article on transversality, and a superb introduction by Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems.”

This book offers a detailed look at Guattari's working methods in transdisciplinary experimentation from the time of his youth to his final years.His youthful adventures in the post-war Youth Hostels movement, decisive contact with institutional pedgagogy and the mentor figures of Fernand Oury and his brother Jean, give rise to an extraordinary penchant for organizational innovation in his life at Clinique de La Borde in Cour-Cheverny, France, and collective forms of expression manifested in publishing ventures and diverse collaborative research formations.Guattari's highly original and hitherto neglected theories of a-signifyng semiotics and minor cinema are explored in depth with reference to the political goals of the critique of infoculture and the molecular revolutionary tendencies that are released in the search for a people to come.Guttari's engagement with eco-politics and art practices displays his originality as a political thinker and is firmly grounded on his exporation of how subjectivity is produced inlate capitalism.Guattari's ground-breaking conception of transversal politics is fully explored in relation to Michel Foucault's sense of the concept and its role in global political theory.

Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. "The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde (created in the 1950s).

Addressing the essential question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Deleuze's philosophy this book provides clear indications of the practical implications of Deleuze's approach to the arts through detailed analyses of the ethical dimension of artistic activity in literature, music, and film. Bogue examines Deleuze's "transverse way" of interrelating the ethical and the aesthetic, the transverse way being both a mode of thought and a practice of living. Among the issues examined are those of the relationship of music to literature, the political vocation of the arts, violence in popular music, the ethics and aesthetics of education, the use of music and sound in film, the role of the visual in literary invention, the function of the arts in cross cultural interactions, and the future of Deleuzian analysis as a means of forming an open, reciprocally self-constituting, transcultural global culture.

Eugene W. Holland provides an excellent introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus which is widely recognized as one of the most influential texts in philosophy to have appeared in the last thirty years. He lucidly presents the theoretical concerns behind Anti-Oedipus and explores with clarity the diverse influences of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Kant on the development of Deleuze & Guattari's thinking. He also examines the wider implications of their work in revitalizing Marxism, environmentalism, feminism and cultural studies.