Synopses & Reviews
As an analyst, philosopher and militant, Félix Guattari anticipated decentralised forms of political activism that have become increasingly evident around the world since the events of Seattle in 1995. Lines of Flight offers an exciting introduction to the sometimes difficult and dense thinking of an increasingly important 20th century thinker.
An editorial introduction by Andrew Goffey situates the text in relation to the work of CERFI, the interdisciplinary research group with which Guattari worked since the 1960s; Guattari's own concerns (as evidenced in the IMEC archive of his papers in Normandy); his work with Deleuze and the 'Guattari effect'; and some of the social, political and cultural concerns arising in France at the start of what Guattari would later call the 'winter years'.
Providing a detailed and clearly documented account of his micropolitical critique of psychoanalytic, semiological and linguistic accounts of meaning and subjectivity, this work offers an astonishingly fresh set of conceptual tools for imaginative and engaged thinking about capitalism and effective forms of resistance to it.
About the Author
Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a French psychoanalyst, philosopher, social theorist and radical activist. He is best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze.
Andrew Goffey is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communications at Middlesex University, UK.
Table of Contents
Introduction by the Translator \ Foreword \ Part I: Semiotic Subjection and Collective Facilities \ 1. The Unconscious is not structured like a language \ 2. Where do collective facilities start, and where do they end? \ 3. The capitalist revolution \ 4. The bourgeoisie and capitalist flows \ 5. A semiotic optional matter \ 6. The apparatus of power and the facades of politics \ 7. A molecular revolution \ 8. The rhizome of collective assemblages \ 9. Microfascism \ 10. Self-management and the politics of desire \ Part II: The Pragmatic Analysis of the Social Unconscious \ 11. Introduction of the principal themes \ 12. Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics \ 13. Pragmatics as the micropolitics of linguistic formations \ Part III: An Example of a Pragmatic Component: Faciality Traits \ 14. On faciality \ 15. The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal \ 16. The semiotics of a blade of grass \ 17. The little phrase in Vinteuil's sonata