Adrián Navigante

EXTENDED TRANSVERSALITY ON FÉLIX GUATTARI’S “ALCHEMICAL LABORATORY”

In this essay, Adrián Navigante deals with Félix Guattari’s notion of transversality and its consequences for the present context. Reception of Guattari’s thought has been too ingrained in its immediate effects to account for the full potential of transversality, which goes beyond the context in which it was formulated and applied for the first time (the French counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s). Transversality as an “art of interstices” is not only a tool for critical or subversive thinking but also a device for qualitatively transforming relationships. It enables a diverse form of socialization – one that is still rather unusual in our culture, mainly due to the consequences of the scientific-technical (one-)world-configuration and the massive emplacement of industrialism.

In its full range, transversality can broaden the horizon of Western thinking toward a concrete perception of alterity and a new politics of relations.

An Art of Interstices in a Cultural Wasteland

I have elsewhere spoken of transversality as a question of method¹, which is already a complex issue, but there is much more to it than that. This surplus must be shown, if possible, not only with the typical scholarly recourse to conceptual abstraction. My attempt in this essay is to deal with the potential contained in the very project of transversality to generate another type of human behavior, and to display some of its transformative aspects. In the sphere of interaction and practice, transversality involves a passage from reactive energy (of an isolated individual) to active synergy (of a committed group), a breath-turn that conjures another form of socialization, an “impossible position” – that is, a position invisible to the system but co-existing as “alternative” – capable of turning segments of the established reality inside out (or upside down) and reconfiguring them beyond taken-for-granted parameters of continuity and change. Can a notion like transversality, which at first sight appears as a method to synthetize contents from different disciplines and cultures, be turned into an interstitial channel of energy leading to other forms of subjectivity, not only on the level of reflection but also of relations(hips), that is, of collective emotions, behavior, and action?

Transversality is an art of interstices. It can be applied as a method to change mainstream organized thinking or to reveal what such way of thinking hides, and it can be experienced as the main content of cultural in-between-ness – not as a hasty bricolage of customs and codes but rather as a thorough reconfiguration of life-patterns. Such work is no mere refurbishing initiative at surface level. Interstices have their own depth, and only from those depths can counter-narrations really emerge. In the present period, one must yoke “chthonian powers” in order to achieve transformation, since the powers of the “high spheres” – whether mystical, prophetic, ecclesiastical, or academic – are for the most part determined by a mechanism of retroactive integration of emerging alternatives into the mainstream logic of the system: either dogmatic or objectifying (both closely related), either purely individualist or rigidly institutionalized (both functional to mainstream social values), ruthlessly competitive and increasingly discriminatory, quantity-based and profit-oriented (irrespective of the symbolic, industrial, or virtual nature of the capital being accumulated), absolutist and expansive. Why should we need another logic, or a partial anti-logic, or differential intensities ultimately incompatible with or at least difficult to be rendered functional to our system? Simply because the intrinsic logic of post-modern society, still supported and guided by epistemological reduction and technocratic amplification (with their resulting “solid basis of reality”) masterfully hides the open-ended, manifold, and to a certain extent fluid horizon of the “Western project”². It produces totalizing effects that lead to the mistaken assumption that a break with its mainstream intelligibility, an unflinching attitude of resistance, or a counter-position with expansive effects, are literally impossible. This is a very effective mechanism to neutralize and subsume – in a tendentially “homeostatic whole” presented as the “universal measure of all things” – any kind of detour that challenges a mechanic adherence to our selective rationality, our short-sighted objectivity, and our increasingly pathological normalcy.

The social system of post-modernity can be defined self-referential – and therefore successful at a high price. A self-referential system is characterized mainly by three features: 1. its capacity to establish relationships to itself and distinguish them from relationships with the environment; 2. a progressive annulation of the relationship with the environment through a self-relational dynamic aiming at total immanence; 3. a tendency to encompass other (minor or less self-referential) systems by means of a proliferation of rebooting and subsuming mechanisms³. The first aspect seals a conclusive separation of “nature” and “culture”. From the optics of this separation, “nature” appears as an objectifiable realm fully severed from any kind of subjectivity and consequently restricted to the purposes of science and technique. “Culture” is the main source from which a specific type of productivity is generated, nurtured, and carried out to the extreme for the sake of profit accumulation⁴. The “natural realm”, once devoid of its own subjective dimension, can only serve for exploitation of resources – with the almost exclusive purpose of profit accumulation. The third aspect adds an internal logic of organization and rearrangement of (already quantified) contents to the general expansion movement of the dominant system. If the natural environment is transformed and eventually replaced by the abstractions of social mediation⁵, the dominant structure and dynamics of the system imposes itself as a “naturalized social environment” upon all other partial subsystems⁶ forming its whole – irrespectively of whether these subsystems are spontaneous movements, doctrines of under-represented groups, or entire world-configurations with incommensurable cultural parameters (either dismissed as “primitive” and “superstitious” or neutralized and reshaped as an object of ethnographic research).

Transversality is an art of interstices. It can be applied as a method to change mainstream organized thinking or to reveal what such way of thinking hides, and it can be experienced as the main content of cultural in-between-ness.

In order to introduce a real change and disseminate it within the social texture supported and fed by the dominant logic, not only chthonian powers are necessary but also a transversal retrieval of them through a counter-narrative whose corpus may surpass a merely discursive construction or elaboration of referents. In this way, actions will have a bearing on the expansion of sociality toward existential regions for which no existing coding strategy seems any longer adequate. Sometimes this gesture of otherness does not appear as something that might end up grasping “the other side” of the presumably exhaustive whole imposed to us. Its starting point is too conventional, too limited, too radical, or simply old-fashioned. However, certain processes can be set in motion through which many fixed referents become fluidified and may end up generating a different modality of relations. A wasteland can only be turned into a fertile land if the earth is populated by the very beings that were dismissed long ago in the history of mankind, when human beings decided that they had been created in the image of a celestial superior being before whom so-called “nature” appeared as a corrupted byproduct or an infernal enemy.

Into Félix Guattari’s “Athanor”

But let’s go back to present times and the issue in question. As early as 1964, Félix Guattari wrote a report for the First International Congress of Psychodrama entitled La transversalité, where he introduces a new dispositive into the field of clinical psychiatry, in his own words: a generator of coefficients of transversality⁷. His purpose was to subvert the standardized functioning of the psychiatric institution by means of transdisciplinary and dissident action at the interstices of the already established territory, thus enabling subjugated groups [groupes assujettis] to attain a specific degree of freedom and empowerment and become subject groups [groupes sujets]⁸. Psychologically speaking, Guattari’s aim is to stir the occluded libido of patients who are excluded from the normal functioning of society and reduced to a catatonic state. In Guattari’s discourse, the word “catatonic” does not exclusively refer to a schizophrenic patient suffering from immobility and stupor. Guattari broadens the spectrum of the concept to include all human beings deprived of a creative use of their bodies, mental faculties, and language. The neuropsychiatric notion of catatonia would in this sense occupy a place at the end of an alienation continuum in which the individual and the social, the normal and the pathological, are not strictly separated. This continuum can also be seen as containing multiple variations within an energy spectrum according to the way in which the energy flows and the relations crystallized and specified through that modality. A proper channeling of that energy, qualitatively opposed to the very institutional mechanisms that obstruct it, could bring about changes in the way people relate to each other, and consequently in the way society works. It becomes clear that the problematic of transversality does not reduce itself to the (good or bad) exercise of psychiatry. It is extended to affected and disenfranchised people in workplaces, educational institutions, marginalized urban areas, as well as imaginary or subliminal spaces of exclusion⁹.

In Psychanalyse et transversalité, Guattari begins by considering a parallel that summarizes the problematic I have sketched so far: “there is a correspondence grid”, he writes, “between the slide or shift of meaning in schizophrenics and the mechanisms of increasing discordance establishing themselves on each level of industrial society”¹⁰. Madness and revolt are two instances in which human existence proves to be irreducible (as in “normal life”) to a producing, consuming, or bureaucratic machine. Something of the intensity of partial drives¹¹ takes over in those cases, unsubdued by conscious action, and prior to the formation of emotional clusters susceptible of being recognized and (at least partially) elaborated. One would be tempted to say, resorting to Freudian vocabulary, “primary processes”, but that would be too reductionist. Guattari’s view of the unconscious dynamics and its social scope breaks with the psychoanalytic focus on the infantile psychic organization as determinant of adult individual and social life. Instead of the Freudian reduction, Guattari introduces an amplification – and a dissemination. His notion of libido is expansive, not at all anchored in the psycho-somatic individual and its most immediate environment (the family) but open to a much broader field. In Guattari’s elaboration, libido is a processual energy emerging from a molecular (i.e. pre-subjective and ontologically non-discrete) level and engaged in a rhizomatic proliferation¹². This energy is inherently multiple and therefore alien to every form of reductio ad unum. This means that, for Guattari, libido has not only familiar or group-related but also socio-political and even cosmic implications¹³. Concerning the therapeutic situation, no transferential framework focused on the individual can retrieve, let alone channel that libido at-large in a direction that breaks down oppressive restrictions and avoid symptomatic relapses. If analysts remain on the individual level, they will inevitably reproduce the alienation from which the patient should be delivered. Because Guattari’s molecular logic of desire is previous in intensity to any individually or socially discrete units, the notion of libido (limitless in its dissemination potential) sets a limit to the logic of quantifying economy. Quantifying economy blocks desire, but desire may end up dissolving the formations of quantified energy – changing the general relational economy of life-forms. Guattari proposes a transversal subversion, one that does not begin with the consciousness of a social class or the strategies of a political party but in the dungeons of desire, where human and non-human factors co-exist and mingle with each other¹⁴. That is his own way of conjuring the chthonic powers I referred to earlier.

What characterizes and preserves orthodox psychiatry (one of the main sites of neutralization, repression, or oppression of disruptive forces) is an effectively regulated form of “transference in the institution”, to which Guattari opposes “transversality in the group”¹⁵. Creating a coefficient of transversality implies modifying naturalized pyramidal structures (like that of doctors over nurses and patients, nurses below doctors and over patients, and patients below nurses and doctors) without falling back in a simple form of horizontality, “a state of affairs where things and people arrange themselves doing what they can in the face of their immediate situation”¹⁶. It is not difficult to note that Guattari’s project is no utopian fantasy that denies pathology and intends to eliminate every instance of institutional organization. It is rather a re-composition of social spaces to see how the problem is designed and to create strategies of re-configuration in which the essentialized aspects of the distinction between normalcy and pathology, as well as that of experts and non-experts, may be critically reconsidered. Transversality means co-existing with madness, but not as an external observer. Observers have the prestige of objective knowledge, but they contribute to the reproduction of “passive schizophrenia” by pushing the patients to the external limit of the disenfranchised, non-productive, and asocial beings. Their external gaze is the first condition of the patients’ social exclusion and institutional confinement; therefore, it must be abolished. No therapy can ever be, strictly speaking, “objective”, since the procedure revolves around mechanisms of (inter-)subjective influence.

In Guattari’s thought, co-existing with madness means sharing its energy field and working constructively to achieve an alternative (inclusive and constructive) circulation of it, since the qualitative aspect of that energy is susceptible of modifying the conscious behavior of the ruling actors. In this sense, the main aspect of a transversal intervention consists in finding channels of communication where the signifying structures may not block the passage from a situation of passive endurance (in form of symptoms, defense mechanisms, and submission to “shrinking authorities”) to one of active reversal and recharting of the territory. Ultimately, Guattari envisions a profound transformation in the logic of relations, where naturalized norms of communication and behavior are left aside to give way to a new embodied (emotional and imaginative) language. If normalcy in the context of late capitalism implies an expansion of social mechanisms of control reaching the level of unconscious influence, a new alchemy of forces is required. In order to turn an individual into a patterned consumerist in our society, it is necessary to sever its biological core from all living bonds around it (sensuous, imaginative, noetic, spiritual) and turn its relational scope into “a huge, dismembered body”¹⁷. A dismembered body is one in which the parts do not respond to an internal whole but are predetermined for mechanical repetition. Transversality, on the contrary, appears as a conjuring act to revivify that body and restitute its trans-individual (proto-subjective, molecular, chaosmotic¹⁸) constitution and scope.

A Politics of Externality

There is a whole world to recover through a radical change of intensity and quality in relationships, and this goes far beyond the psychiatric institution. Society is, in many ways, a madhouse, but one of domesticated energy. It is the kingdom of pathological normalcy where the role of its actors is mainly characterized by a compulsion to permanent self-deceit. The very notion of “success”, an imperative in our society, implies a high dose of self-deceit, only partially compensated by material results. This complex is expressed and articulated in hyper-industrial profit-seeking (to the detriment of most earthly life-forms), in different forms of religious or mono-cultural fanaticism (to the detriment of its scapegoats), and in intellectual rigidity and intolerance (which goes hand in hand with emotional immaturity). One must say, though, that the general mechanism is quite efficient. Despite its manifold setbacks, we have arrived at a point in which almost any counter-cultural initiative is fed upon the very individualist motivations that keep the system alive – rendering the counter-project automatically infantile, absurd, or pathetic. Why should we become “counter-culturally rebellious” if the global stage of consumerism contains its own devices allowing for small transgressions and detours without putting the security system of its institutional core at risk? Bodies appear seemingly liberated in the domain of pornography; the world-wide web provides an endless flow of information to entertain and educate; democracy is said to be consolidated through social media and their endless debates. Nobody really cares to scratch the surface and see the bondage in pornography, the fake news on the internet, or the pseudo-egalitarian absolutism of social media. In such context, individualist rebels must exaggerate their difference to become ostensibly different. Some of them may become metaphysically committed satanists, others volunteer for racial warfare, others expose their plastic-surgery-based bloodbaths and deformations on Facebook or Twitter, and a psychopathic bunch may opt for serial-killing or crazed rampages at schools or shopping malls. Upon closer look, such “outcasts” are deeply into the system: they reify the reified even more in the hope of leaving an indelible imprint in our socially emaciated eco-system, In doing such things, they reinforce the need for the system to go back to “normal”. In general terms, one can say that this is no chthonic alchemy of relations but an addition of waste to the contemporary surface-landscape of global zombification.

In Félix Guattari’s thought, transversality does not reduce itself to the exercise of psychiatry. It is extended to affected and disenfranchised people in workplaces, educational institutions, marginalized urban areas, as well as imaginary or subliminal spaces of exclusion.

For the alchemy to work, the diagnosis of the problem should be sufficiently accurate, and the scope of the intervention realistic but at the same time far-reaching enough to ignite real transformation and not simply a purely formal rearrangement of things. The first critical modification that Guattari introduces in the psychoanalytic perspective (from which he takes part of his concepts) is the consideration of the social dimension of desire. The purpose of it is to make a right diagnosis about the situation of XX century Western society – especially its institutional management of the kind of difference that falls under the category of “abnormality”. What is madness after all but a radical figure of otherness within a culture in which homogeneity and integration of differences are taken as main desiderata for the sake of “enhanced functionality” (at all costs)? That figure of otherness points not only to an external quality of energy in an established set of relationships but also to an intensity for which individual life is only a passage or a coloration within a much bigger scenario. For Guattari, madness is not at all about individuality. Its transgressive aspect, if taken seriously (not literally!), bears the potential to re-configure world-relations.

In Freudian psychology, the individual is not only the starting point but also the central aim of the analysis. It is true that a concept like primordial repression [Urverdrängung] could be retraced, if one chooses a rather deterministic viewpoint, to instances preceding individual life and determining conscious development¹⁹. It can also be read in the opposite direction (leaving aside the ultimate status of the “primordial”²⁰) to show the sexual misery of bourgeois life and relate it to the already existing misery of capitalism²¹. Such interpretations, even if legitimate as part of Freud’s history of effects, move away from the core of his psychoanalytic reflection and clearly transgress its initial horizon. After all, psychoanalysis remains a science of the individual subject. It does not feed upon so-called facts of history (that is, concepts related to collective socialization) but upon phantasmatic narrations (rooted in individual childhood attachments and primordial family bonds).

When Guattari reintroduces the social dimension of desire, he begins with collective fluxes in place of individual consciousness. A very important aspect is that the multiple character of the collective dimension can never result from the addition of single units, for it precedes the level where that energy takes discrete shape(s). For Guattari, the death drive, which Freud presented as an intrapsychic invariant in all human beings²², is no primordial instance but the consequence of a significant and specifically located transformation of desire. It does not explain the secrets of human nature but rather the cultural effects of modern industrialism and its social organization on a deep and barely understood (unconscious) level: “Industrial society assumes the unconscious control of our destiny by imposing a disarticulation of each consumer-producer that corresponds to the disclosure of the death drive”²³. Such view leads to an inevitable dissociation of individuals from their field of living and concrete relations. Constitutive bonds are transformed into an existential vacuum, and even the most significant instances – religious and artistic experience, erotic encounters, scientific and political changes – end up becoming reified. This mystification was denounced around the same time – with a much more laconic spirit – by Ronald Laing in his book The Politics of Experience²⁴: “Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited […]. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labelled by the ‘normal’ majority bad or mad”²⁵.

With his notion of transversality, Guattari proposes an internal break with the contractual relationship between psychiatrists (most of whom practice a form of liberal and de-humanized medicine) and their patients (de-subjectified individuals cut off from every meaningful bond). On a larger scale, his device is a micropolitical igniter applicable to other institutions of society – history, pedagogy, sociology, ethnology, politics – and capable of turning rigid and conflict-laden contradictions into vehicles of change. Within the psychiatric framework, psychotic patients (the epitome of “madness”) are central to Guattari because their position within the system is one of absolute exclusion. For him, this has a positive side: their libido can never be captured by the economic emplacement (of desire) that constitutes modern bourgeois society – a good reason to prescribe them heavy medication, so that the differential qualifications of their libido fluxes may be silenced²⁶. Guattari strives to incorporate the externality of that energy and subvert the relationship not only between doctor and patient but also within the structure of the psychiatric service. This subversion, as I already indicated, is not limited to the problem of mental affliction and its possible treatments; it has far-reaching consequences on the understanding of alterity, which is the basis to question the indiscriminate universalization of Western values and its civilizational consequences. In an early dialogue with Jean Oury, the founder of the psychiatric clinic La Borde, Guattari ascribes to madness “an anthropological role […] since we begin to realize that madness is an essential phenomenon in our society, and that it is necessary to reconsider the old frame of thinking […], to understand mad people, to step out of racism and colonialism with innovative pedagogic methods, etc.”²⁷ His notion of transversality, which was formulated before his famous collaboration with Gilles Deleuze, contains something more significant than many theoretical insights of L’Anti-Œdipe and Mille Plateaux. It can be read as the indicator of an “affective anthropology” in statu nascendi, an effort to systematically de-center the human factor that became so prominent in modern Western thought and led to the present ecological, economic, and socio-political catastrophes.

The Vision of an Internal Outplace

“The consolidation of a level of transversality”, writes Guattari, “enables the inception of a new trait in the group, by means of which the delirium and any other unconscious instance where the illness has remained imprisoned so far can reach a mode of collective expression”²⁸. In the French context of the 1960s, transversality referred to a detour not only from standardized psychological and social laws but also from cultural determinants that seemed unsurmountable. This type of energetic transformation in both patients and therapists is not reduced to reshaping the functioning of the institutional group for the sake of health and justice, or to relativizing the biomedical model and its abstract notion of “universality” through increasing awareness of social factors in the representation and treatment of the illness, or to exonerating patients from the degrading and sometimes devastating label of “abnormality”. Guattari proposes an alchemy of forces, and the source of that alchemy is the differential power of schizophrenia – not as a serious mental affliction with little or no prospect of cure, but as a potential and unfathomed “war machine”²⁹ against mainstream parameters of normalcy, sociability, respectability, and (un-)relational freedom. Guattari attempts to disclose a reverse-side of the schizophrenic affliction, something like a passage from reactive to active energy that might enable schizophrenics to break the chains of socio-cultural predeterminations. How can this passage, quite Nietzschean in its original inspiration³⁰, be interpreted other than as the construction of an armored vehicle to destroy the “naturalized straitjacket” of abstract and reified relations? Guattari devises a war machine susceptible of protecting its conductors while they break through the “enemy line” – the impermeable tissue of the established order of things.

Schizophrenia in Guattari’s conception is not so much a clinical definition as a marker of exteriority, schizein (splitting) as separation from everything that falls under the equation of reality and rationality.

There is a long way to Guattari’s (and Deleuze’s) conception of a “war machine” – as it is formulated in Mille Plateaux: “a pure and immeasurable multiplicity […] the power of metamorphosis”³¹, and further: “an assemblage that renders thinking itself nomad”³². It includes an extension of Gregory Bateson’s concept of “double bind”, a singular approach to Antonin Artaud’s notion of “body without organs”, and a progressive interest in (post-Marxist) ethnology as an anti-ethnocentric politics of alterity. Much as Guattari valued Bateson’s emphasis on relationship and communication (as opposed to intrapsychic determinants and unconscious structures) for an understanding of subjectivity, he regarded the destructive ambivalence presupposed by the concept of “double bind”³³ not as a constitutive dilemma of human communication but as a type of disorder generated by the Oedipal structure and its reductive behavioral scope. The choice between neurotic identification and normative interiorization is not constitutive of human beings but rather the product of a pathological form of normalcy. This aspect of Guattari’s thought reminds us of Ronald Laing, who at the beginning of the 1960s tried to extend Bateson’s theory of the double bind from the restricted scope of pathology formation within family groups to the whole of society. For Laing human communication in Western society was an all-encompassing form of social mystification, in which the isolated “I” knows no real “thou” but an alienated and alienating “other”, a third person who – like the recurring mirror of a displaced ego – frustrates every authentic encounter. This authentic encounter can take place only if psychiatry does not define the experience of madness as “delusional system” but explores its unknown and challenging dimensions, the asymmetrical folding of an otherwise homogenized “reality”. This implies an ontological leap, an acceptance of the subversive or alternative realities experienced by schizophrenics – for which the Western ratio does not have any adequate tool of interpretation. Guattari is convinced that a change of method and technique is necessary, as well as the creation of another language to achieve levels of communication hitherto inaccessible. Schizophrenia in Guattari’s conception is not so much a clinical definition as a marker of exteriority, schizein (splitting) as separation from everything that falls under the equation of reality and rationality, everything that is inscribed and legitimated in the uniformed body of interactions and bonds called socius.

It is at this point that a figure like Antonin Artaud becomes relevant. Firstly, because this poet achieved an existential overcoming of the literary and the dramatic genres in the passage from representation to incorporation³⁴ and from beauty (or rather sublimity) to cruelty³⁵; secondly, because his work dwells in the harrowing tension between madness and creative insight, and lastly because he was himself the victim of quite a violent modality of treatment during the nine years he spent in psychiatric institutions (from 1938 to 1947). In his poem Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (1947), Artaud affirms that “man is sick because he is badly constructed […] when you have wrought a body without organs for him, you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his freedom”³⁶. This verse summarizes what Guattari sought to obtain with his method of transversality: the passage from the pathological affection of schizophrenia (whose main reference is autism) to its underground level of creative production of desire³⁷. Only in the process of generating a passage or enabling a transition to another composition of world can one realize that mental alienation is not a constitutive phenomenon of human nature but the result of an artificial distortion of relations within a culture, a “bewitched world”³⁸ where the whole sphere of socialization is placed under the yoke of something powerful and pernicious. Once this process is “systematized and naturalized” (as happened in the case of Western industrialism), not only social relationships are torn from their living texture and turned into rigid, mechanized, and predetermined roles. Mental faculties become deranged, habits are flattened to a stimulus-response model, and behavior degenerates into conditioned impulses. Even bodily functions and organs are reformatted within the autopoietic phantasmagoria of a fully mechanized and commodified world. In this context, the perception of the environment is mutilated in such a way that normalcy becomes a kind of social anesthesia in the face of untenable individualism, increasing consumerism, and ruthless market competition. This is clearly the “badly constructed man” Artaud speaks about in his poem, whereas madness, far from being the solution to the ailments of the system, points in et per se to an unthinkable exteriority and shows that there is something other than the “acceptable symptoms” (anxiety, apprehension, stress, hypochondria, etc.) to be managed by the system. The other side of the naturalized immanence in which we live as normal consumerists or as civilized social Darwinians becomes perceptible through the scandal of serious pathology. Only by working through its veil of affliction can we see ourselves as machines that were led astray from the creativity of their chthonian origins and ended up following the asphalted surface-lines of an urban phantasmagoria. What emerges out of the latter is prone to self-referentiality, bad abstraction, and self-extinction. That is why transversality can be seen as a movement that bears hope at a dead end. Working on transversality can pierce the veil of a pathological difference and reach the golden core of its energy. However, the golden core does not exist separately. It is no concealed quinta essentia waiting to be delivered by a sudden awakening. It emerges from permanent work on the chaotic depths of the unconscious magma to transform the whole register of energies, but its inherent ambivalence is never overcome³⁹.

In Guattari’s alchemy of forces, Artaud’s body without organs is no passage to immortality in a Gnostic sense of the term, no alternative to the physical body of corruption and decay. It is rather an internal outplace within a totalized field of immanence, a kind of martyrized body that resists its final vivisection by taking upon itself all the afflictions of the system⁴⁰. The body without organs is the analogical embodiment of a nature that has been ravaged for the sake of instrumental rationality and profit-oriented production. The main characteristic of this process is the production of discrete units and their emplacement in a cultural dynamic based on profit and consumerism that annihilates the under-ground level of production and relations – with which Guattari connects his notion of collective and unquantifiable desire. Cultural differentiation, that is, the production of discrete and socially functional units, is not reduced to mass production of industrial artifacts to zombify the masses – something that is usually defined in opposition to any “natural” instance of (human or non-human) life. That duality is surmounted through an all-encompassing abstraction process, which conquers every space of social life and retroactively affects its seemingly ontological opposite: “nature”. Not only human labor or social relations, but life in its broadest sense becomes fully quantifiable and susceptible of being manipulated at large for the sake of profit (as opposed to solidarity) and market relations (as opposed to living interactions). Every-thing – including bodies, organs, and even genes – must become productive, adhere to economic surplus, stimulate potential consumers, and contribute to the perfectibility of quantified and instrumentalized social relations. The body without organs, on the contrary, is “unproductive, sterile, unengendered, unconsumable”⁴¹. It is in a way the waste product of the system⁴², in which the latter’s destructive logic is fully introjected⁴³. It points in its own way to the chthonian or daimonic level of energies involved in the utter deviation from the furrow of normalcy⁴⁴. On this level, there is no hallucination, there is no delusional state or introjection of libido. If schizophrenic desire becomes active, it brings about a discovery and a reemployment of intensive quantities leading to a migration of contexts as well as to a (theoretical and operational) reformulation of contents.

Opening the Chthonian Gate: Schizoanalysis and “Primitive Cures”

Psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and even transpersonal or spiritual psychology do not have the tools to deal with the “chthonian level” thematized by Guattari. Psychiatry blindly follows the bio-medical paradigm and excludes from the very beginning the possibility of experiencing “nature” as something different from what the discourse of natural sciences prescribes. Psychoanalysis, as we have clearly seen, isolates the individual from a complex socio-cosmic milieu and establishes the closest to a degree-zero of observation based on a reductive and negative conception of the unconscious. Transpersonal and spiritual psychology⁴⁵ have introduced elements to broaden the horizon, but they resort too quickly to metaphysical postulates and generalities, thus reducing the complexity of the problem and ruining the consistency of their approach⁴⁶. In Guattari’s thought, the turning point inscribed in the body without organs in relation to the alienating system appears in a seemingly regressive moment, that of the analogy with the earth as primitive and savage unity of desire and production. Both the earth and the body without organs are seen as full bodies, i.e. bodies of unquantifiable plenitude, impossible to reduce to land appropriation, division of labor, and abstract or segmentary production. They have their own method of coding (or way of composing a world), a special form of territorialization, whose substrate of cruelty has been disjointed and rechanneled by modernization⁴⁷. This is where Guattari’s approach shows its own limitations. The traces left by such systems, which do not belong to the past but to a parallel evolution of cultures⁴⁸, compels us to think the movement of culture back into the bodies of their different actors, back into the other (non-objectifiable) side of nature, to do justice to alterity.

Nature should designate the uncharted territory of germinating intensities, of lateral alliances, of unthought-of relations, of new strategies of coding that counteract the reproduction of commodified desire and reified socialization.

Why should one seek that kind of “justice”? Because alterity is the other side of the capitalist modality of dominance, the other side of the end – or rather the ultimate accomplishment – of history, a return to “nature”, though not as the essentialized opposite of culture, a primordial ontology ensuring an indestructible identity, or a romantic image of rebellion or purity against the corruption of a mundane and money-making society⁴⁹. Nature, if the word can still be used, should designate the uncharted territory of germinating intensities, of lateral alliances, of unthought-of relations, of new strategies of coding that counteract the reproduction of commodified desire and reified socialization. Nature as Gaia and Chthonia (intertwined), at the same time ancestral and new living collectivities. Nature as the dimension of land that resists the ravaging intrusion of (hyper-)urbanization, infrastructure-planning, management, and space industry. It is only through regaining human and other-than-human intensities of a type that is not any longer accessible in our mainstream culture that alternative instances of subjectivity can emerge. After all, the reduction of the living scope of relations to human affairs of an abstract sort is a product of Western modernity, but the latter carries in its core, because of its own expansion process and contact with other cultures, significant seeds of resistance and change. As a cultural project of universal rank, it has been exported to almost every corner of the globe, being at the same time unable to wipe out the local (regional and collective) attachments and referents of the conquered lands – where alternatives to universalist homogenization were permanently reconfigured from collective “bodies without organs”. In the same way schizophrenics withdraw to the body without organs in an attempt to escape their submission to an oppressive domain of “normalcy”; they do that, writes Guattari, in the same way in which the body without organs withdraws to the deserted places of the universalist cultural narrative imposed upon us⁵⁰ – because it is in those far-off places that a new horizon is disclosed: other races, other cultures, other gods⁵¹. The socius is neither fixed nor closed over the productive forces and their selective production of reality; it is open to other forms of intensity and relation which have been deemed abnormal, delusional, or destructive by the abstract machines supporting the functioning of globalized economy and its cultural consequences. In Guattari’s thought, this movement of desire beyond the already coded surface of normal, efficient, or utilitarian social interaction is called “nomadism”. It is nomadic not because it knows no attachment to land (and therefore to ancestors or traditions)⁵², but rather because it is by principle unsubduable to the unifying coding machine of our present production and social system. However, it does reach other places, and those places have their own cartography, their own location, their own degree of consistency.

It was Victor Turner’s cultural anthropology that inspired Guattari to associate “primitive cures” with his own alternative form of analysis (which he called schizoanalysis)⁵³. At first glance, this can be perceived as somewhat contradictory. One of the pseudo forms of the unconscious from which schizoanalysis seeks to escape is symbols, whereas Victor Turner’s cultural anthropology is focused precisely on the value of symbols within the broad framework of ritual performance⁵⁴. In L’Anti-Œdipe, an author like C. G. Jung – who struggled his whole life to restitute the numinous value of symbols – receives very little recognition. Jung’s resistance against Freud’s reductionist conception of the unconscious is celebrated by Guattari and Deleuze, especially his position in the debate over the notion of transference. In a certain way, C. G. Jung anticipated the transversal amplification that Guattari attempted to introduce in 1964 (by opposing “transversality” to “transference”), since – as Guattari himself indicates – he fought to destroy the “parental role” of the analyst and worked on a much broader transferential field (populated by gods, devils, sorcerers, and other strange beings.)⁵⁵. A good starting point, say the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, but “everything went wrong afterward”⁵⁶. For C. G. Jung, the symbol, essentially related to the powerful condensation device of myth and religion, is an adequate expression of the unconscious. It is not the drive, but the spirit (of Nature!) which works on that level. But does that really change the main question of relation in analysis and the worlds implied in the transferential exchange? It is not only Freud’s katabasis but also Jung’s anabasis that Guattari rejects⁵⁷, since the whole productivity of the unconscious together with its social, political, environmental, and cosmic multiplicities (all of which are brilliantly disclosed the case of Daniel Paul Schreber⁵⁸) are reduced to a diffuse form of transcendental expressionism.

What attracted Guattari so much from Victor Turner’s symbolic anthropology? Mainly the way he describes the curative ritual of Ihamba⁵⁹ among the Ndembu people of Zambia, in doing justice to traditional etiologies instead of imposing a Western interpretation. The situation could easily be interpreted in a psychoanalytic way. The victim is preyed upon by the ghost of his maternal grandfather. He spent an unusually long time in the matrilineal of his father (contrary to tradition). He is effeminate and has been his father’s favorite; the conflict is triggered by the death of his father. The Oedipal nature of the case is blindingly obvious, say Guattari and Deleuze, “for our perverted eyes”⁶⁰. Turner’s gaze, on the contrary, focused on quite another level of analysis revealed by African divination, which defies every etiological criterion related to Western rationality. The cause of the patient’s affliction revolves around the ihamba motive, or more precisely around the two incisors of the ancestor hunter who is assailing him. Strictly speaking, there is no cause. There are, on the contrary, multiple effects of an action carried out by non-human agents (the ancestor’s teeth escaping from the sacred pouch and penetrating the body of the victim). This action does not only concern the afflicted person but also the whole community; it includes hidden conflicts, political tensions related to power succession, and the colonial situation which caused many African villages to fall into a state of decrepitude. What Victor Turner shows is that “the Ndembu analysis was never Oedipean, it was plugged into social organization and disorganization […]. Instead of reducing everything to the name of the father, or that of the maternal grandfather, the latter opened a field that contains all the names of history […] scattered in the thousand segmented fluxes of chieftainships, linages, and rapports of colonization”⁶¹.

It is important to underline that, when Guattari speaks of social relations, he does not only mean conscious interests or preconscious emotional investments, but mainly unconscious cathexes related to collective desire. Collective desire, on that level, is transgressive, since it points to unknown mechanisms (usually of other cultures) to avail themselves of the most weird and unintelligible things, those tokens of alterity that derange Western self-referentiality and rational solidity. The most significant aspect of Turner’s view is that it does not limit the field of the conflict to any intra-psychic realm, and it refuses to see the individual as the key to the matter. But even more: it opens a field for which another kind of thinking is required, as well as a procedure that might bring together a myriad of apparently incompatible (natural and artificial) things – all of them animated. Victor Turner does not show any mystification of human conflicts in terms of supernatural forces and magical objects, but a challenge to a dominant world-configuration – including that of anthropologists as scientists working on a relatively stable object of inquiry. If that is broken or even threatened, not only the object but also the subjective underground is at stake, and the “normal reaction” of scholars is a recourse to colonial mystification: they end up translating into rational terms something that totally escapes their grasp, even at the risk of deforming or adulterating the intrinsic “logic” of the whole process. Guattari’s transversal method intends to pick up the challenge posed by Victor Turner, that of creating detours or diverging lines [lignes de fuite] that might lead into those spaces for which Western hermeneutics has nothing to offer but what I would term “the lapsus of rationality”. Jacques Lacan wrote illuminating words on this question: “When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious. One knows. But one has only to be aware of the fact to find oneself outside it”⁶². The awareness Lacan speaks about is not an instance of insight or illumination. It is on the contrary one of blindness and resistance. The analysts who reach that level are not capable of exploring the unconscious. They have neither the disposition nor the tools for it. And they are in the wrong place, because the unconscious is ultimately outside, outside of everything what can be said and done in terms of rational intervention – closing the chthonian gate and feigning a bridge to the real agents of the affliction.

1. Adrián Navigante, Transversality: Questions of Method, in: Transcultural Dialogues N°13, Spring Equinox (May 2023), pp. 3-19. To read this article, see: fondationalaindanielou.org/wp-content/uploads/fondation-alain-danielou_transcultural_dialogues_13.pdf
2. From the Gnostics in ancient times, passing through alchemy in the Middle Ages and the humanism of the Renaissance, to the manifold esoteric and visionary currents of modern times, the Western project as a totality can in no way be reduced to what has been imposed as a “consistent world-view” through the dominance of Cartesian dualism, the philosophy of liberalism, and the socio-cultural wasteland of industrialism.
3. Cf. Niklas Luhmann: Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt 1987, pp. 31-32. It should be pointed out that even if Luhmann uses the expression “social systems” (in the plural), he ultimately resorts to the term “system” (in the singular) to refer to modern Western society. This is mainly due to the latter’s ambition of universal validity, which ultimately shapes every form of relationship as already subsumed within the unifying and symptomatically selective principle (cf. Luhmann, Ibidem, p. 33).
4. The phrase “being carried to the extreme” points to an advanced phase of industrialism in which imperialism and monopolization – despite the increasing awareness of both problems in the intellectual elites – have become the rule of thumb of world economy without any other factor that might significantly interfere with its course. The reason is that even intellectual elites are directly or indirectly dependent on the economic power of those elites to secure a material basis that allows them to pursue their critical research.
5. There are very concrete and absurd examples of this aspect, like new institutions for stressed out entrepreneurs in which the latter are “virtually taken back to Nature” by means of visual simulators to reduce stress and experience some form of harmonious connection with that “lost object”. In the meantime, real Nature keeps being destroyed “out there” by the very project they themselves design and carry out.
6. “The total system [Gesamtsystem] takes on the function of an internal environment [interne Umwelt] for the partial systems [Teilsysteme], that is, for each partial system according to its specific way of functioning” (Niklas Luhmann, Ibidem, p. 37). Luhmann’s reference is very clear: it does not matter what the specific way of functioning of each subsystems may be and what influence its expansion could eventually have on the general status quo. The naturalized discourse or course of action consists in rendering it homologous – or at least highly compatible – with the dominant patterns of socialization. Thus, indigenous shamans of whatever provenance are led to speak of the “great Spirit” for the purpose of rendering their discourse and practices compatible with the general background of monotheistic religions. This is done in a way remindful of the transformation of Yoga (as philosophical system and soteriological practice) into relaxation and health-supporting exercises (validated of course as a complement to what Western medicine has achieved), or the adaptation of Tantra for merely hedonistic and psychospiritual patterns of consumerism – without forgetting its possible psychopathic turns, like the case of the Neo-Tantric Guru Gregorian Bivolaru (imprisoned in France on charges of rape and human trafficking) and its Movement for the Spiritual Integration into the Absolute.
7. For the meaning of these “coefficients of transversality” and their relationship with Guattari’s dispositive (including the rediscovery of psychosis below the rags of neurosis), cf. Gilles Deleuze: Préface à Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, Paris 1972, p. vi.
8. Félix Guattari: La transversalité, in: Psychanalyse et transversalité, pp. 72-85, especially p. 76. Subject groups are co-creators of their own destiny despite a general structure of oppression that threatens to bring them back to their former condition of “subjugated”.
9. Imaginary and subliminal spaces of exclusion are not simply intra-psychic. They have an existential and social character that resists any explanation by means of binary oppositions (white-black, executioner-victim, exploiter-exploited, etc.), and this is very akin to Guattari’s idea of rhizomatic multiplicity – which can never be reduced to positivist categories or vulgar distinctions of the type: fact or fiction, cognitive or emotional, personal or social.
10. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 75.
11. In the notion of partial drive, there are two components that attracted Guattari’s attention: the continuous source or flow of energy that does not distinguish psychic affection from endosomatic stimulation, and the absence of unified direction in the flow of energy (which discards a constitutive or predetermined “object” or “aim” of the energy-flow). The notion of partial drive stems from Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), but Guattari found a potential passage from a reductive conception of the unconscious based on primordial determinants to a broader conception based on the heterogenous productivity of desire in Lacan’s elaborations on the “object a”, which escapes symbolization and opens the space of a surplus of desire (jouissance) where the whole symbolic system is shaken and loses ground (cf. Jacques Lacan: Le séminaire IV. La relation d’objet, Paris 1994)..
12. The level of ontological inconsistency refers to a dimension of experience where human desire is not subjected to the constitutive and regulative rules of the functioning of society (hierarchy, division of labor, spatialization of time, distribution of energy according to objectives, etc.) and flows in different, unexplored directions without responding to any superimposed principle, thus de-territorializing the codified life spaces that seem to be fixed and unchangeable (cf. Félix Guattari: Lignes de fuite. Pour un autre monde des possibles, La Tour-d’Aigue 2011, p. 112). As to the notion of rhizome, it refers to a heterogenous, multiple, horizontal, non-genetic and immanent life-movement, which Guattari and Deleuze oppose to homogenization, unification, hierarchical organization, genetic order, and transcendent determination. This is summarized in the main conceptual contrast they establish between “rhizome” and “root” (cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980, pp. 13-19).
13. Félix Guattari: Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris 1989, p. 62. Only with the stratification of libido in the psychic formations of an individual psyche do we reach what Freud and Lacan theorized as “determinants” (with their manifold vicissitudes related to the individual destiny). As processual economy of forces, the libido has a complex history and relational dynamics before it reaches the level of functional stratification and underpinning. This is also the reason why Guattari and Deleuze read the case of Daniel Paul Schreber (i.e. his “cosmic delirium”) as main indicator of the failure of psychoanalysis to grasp the scope of what it calls “unconscious” (cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe : Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1, Paris 2018, mainly pp. 9-10). The development of Guattari’s thought shows that the cosmic dimension is not a supplementary level to the socio-political, but that it progressively transforms the socio-political arena into a surface of hitherto excluded modalities of “becoming”.
14. The opening toward the “non-human”, so terrifying as it may appear in the case of madness (where one would speak of “inhuman” presences), shares some relevant features with other world-conceptions in which such interaction of energies is accomplished in ways that one could define as fully opposed to the pathologies of Western psychiatry and the negative or destructive aspects of mental derangement. In his Red Book, C. G. Jung depicts his own chthonic initiation (which he refers to as katabasis), which led him from the domain of psychiatric rationality (his professional career in Burghölzli) to the realm of souled relationality (his vocational veer toward Analytical Psychology). The quality of this experience (the first hints of which appeared very early in his life, as he relates in his autobiography Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken) was considered “pathological” by his Freudian adversaries and critical biographers (cf. Donald Winnicott, Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in: Donald Winnicott: Psychoanalytic Explorations, Harvard 1992, pp. 482-492, especially pp. 484-486; Frank Mclynn, Carl Gustav Jung, New York 1997, pp. 239-241.).
15. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 79.
16. Félix Guattari: Ibidem. Crystal clear is also the following consideration, which summarizes his position: “Transversality is a dimension which aims at surmounting two impasses: a pure verticality and a simple horizontality” (Ibidem, p. 80). In this sense, transversality is the condition to turn subjected (i.e. oppressed and subjugated) individuals into subjective (i.e. empowered and creative) agency.
17. Félix Guattari: Ibidem, p. 82.
18. The notion of chaosmosis implies firstly a step toward chaos, though not in the sense of a total disorganization, fragmentation, and dissolution of subjectivity, but rather as a detour from the dominant balance of society shaped by alienating forces (cf. Félix Guattari: Chaosmose, Paris 2022, p. 119). Secondly, it points to a way of channeling a pathic intensity through a “plan of immanence” (cf. Félix Guattari: Qu’est-ce que l’Écosophie ? Paris 2018, p. 106). This means finding an orientation whereby individual and collective consistency may be regained (avoiding thus being swallowed up by utter chaos) without being recaptured by the logic of the dominant production of desire and relationships.
19. This determinism would be, if one follow’s Freud’s secular and atheistic conception, a “biological fiction”, as in the case of primordial aggression and the death drive. A great deal of rationalization is applied also on that level, for example with transgenerational disturbances, with the aim of helping the ghosts out of the dark realm of the unconscious and turning their visitations into a discourse on the historical distance introduced by (their) death. Despite such strategies, such concepts can never become scientific, as Freud hoped, since they can only be made coherent through an inverted metaphysics.
20. Curiously enough, Guattari writes (with Deleuze) that the notion of primordial repression does not have any other meaning than a “repulsion of the desiring machines by the body without organs” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, p. 17). For Guattari there is nothing “primordial” in the Freudian repression. It rather points to a moment of paranoid (pseudo-)recomposition of the energy unleashed by schizophrenia. The next stage would consist in re-channeling that energy toward the space of the reality principle, that is, the family-based theater of neurosis.
21. This was Herbert Marcuse’s attempt in his book Eros and Civilization (1955).
22. Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in: Studienausgabe III: Psychologie des Unbewußten, Frankfurt 2001, pp. 213-272, especially p. 248.
23. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 82. It is Wilhelm Reich who inspired Guattari with his critique of the Freudian death-drive in Character Analysis (cf. Wilhelm Reich: Character Analysis (Third, enlarged Edition), Main, WRM Press, 1988, pp. 225-236).
24. The The Politics of Experience were published in 1967, but the essays composing it date back to the previous three years (most of them to 1964, the year of the publication of Guattari’s essay on transversality), as indicated by Laing himself at the beginning of the book.
25. Ronald Laing: The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, London 1990, pp. 23-24.
26. This is by no means an utter rejection of medication in acute cases. Chemical anesthesia is the most effective Western resource to avoid instances like extreme violence or suicide. It is rather an anthropologically relevant constatation that in silencing the voices of alterity, every possibility of transforming that suffering into creating energy is ruled out, not so much for the benefit of the patient but rather for the preservation of the naturalized treatments of psychiatry – exclusively based on the bio-medical paradigm of illness – with no consideration whatsoever of the profound layers of socialization – for which only the anthropology of the last half century has elaborated – with considerable “scientific precaution” – a promising discourse focused on the symetrization of cultures. The work of authors like Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour (an eminent anthropologist of modern Western culture!) are examples of scientific attempts at trans-cultural symetrization.
27. Félix Guattari : Sur les rapports infirmiers-médecins (Compte rendu d’une discussion à La Borde avec Jean Oury), in: Psychologie et transversalité, pp. 7-17, quote p. 9.
28. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 82.
29. Sixteen years after his essay on transversality, in Mille Plateaux, Guattari provided (with Gilles Deleuze) a detailed account of his notion of “war machine”, pointing to its “extraneous” character with regard not only to the state apparatus but also to the Western logos: “the war machine is of another species, of another nature, of another origin than the state apparatus […] there would be a fulguration of the war machine coming from the outside” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, pp. 436-437, my emphasis). In order to do justice to the “externality” of the war machine, Deleuze und Guattari resorted to Pierre Clastres’ model of the society against the state based on the latter’s ethnographic work among the indigenous groups of the Guayaki, Mbya-Guarani, Chulupi and Yanomami. I use once again Erich Neumann’s term “extraneous” to underline the almost unsurmountable gap between previous models of understanding not only social but also existential change and what Deleuze and Guattari proposed in Mille Plateaux, even beyond their own horizon of expectations.
30. It is mainly Gilles Deleuze who worked on Nietzsche’s distinction between reactive and active, mainly on the level of the body, which inspired Félix Guattari in his critique of the psychiatric institution and the subversive potential of schizophrenia. The body, as Deleuze says, “is a multiple phenomenon composed by a plurality of irreducible forces” (Gilles Deleuze: Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris 2005, p. 45). There is not only the general quantity of forces, but their differential quality, which introduces the field of relations extending itself from the affective body to the whole environment: “The forces which enter into a relation do not have a quantity without at the same time having a quality that corresponds to their difference in quantity” (Gilles Deleuze: Ibidem). The field of forces and their possible distinctions (none of them reducible to a dialectical scheme) contain unimaginable horizons of thinking and action – which Guattari intends to explore with his approach to the subversive potential of madness.
31. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, p. 435.
32. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, p. 36.
33. This concept was formulated in a paper published in 1956 and refers to the divisive simultaneity of two different messages emitted from the parents to the child, which the latter cannot emotionally handle. The messages are not strictly linguistic but behavioral, as Bateson himself shows in the following example: “We hypothesize that the mother of the schizophrenic will be simultaneously expressing at least two orders of message […] a) hostile of withdrawing behavior which is aroused whenever the child approaches her, and b) simulated loving or approaching behavior which is aroused when the child responds to her hostile and withdrawing behavior, as a way of denying that she is withdrawing. […] The child is placed in a position where he must not accurately interpret her communication if he is to maintain his relationship with her. In other words, he must not discriminate accurately between orders of message, in this case the expression of simulated feelings and real feelings. As a result, the child must systematically distort his perception of metacommunicative signals” (Gregory Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland: Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia, in: Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, N°4, 1956, quoted from Gregory Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago: London 2000, p, 213-214).
34. I use this term, which stems from the Afro-Brazilian cults of possession, in an anthropological sense to highlight the reception of intangible entities in one’s own body, as well as the channeling of those energies in bodily or verbal communication affecting a whole group. From an anthropological point of view, incorporation is not an intrapsychic phenomenon but an intersubjective and environmental one. The term includes at the same time an assemblage of bodies, spaces, and things (in a sacralized space) that enable such phenomenon to take place. If one thinks of Artaud’s last appearance at the Parisian theater Le Vieux Colombier, it becomes clear that what emanated from him (as perceived by the public) was an ominous bundle of forces that no witness of that event could reduce to psychological dimension. François Laplantine refers to the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé as “a theatrical form quite close to Antonin Artaud’s conception of theater, since for Artaud the actor must incorporate his character and become that other to the point of being possessed” (François Laplantine: Théâtre de la catastrophe, Paris 2022, p. 20).
35. In Artaud’s conception of theater, cruelty means the reduction of the breach between actor and spectator to a shared space of sacred communication, a magnetic transmission where every rest of abstract rationality (representation, psychology, morality, distraction, artifice) is burnt in the perceptual (collective) intensity of magical action, cf. Antonin Artaud: Le théâtre et son double, in: Œuvres Complètes IV, Paris 1978, pp. 82-85. The space of intensity where sacred communication takes place is in Artaud’s conception related to the telluric (or chthonian) forces of nature, with which Indigenous cultures still preserve a singularly rich (that is, non-objectifying and transformative) modality of interaction: “For me, European culture has failed; I think that in the unbridled development of its machines, it has betrayed the true sense of culture […] The sacred rites and dances of the Indians are the most beautiful form of theater and the only ones that can be justified” (Antonin Artaud: Lettre ouverte aux governeurs des états du Méxique, in: Œuvres Complètes VIII, Paris 1971, p. 228).
36. Antonin Artaud: Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, in: Œuvres Complètes XIII, Paris 1974, p. 104.
37. “Before being the affection of the artificialized schizophrenic, personified in autism, schizophrenia is the process of production of desire and desiring machines” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Œdipe, p. 33).
38. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem, p. 18.
39. Félix Guattari’s alchemy is not aethereal but chaosmotic, which means that the ultimate sphere of transmutation is a chthonian magma of forces – concealed by the accumulated superimpositions of adulterated elements but in no way detached from the rest of the environment. This is far from a classical conception of alchemy, even that of post-medieval times, for which there is always a pristine, aethereal space of restitution to resort to which guarantees the proper distillation.
40. Artaud was fully aware of this aspect. That is why he defined the artist as a scapegoat: “The social duty of art is to give expression to the anxiety of its time. […] If the artist ignores that he is a scapegoat, that his duty is to magnetize, attract and place the straying wrath of his time upon his shoulders to ease the collective dejection, he cannot be called an artist” (Antonin Artaud: L’anarchie sociale de l’art, in: Œuvres Complètes VIII, p. 287).
41. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Œdipe, p. 16.
42. “The body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem, p. 42).
43. Hence its association with the Freudian death drive and with Emil Kraepelin’s terminal state of schizophrenia, i.e. autism (cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem, p. 16 and p. 33, respectively).
44. Guattari and Deleuze refer to Karl Jaspers’ indications about the difference between “process” (rupture and intrusion of external agents) and “reaction” (relation of such contents from the point of view of ego-mediation) in his Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913). Jaspers’ ambivalence in the treatment of delusional ideas, their autonomy and concretion – to the extreme case of what he calls “split-off personalities” [abgespaltene Persönlichkeiten] – points to the limitations of his own approach. He describes the subjective character of those autonomous factors and leaves an open door to another conception of “nature” and “culture”, which he rejects at the same time on principle – namely that of modern rationality. But the case of the German chemist Ludwig Staudenmaier, on which he extensively comments, can be seen as the type of material to broaden the horizon of transversality and finally reach the question of alterity without the prejudices of a naturalized Western dominance.
45. Two disciplines from which the most emblematic works in relation to the thematic of this book are Stanislav Groff’s The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (1998) and Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology (2000).
46. Mainly because the realm of alien or unknown forces interacting with human subjectivity is transformed into an all-encompassing notion of “(translucid) consciousness”, but also because the ultimate mystical synthesis postulated by such authors overshadows the myriad forms of relation revealed by ethnological and ethnopsychiatric work over the last seven decades. Ultimately such openings to “Eastern spirituality” are another form of ethnocentric speculation. They universalize what could be defined as an ideal type of “other” within us – quite the opposite to the notion of “alterity”.
47. Despite their illuminating insights, Guattari and Deleuze regarded the animistic network of relations, which can be so clearly observed in traditional non-Western societies (formerly called “primitive cultures”) as a coding dispositive that was not adequate for a real liberation of the desiring machines – that is, the other side of capitalist fluidification. In this sense, the treatment of alterity in L’Anti-Œdipe contains a rest of ethnocentric evolutionism – which Guattari partially modified during the 1980s (only after the publication of Mille Plateaux). This seemingly paradoxical attitude of condemning capitalism but at the same time seeing it as a force of liberation (from essentialized bonds such as lineages, land, blood ties, nobility rights, etc.) is something that Deleuze and Guattari, despite their criticism of classical Marxism, inherited from it. Ultimately it has nothing paradoxical in itself, but rather paradoxical effects, because the instances of micropolitics that can be extracted from traditional non-Western societies to counteract the zombification effects of hyper-industrialism and global technocratization are rejected a priori as opposed to freedom and progress.
48. For a refutation of the one-sided evolutionist gaze in the treatment of Indigenous societies, cf. Philippe Descola: “Since it is our institutions and the objects we have produced that seem to us the consequence and the main parameter of evolution, we cannot conceive that Aboriginal Australians also know a very long evolutionary process. Europeans have always asked themselves why they know evolution and the other cultures don’t, but in fact the others have also evolved, only in a different way” (Philippe Descola: Diversité de natures, diversité des cultures, Montrouge 2010, p. 56).
49. The problem of capitalist accumulation and commodification of the whole society is quite different from a superficial condemnation of money as root of all evil – something which makes little sense, even on the level of a radical critique of social relations. The expression “capitalist accumulation” has a very specific sense in the writings of Karl Marx related to a qualitas occulta to which human labor is relegated, and the focus is exclusively laid on the exchange value of commodities – as if they had a life of their own independently of what (or who) produces them. The fact that commodities appear as fully severed from the whole infrastructure of productivity (with its economic and socio-political problems) is an ideological concealment and a reduction of social life to quantified relations only applicable in the arena of market exchange. Quite another thing is money as principle of comparison of exchangeable goods (a relevant question already in the writings of Aristotle, cf. Politics, 1:1257b), which until the XVIII century was closely related to an anthropological reflection on a functional criterion that might enable a balance between the different producers of goods and the general (material) needs of the population. From the XVIII onward, the science of economy became independent, and the laws searched by theoreticians were not any longer (as in the case of Aristotle) related to the general anthropological question of a “good life”; they aimed instead at establishing effective principles to grasp and regulate the dynamics of a market that was conquering more and more aspects of social life. This process went hand in hand with a complexification of human interaction and the need for more mediating instances to render exchanges intelligible and plausible – money being one of the most functional and effective instances. It is mainly Georg Simmel who in 1900 reformulated the question of money in Western culture from the point of view of a broader cultural critique (an enterprise that had been abandoned by human scientists due to the increasing primacy and specificity of the economic question). He characterized money as the prototype of a cultural symbol, the dynamics of which had very concrete effects on the feelings and destinies of individuals (cf. Georg Simmel: Philosophie des Geldes, Frankfurt 1996). The symbolic status of money points for Simmel to a general problematic of modern culture and its mediation instances going far beyond the sphere of economics – especially in the determinations postulated by a Marxian hermeneutics of production and circulation.
50. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, p. 105. We will see that only the transformed gaze of ethnology (through the irruption of its alterity-counterpart) can shed light on those places and reveal that they are in fact “populated” by other beings and laws of existence and relation.
51. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem,p. 104. On the level of productive and pre-capitalist desire, it is not decisive whether the synthesis toward a new instance of relation is imaginary or real, since the distinction between real and imaginary cannot be given a priori. It is constructed by the very creative act of composing a world within an active and fully engaged community (of human and/or non-humans).
52. In the 1980s, Guattari’s dialogue with ethnology was intensified and, despite some of his remaining prejudices against the ecologically relevant motive of a “return to the earth”, he emphasized the possibility of “spawning spaces” (espaces de frayage, cf. Félix Guattari (ed.): Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, N°1, printemps 1987, p. 8) between modern Western civilization and “archaic” societies, like dreaming, dancing and further ritual practices with their singular coding strategies and intensities.
53. In L’Anti-Œdipe, there are scanty references to Victor Turner’s work, but the long reference to his article of 1964, “A Ndembu Doctor in Practice”, is – as we shall see in what follows – very telling, both with regard to the closeness Guattari sought to this type of alternative view of therapy and to the limits of the theoretical framework in which he tried to circumscribe his schizoanalysis.
54. At least from 1957 onward, which means in the most significant part of his work. Turner’s fieldwork period was spent at the Mukanza village (from 1950 to 1952) and devoted to the mechanisms employed by the Ndembu people for the resolution of social conflicts. In that context, rituals and symbols had for Turner a peripheral and practically insignificant place. Only after his doctoral thesis (Schism and Continuity in an African Society, 1957) and his progressive distance from the Manchester School – and its early Marxist bent – did he write his first essay exclusively related to ritual, which contains – among other interesting aspects – an innovative treatment of symbols. This text, entitled “Symbols in Ndembu Ritual”, was read at the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth in 1958 and published six years later in the volume Closed Systems and Open Mind: The Limits of Naivety (1964).
55. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, p. 56. The question of transference in C. G. Jung is, without any doubt, the via regia to alchemical transformation, that is, it contains all the tensions that stand between two energetically active opposites (thematized by Jung in terms of “masculine” and “feminine” poles) as well as the potential to transform those tensions into a living and creative complementarity. In this sense, it is not surprising at all that Jung chose to speak about transference through a psychological exegesis of an alchemical florilegium of the XIV century, the Rosarium Philosophorum. This text was perceived as a summa alchemica condensing the wisdom of entire centuries (from hermetic philosophy to late mediaeval esoteric speculation) in symbolically codified language (both in illustrations and in short sentences) around the problem of the transmutation of (from base into noble) metals. Unfortunately, Guattari did not know C. G. Jung’s visionary notebooks (The Black Books, The Red Book), which are much closer to his notion of transversality than what he could find in Jung’s “official writings”. C. G. Jung’s visionary writings are a kind of “animist substratum” of his theory of archetypes, which later on followed much more conventional ways – rendering itself compatible to the typical reductio ad unum that dominates the Western world both in religion and science.
56. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem.
57. Freud’s katabasis consists in reducing the myth to the underground of the drive, while Jung’s anabasis elevates the myth to the spirit level. Both operations are for Guattari structurally similar despite their surface-level opposition (atheism vs religiosity): they reduce the multiplicity of phenomena to transcendent denominators which retroactively determine theoretical interpretations and practical procedures. This is what appears as “diffuse” in L’Anti-Œdipe: a lot of complex, dynamic and interdependent material that calls for a creative operative intervention is synthetized into foundational signifiers that will guide the whole therapeutic process through the series of reductions they prescribe, betraying the challenge of lived alterity.
58. The interest that Daniel Paul Schreber’s personal account of his mental illness (dementia paranoide), published under the title of Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903), triggered among psychiatrists is not limited to a mere presentation of clinical facts. Freud recognized Schreber’s extraordinarily sharp mind and power of observation in describing the processes he went through (cf. Sigmund Freud: Über einen autographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), in: Gesammelte Werke VIII, p. 241); Lacan admired the subtility and power of composition displayed by Schreber in linking the nerve language of the dead souls speaking to him with the fundamental language of God, the taste of which is rendered with surprising stylistic and euphemistic skills (cf. Jacques Lacan: Le séminaire, livre III: Les psychoses, Paris 1981, p. 36). Guattari is fascinated with Schreber mainly because he sees in the very mise en scene of his Memoirs not only a subversive amplification of the libidinal economy dominating Western modernity (something already practiced by authors like Bataille and Lyotard) but also an articulation of its external side – comparable only with singular poietic achievements like that of Antonin Artaud.
59. Ihamba means in Ndembu language “tooth”. Capitalized the word refers to the ritual in which the tooth (ihamba) of a dead hunter is extracted from the body of a sick person. The affliction of the sick person is related to the tooth as afflicting agent wandering about inside his/her body (cf. Edith Turner: A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia, in: David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet: Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters. The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience, Ontario 1994, pp. 71-98, especially p. 94.
60. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, p. 200.
61. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari : Ibidem, p. 202.
62. Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI), New York: London 1998, Preface to the English-Language Edition, p. vii. This text does not exist in the French original version of Lacan’s Seminar XI.