Film UbuWebFélix Guattari (1930-1992)
Grand entretien (1989)
Pierre-Félix Guattari (April 30, 1930 – August 29, 1992) was a French militant, institutional psychotherapist, and philosopher. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) in which they developed schizoanalysis. He also developed a concept of three interacting and interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment, an "ecosophy" that would link environmental ecology to the social and mental spheres. Guattari was a leading thinker of what came to be called Post-structuralism. He was also considered a post-modernist. Post-structuralism was critical of the mode of the thought of Structuralism, which focused on binary oppositions to create universal meanings. The post-structuralists, especially the deconstructionists sought to destabilize these fixed meanings, demonstrating not the homogenous nature of thought but its heterogeneity. Post-modernism, likewise, doubted the modernist confidence in the ability to create a unified or grand narrative that would represent truth. The work of Guattari, especially his collaboration with Deleuze, attempted to both dismantle and at the same time use the theories of Freud and Marx, to reinterpret the basic notions of desire and social order through "a political analysis of desire as it is expressed or repressed in Western culture." Their attack on capitalism starts with the family, which they consider as the key source of repression. From the perspective of individualism, the family must repress desires to maintain itself. They imagine a larger social order which replaces the dominant role of the family in capitalist society as the basis for a new utopian vision.
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Félix Guattari in UbuWeb Sound