The 70 best phrases of Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari was a famous French psychoanalyst and philosopher., born during the year 1930 in Oise, France.
Together with Gilles Deleuze, he formed one of the most famous duos in philosophy, writing great internationally known works such as: The Anti-Oedipus either thousand plateaus. Throughout his life, Guattari considered himself openly on the left, and showed his support for the Palestinians who were trying to recover their territory or for the redemocratization process in Brazil.
- We recommend you read: "Félix Guattari: biography of this French philosopher and psychoanalyst"
Phrases and reflections by Félix Guattari
Undoubtedly, Guattari was a philosopher tremendously committed to the fight for social welfare, and perhaps one of the best psychoanalysts of his time.
Would you like to know some of his most famous quotes? In the text that you will find below you will be able to enjoy the best phrases and reflections of Félix Guattari.
1. Everywhere and at all times, art and religion have been the refuge of existential cartographies based on an assumption of certain existentializing ruptures of meaning.
Art and religion have always formed two great escape routes for men and their existential doubts.
2. Not only is there no cause-and-effect relationship between the growth of technical-scientific resources and the development of progress social and cultural, but it seems evident that we are witnessing an irreversible degradation of the traditional operators of regulation social.
The new technologies influence to a great extent and directly in our socio-cultural relations.
3. These existential catalytic segments can continue to be carriers of denotation and signification. Hence the ambiguity, for example, of a poetic text that can transmit a message and at the same time denote a referent while essentially ceasing to function on redundancies of expression and of content.
The art of poetry can be a very powerful means of communication, with it we can express ourselves very freely.
4. What could be said, using the language of computing, is that, evidently, an individual always exists, but only as a terminal; that individual terminal is in the position of consumer of subjectivity. It consumes systems of representation, sensitivity, etc., that have nothing to do with universal natural categories.
Thanks to computers and new technologies, we can develop in society in a way that was not possible before. Today's media are very different from those that existed in the past.
5. The psychoanalysts of today, even more than those of yesterday, hide behind what we could call a structuralization of the unconscious complexes. In his theorizing, this leads to unbearable sterility and dogmatism and, in his practice, it leads to a impoverishment of their interventions, in stereotypes that make them impervious to the singular otherness of their patients.
A profound critic of the psychoanalysts of his own time, Guattari undoubtedly stood out among them all.
6. Social ecology should work on the reconstruction of human relations at all levels of the socius. He should never lose sight of the fact that capitalist power has delocalized, deterritorialized, at the same time in extension, by extending its enterprise to the of the social, economic and cultural life of the planet, and intentionally, by infiltrating within the most subjective strata unconscious.
Capitalism affects us directly in all aspects of our lives, many of these conditions we do not even get to perceive.
7. The same ethical-political intention crosses the problems of racism, phallocentrism, and the disasters bequeathed by urbanism. supposedly modern, of an artistic creation freed from the market system, of a pedagogy capable of inventing its mediators social etc This problem is, after all, that of the production of human existence in the new historical contexts.
As society moves into the future, its ethical and moral values change with it.
8. Properly, mass culture produces individuals: normalized individuals, articulated with each other according to hierarchical systems, value systems, submission systems; It is not about visible and explicit submission systems, as in animal ethology, or as in archaic or pre-capitalist societies, but much more concealed submission systems.
Society introduces certain behaviors into our way of thinking, these behaviors will direct our efforts in life towards a certain end. In a certain way we are controlled by the society in which we live.
9. Our critique of psychoanalysis, based on aesthetic creation and ethical implications, does not presuppose, however, a "rehabilitation" of analysis. phenomenological that, in our perspective, is mutilated by a systematic "reductionism" that leads it to limit its objects to a pure transparency intentional.
Guattari helped to improve the psychoanalysis that existed to date with his work, creating new bases for the next psychoanalysts.
10. In the same way that in other times the Greek theater, courtly love or chivalric novels were imposed as a model, or rather as module of subjectivation, today Freudianism continues to inhabit our ways of sustaining the existence of sexuality, childhood, neurosis…
The influence that Freud exercised was undoubtedly very important in his time, and is still relevant today in the ways of thinking of many people.
11. It is always necessary for the intellectual to be sure of himself, to be singular, to be courageous, and to continue working, resist the fascination of academia, the media and other institutions for the style.
As people we must be brave and believe in our own qualities, in this way we will be much more effective in our trades.
12. The subject is not obvious; it is not enough to think in order to be, as Descartes proclaimed.
In this quote Guattari tells us about the famous phrase of René Descartes, "I think, therefore I am".
13. It happens as if a scientific super-ego demanded ratification of psychic entities and imposed apprehension only through extrinsic coordinates. Under such conditions, it should not surprise us that the human sciences and the social sciences have condemned themselves. themselves to not reach the intrinsically evolutionary, creative and self-positioning dimensions of the processes of subjectivation.
The sciences often put certain limits on themselves, these limits can come to stagnate their evolution over time.
14. I am convinced that the question of subjective enunciation will arise more and more as the machines that produce signs, images, syntax, artificial intelligence are developed... This means a recomposition of the social and individual practices that I order according to three rubrics. complementary: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology, and under the ethical-aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy.
Guattari thought that new technologies would change our forms of communication, and with them our social relations would also change.
15. The routine of daily life and the banality of the world as presented to us by the media surround us with a comforting atmosphere in which everything ceases to have real importance. We cover our eyes; we force ourselves not to think about the passing of our times, which quickly leaves behind our known past, which erases forms of being and living that are still fresh in our minds and fills our future in an opaque horizon loaded with dense clouds and miasms.
We must live in the present and do everything we want in our lives, we must not let ourselves be carried away by the media or the interests of third parties.
16. History does not guarantee irreversible transit through progressive frontiers. Only human practices such as collective voluntarism can protect us from falling into even worse atrocities. In this sense, it would be completely illusory to put ourselves in the hands of the formal imperatives for the defense of the "rights of man" or the "rights of people". Rights are not guaranteed by a divine authority, they depend on the vitality of the institutions and power formations that feed their existence.
The laws and the government must ensure the rights of their citizens, adapting over time to the needs of the moment.
17. In all societies, sexuality is normalized. That's nothing new. What matters is the way in which it is used, incorporated, in the constitution of the collective force of work, in the production of consumers, in the set of production systems inherent to the capitalism. Before, sexuality was reserved for the private domain, for individual initiatives, clans and families. Now, the wishing machine is a working machine. At this level, the flows of desire find reserves with the capacity to express rebellion. And the system acts on it in a preventive way, like an insurance company.
In today's society sexuality is completely accepted, the capitalist system takes advantage of this fact by taking advantage of it.
18. International solidarity is only assumed by humanitarian associations, when there was a time when it concerned trade unions and left-wing parties in the first place. For its part, Marxist discourse has been devalued (not Marx's text, which retains great value). It corresponds to the protagonists of social liberation to reforge theoretical references that illuminate a possible way out of history, more full of nightmares than ever, that we are going through at the moment. Well, not only the species disappear, but also the words, the phrases, the gestures of human solidarity. All means are used to crush under a cloak of silence the emancipation struggles of women and the new proletarians who constitute the unemployed, the emarginatti, the immigrants…
At present, solidarity is conspicuous by its absence, capitalism is not interested in anything that does not produce more capitalism.
19. At the same time, science and technology have evolved at an extreme speed, providing man with the means to solve practically all of his material problems. But humanity has not taken advantage of these means, and remains perplexed, powerless in the face of the challenges it faces. It passively contributes to water and air pollution, to the destruction of forests, to climate change, to the disappearance of a large number of species, the impoverishment of the genetic capital of the biosphere, the destruction of natural landscapes, the suffocation in their cities live and the progressive abandonment of cultural values and moral references about solidarity and fraternity... Humanity seems to have lost its mind or, more specifically, the head no longer works in tune with the body.
We must all contribute our grain of sand in the conservation of the natural environment.
20. Neither the individual nor the group can avoid an existential leap into chaos. This is what we do every night as we wander into the world of dreams. The fundamental question is to know what we gain from this leap: a feeling of disaster or the discovery of new contours of the possible? Who controls the current capitalist chaos? The stock market, multinationals and, to a lesser degree, the powers of the State! Brainless organizations for the most part! The existence of a world market is undoubtedly essential for the structuring of international economic relations. But we cannot expect this market to miraculously regulate the exchange between human beings on this planet.
It is very likely that the international capitalist system will collapse in the future. Have we already reached the point of no return?
21. Chernobyl and AIDS have brutally revealed to us the limits of humanity's technical-scientific powers and the "surprises" that "nature" can reserve for us. Undoubtedly, a more collective responsibility and management is imposed to guide science and technology towards more human ends. We cannot blindly abandon ourselves to the technocrats of the State apparatuses to control developments and avert the dangers in those domains, governed, essentially, by the principles of the economy of benefit.
Throughout history, the human being has not stopped overcoming all those new difficulties that have been presented to him, currently the same is happening with the famous coronavirus. We must be positive and know how to hope for the best.
22. A fundamental condition for successfully fostering a new planetary consciousness would therefore be based on our collective capacity for creation of value systems that escape from the moral, psychological and social lamination of capitalist valorization, which is only focused on profit economic. The joy of living, solidarity and compassion towards others are feelings that are on the verge of extinction and must be protected, revived and pushed in new directions.
The human being will reach its most productive stage when we act as a single species, we must understand each other and act for the benefit of all.
23. The productive forces, due to the continuous development of mechanical work, multiplied by the computer revolution, will free up an ever-increasing amount of human activity time potential. But, for what purpose? That of unemployment, oppressive marginality, loneliness, idleness, anguish, neurosis, or that of culture, creation, research, reinvention of the environment, enrichment of ways of life and sensibility?
Do you think that automation in industry is positive for the labor market? Certain people including this philosopher do not seem to have it clear.
24. Post-industrial capitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World Capitalism (IMC), tends more and more to decentralize their nuclei of power from the structures of production of goods and services towards the structures that produce signs, syntax and subjectivity, especially through the control it exercises over the media, advertising, polls, etc.
The control of the media is currently one of the most profitable businesses that exists.
25. Subjectivity is produced by assemblages of enunciation. The processes of subjectivation or semiotization are not centered on individual agents (in the functioning of intrapsychic, egoic, microsocial instances), nor on group agents. Those processes are doubly decentered. They imply the operation of expression machines that can be of an extrapersonal or extra-individual nature (machinic, economic, social, technological, iconic, ecological, ethological, mass media, that is, systems that are no longer immediately anthropological), as subhuman, infrapsychic, infrapersonal in nature (systems of perception, sensitivity, affection, desire, representation, image and value, modes of memorization and production of ideas, systems of inhibition and automatisms, bodily, organic, biological, physiological systems, etc.).
As a good philosopher, Guattari was interested in everything that surrounds the human being and his interactions. How we communicate with each other largely determines our own future.
26. The capitalistic societies expression under which I include, together with the powers of the West and Japan, the so-called countries of real socialism and the New Industrial Powers of the Third World are now manufacturing, to put them at their service, three types of subjectivity: a serial subjectivity that corresponds to the salaried classes, another to the immense mass of the "non-insured" and, finally, an elitist subjectivity that corresponds to the layers leaders. The accelerated "mass mediatization" of all societies thus tends to create an ever more pronounced separation between these various categories of population. Among the elites, we find a sufficient availability of material goods, means of culture, a minimal practice of reading and writing and a feeling of competence and legitimacy in the decisions. Among the subjugated classes, we find, as a general rule, an abandonment to the order of things, a loss of hope of giving meaning to their lives.
Undoubtedly, the social class to which we belong allows us to achieve one goal in life or another, if we do not have certain means we are not equally competitive with each other.
27. Our society produces squizos as it produces "Dop" shampoo or "Renault" cars, with the only difference that they cannot be sold.
Mental health is indeed very important, which is why the state must put all means at its disposal for the cure and treatment of these diseases.
28. The characteristic of cynicism lies in claiming scandal where there is none and in passing for bold without audacity.
We must not be cynical in our personal lives, honesty will lead us in the future to where we really should be.
29. The criteria that distinguish classes, castes and ranks should not be sought on the side of what is fixed or relative permeability, closure or opening; these criteria are always revealed as disappointing, eminently deceptive.
Indeed, classes or castes can be very malleable, they can change radically over the years or even disappear.
30. But we always make love with worlds. And our love is directed to this libidinal property of the loved one, to open or close to vaster worlds, masses and great ensembles. There is always something statistical in our love affairs, and laws of large numbers.
We all feel the vital need to be loved and to achieve this fact, we carry out a thousand personal adventures that lead us to investigate all kinds of worlds.
31. In Freud there was all this, fantastic Christopher Columbus, brilliant bourgeois reader of Goethe, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Al Capone masked.
As we can see Guattari was not a great follower of Sigmund Freud, in fact throughout his career he wrote various criticisms of the so-called father of psychoanalysis.
32. If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that it is the negative of all social formations: it is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of the flows that allows to understand the secret of all these formations, to encode the flows, and even to over-encode them before something escapes the coding. Primitive societies are not outside of history, it is capitalism that is at the end of history. history: it is the result of a long history of contingencies and accidents and causes the advent of this end.
Capitalism was his favorite topic when he wrote about politics, being a Marxist his personal ideology collided head-on with this economic system.
33. Desire does not have people or things as its object, but entire media that it travels through, vibrations and flows of all kinds. that espouses, introducing cuts, captures, desire always nomadic and emigrant whose first characteristic is the giantism.
Desire can harbor within it anything that we can imagine, as Guattari tells us in this quote, they do not have to be people or things.
34. The schizophrenic's walk is a better model than the neurotic lying on the couch. A bit of fresh air, a relationship with the outside.
Schizophrenia is one of the most talked about mental illnesses, Guattari was very interested in his research.
35. It is true that it is difficult to get people to get out of themselves, forget their most immediate concerns and reflect on the present and the future of the world. They lack collective motivations to do so. Almost all the old means of communication, reflection and dialogue have been dissolved in favor of individualism and loneliness often comparable to anxiety and neurosis. That's why I advocate invention - under the auspices of a new confluence of environmental ecology, environmental ecology. social and mental ecology - of a new collective montage of statements regarding the family, the school, the neighborhood etc The operation of the current mass media, and television in particular, is contrary to this perspective. The viewer remains passive in front of the screen, prisoner of a semi-hypnotic relationship, isolated from the other, empty of awareness of responsibility.
The media can be very harmful to society, there should be greater control over them and the content they broadcast.
36. From now on, what will be the order of the day is the liberation of "futuristic" and "constructivist" fields of virtuality. The unconscious only remains clinging to archaic fixations to the extent that no behavior pulls it into the future. This existential tension will be realized through human and non-human temporalities. By the latter I understand the unfolding, or, if you like, the unfolding, of animal becomings, of vegetable, cosmic becomings, but also of machinic, correlative becomings. of the acceleration of the technological and information revolutions (this is how we see the prodigious expansion of a subjectivity assisted by computer). To this we must add that it is convenient not to forget the institutional and social class dimensions that regulate the formation and "remote control" of individuals and human groups.
The future may bring with it great changes in the technology that many of us use every day, thereby changing all aspects of the society in which we live.
37. Capitalism does not cease to seize the flows, to cut them off and to reverse the cut, but they do not stop to expand and cut themselves along gaps that turn against capitalism and what notch
Capitalism subjects society to great repression, but society tends again and again to rebel against it.
38. The family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even inscribed in a larger circle than it would mediate and express. The family by nature is eccentric, decentered.
The family is only a small nucleus of the great society in which we live. Do you think it should have a greater relevance? Félix Guattari believed in this idea.
39. The schizophrenic remains at the limit of capitalism: he is its developed tendency, the surplus product, the proletarian and the exterminating angel.
Without a doubt, schizophrenics have a vision of life that another person cannot have, Guattari felt a great interest in how they understood society.
40. Say it's Oedipus or else you'll get slapped!
Oedipus was a mythical Greek king who committed patricide and later married his mother. A story that we should all know about.
41. We don't want the train to be dad and the station mom. We just want innocence and peace and to be left to plot our little machines, oh, desiring production.
We are all manipulated in a certain way by society, it directs our thoughts and desires since we are born.
42. Scientific knowledge as disbelief is truly the last refuge of belief and, as Nietzsche says, there has always been only one psychology, that of the priest. From the moment lack is introduced into desire, all desiring production is crushed, it is reduced to nothing more than phantasy production; but the sign does not produce phantasms, it is the production of the real and the position of desire in reality.
In this quote, Guattari analyzes Nietzsche's vision of the so-called "psychology of the priest" and how it affects us in our lives.
43. Michel Foucault has shown in a profound way the cut that the irruption of production introduced into the world of representation. The production can be of work or of desire, it can be social or desiring, it appeals to forces that no longer allow themselves to be contained in the representation, to flows and cuts that pierce it, traverse it on all sides: "an immense shadow tablecloth" stretched out under the representation.
Today's world is focused on production, as in any capitalist society, this is necessarily so.
44. The unconscious ignores castration in the same way as it ignores Oedipus, parents, gods, law, lack... The women's liberation movements are right when they say: we are not emasculated, you are being screwed.
In the unconscious there is only room for our personal thoughts, by inquiring into it we can get to know what we really want.
45. The unconscious ignores people.
Our unconscious is governed by our own thoughts and emotions, within it there is only us.
46. Whatever some revolutionaries think, the desire in its essence is revolutionary, the desire, not the party! And no society can support a position of true desire without its structures of exploitation, subjugation and hierarchy not being compromised.
In order to make all our personal wishes come true, we must break the limits that society imposes on us. This is something that in practice is really difficult to do.
47. Everything happens again, everything comes back again, the States, the countries, the families. This is what turns capitalism, in its ideology, into the variegated painting of everything that has been believed.
Capitalism is currently much more relevant than any ideology or any religion, it is perhaps the most effective form of population control that exists.
48. Always ready to expand its inner limits, capitalism remains threatened by a limit exterior that runs the risk of reaching him and splitting him from within the more the limits are widened interiors. For this reason, the lines of flight are uniquely creative and positive: they constitute a cathexis of the social field, no less complete, no less total than the opposite cathexis.
Capitalism may, over time, show us that it is not an efficient economic system in the global world in which we find ourselves. This can seriously harm all its citizens if it collapses.
49. The identity between desire and work is not a myth, but rather the active utopia par excellence that designates the limit to be crossed by capitalism in the production of desire.
Capitalism tries to create a false perception of freedom, subjugating us by using our own desires on us and fostering new ones to pursue.
50. Reich's strength lies in having shown how repression depended on general repression.
Without a doubt, the Nazi regime managed to reach the highest levels of repression towards its own people, our own neighbors could be our biggest jailers.
51. Plekhanov points out that the discovery of the class struggle and its role in history comes from the 19th century French school, under the influence of Saint-Simon; Now, precisely those same ones who sing of the struggle of the bourgeois class against the nobility and feudalism stop before the proletariat and deny that there can be class difference between the industrialist or the banker and the worker, but only fusion in the same flow as between profit and salary.
The class struggle has always existed within society, both under feudalism and under capitalism.
52. Capitalism has only been able to digest the Russian Revolution by constantly adding new axioms to the old ones, an axiom for the working class, for the trade unions, etc. He is always ready to add new axioms, he adds them even for minuscule things, completely derisory, it is his own passion that does not change the essential at all.
Capitalism, over the years, has increased the limits it imposes on its society, thus managing to maintain control over the working class.
53. Writing was never the object of capitalism. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate.
Maintaining a generally illiterate population can help keep a capitalist system in check.
54. Capitalism is the only social machine, as we shall see, that has been built as such on flows decoded, substituting the intrinsic codes for an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of currency.
Capitalism subjects all human beings within it, but the limits that it imposes are often imperceptible to its users.
55. Classes are the negative of castes and ranks, classes are orders, castes and ranks decoded.
Social classes are a way of understanding society that is widely used today. Hierarchizing its classes we can make a very detailed scheme of its operation.
56. From the beginning, the psychoanalytic relationship is shaped by the contractual relationship of the more traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned exclusion of the third, the hypocritical role of money to which psychoanalysis provides new buffoonish justifications, the alleged limitation in the time that denies itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by nourishing an inexhaustible transference, by always feeding new conflicts.
As we can see Guattari, he was a great detractor of capitalism, this philosopher hated all aspects of this economic system.
57. The interest can be deceived, unknown or betrayed, but not the desire.
When we want something, we really want it. Desire may be the reason why we do many things in our day to day.
58. The image of the intellectual teacher-thinker is completely out of use.
The intellectual man as such no longer exists in today's society. This image of a thinking man has changed and has been adapted to new standards.
59. The intellectual, today, is collective, potentially, in the sense that people read, reflect and learn about different professions.
At present, many people feel more interested in the search for knowledge.
60. We need a reappropriation of knowledge, using the "intelligence technologies" that Pierre Lévy talks about.
We must know how to use new technologies in our favor, and be able to improve our own knowledge with them.
61. But let's be wary of the capital "E" that is granted to the State. The State is contradictory: it can be rigid and intelligent at the same time. In any case, we never conceive of State agents as politically neutral.
The political and economic interests of our leaders have a great impact on the lives of all of us.
62. Combining democracy and efficiency, associations can offer a coefficient of freedom that the State will never allow.
In one way or another, the State always places certain limits on its citizens, these limits curtail our freedoms and diminish our opportunities to prosper in life.
63. The fundamental ethical principle is: the process is worth more than inertia. This does not go through conviction, propaganda, proselytism. It is a process, a desire for creativity that must be transmitted.
Ethics change over the years and continually evolve, adapting to the social needs of the moment.
64. Complex phenomena like that demand complex responses.
Great answers necessarily need a great question to answer.
65. The great revolution to come will be the union of the individual screen and the computer screen. Thus, television is the carrier of interactivity, of a new type of possible transversality. Our entire social and productive hierarchy will then seem totally out of date, just as we have seen the great coal and steel conglomerates become obsolete. We are in an ultra-paradoxical period, on the verge of radical mutations. They may arrive tomorrow, but they may also take twenty years.
Guattari already predicted to us in the past that new technologies would have a great impact on our lives.
66. The extreme right has undoubtedly acquired a very dangerous position on a political level.
The extreme right today has achieved greater popularity than it had in the past.
67. A conservative social current supports the right and the extreme right or, rather, pushes the right towards extremism.
The right and the extreme right have achieved today in France, a very solid voter base.
68. No power of the left or of the right has been able to influence the popular forces.
Being able to influence to a great extent within society is something really difficult to do during an election.
69. The solution does not lie in a return to archaism, to ancestral nationality, but in the formation of a new type of European identity.
The member countries of the European Union should undoubtedly promote better social integration and a greater sense of belonging to it.
70. I think this is the spirit of the times. We clearly see transversality in the Renaissance period, where affinities are expressed between very heterogeneous fields, with completely different practices in the aesthetic, scientific, technological, social order, and in the field of great discoveries.
Transversality in politics can be something very positive and that also affects the whole of society.
