Background
Guattari, Félix was born on April 30, 1930 in Paris.
Political activist Psychoanalyst
Guattari, Félix was born on April 30, 1930 in Paris.
Pharmacy and Philosophy, Université de Paris in the early 1950s.
Involved with the project to open the Clinique de la Borde, at Cour-Cheverny, near Bois, which was fundamentally opposed to widespread repressive psychiatric practices. 1975, helped found Réseau International d’Alternative à la Psychiatrie.
Guattari worked with Gilles Deleuze. He searched for a synthesis of Marx and Freud and his collaboration with Deleuze on L’Anti-Oedipe ( 1972) contains a powerful critique of both strands of thought, of the reductionisms which dominate contemporary thought in general and French culture in particular. Thus, against the oedipal reductions of psychoanalysis with its presentation of desire as ‘law’ and ‘lack’, desire is celebrated as positive, productive and excessive. Against the orthodox economic reductionism of Marxism, a picture of the ‘social’ is given in terms of flows and cuts, semiotic machines rather than structures. In his later work, Les trois ecologies (1989), Guattari argues that more than ever before, nature cannot be separated from culture, environmental ecology separated from mental ecology He calls for an ‘ecosophy’, a combination of philosophy and ecology, which aims at constituting an all-embracing ecological system, at once practical and speculative, political and aesthetic, to replace the archaic forms of religious, political and associative engagement. There is no doubt that his collaborations with Deleuze have had a profound influence on the development of poststructuralism and its influence on the fields of literary and cultural theory. L’Anti-Oedipe is often celebrated as a defining moment in twentiethcentury thought, the post-68 embodiment of the hopes and frustrations of a whole generation of radical intellectuals.