Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives »

François Dosse is professor of history at the University of Paris 12 and the Paris Institute for Political Studies. He is also a member of the research team at the Institute of the History of the Present and at the Center for Cultural History at the University of Versailles/Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Dosse has published several important books on intellectual history, including the History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 and History of Structuralism: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present.

Deborah Glassman, author of several works in literature and education and international development and translator of The History of Structuralism, lives in Paris and Washington D.C. Currently, she is living in Tunis and working at the African Development Bank.

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. That the two should meet was quite unlikely-and yet, while Deleuze was recovering from lung surgery, he met Guattari in an arranged encounter that led to a surprising relationship and several books, including Anti-Oedipus, What is Philosophy, and A Thousand Plateaus.

François Dosse is a prominent and prolific French intellectual historian well known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of such important intellectuals as Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, Michel de Certeau. Here he examines the productive if unlikely twenty-year partnership between two men of distinct sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates this enduring collaboration through familial and historical contexts and the turbulent years of 1968. He also measures the posthumous fortunes of these two writers within their intellectual, academic, and professional circles both in France and beyond.

Publishers Weekly

An exhaustive and fascinating account of a remarkable collaboration between Guattari, a radical, militant psychiatrist, and Deleuze, one of the towering figures of contemporary French philosophy, whose work together produced Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, startlingly original blends of social psychology, philosophy, and capitalist critique that positioned itself in opposition to both socialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Dosse, a French professor of history, traces these lines of influence, placing the pair's work firmly in the context of the May 1968 student uprising, and both authors' strained relationships with a megalomaniacal Lacan. The intellectual background of each writer is examined: Deleuze's texts on Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, and Guattari's work as director of a psychiatric unit outside of Paris where distinctions between patient and doctor were obliterated. The author strives to re-establish Guattari as an integral collaborator, one whose contribution was overshadowed in later years by Deleuze's celebrity. However, despite the wealth of research, the author too often resorts to paraphrases of their writings, and the book would have been well served by judicious editing. Nonetheless, as a glimpse into a remarkable period in French intellectual history where politics, philosophy, and literary brilliance coalesced, it is captivating. (June)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Betwixt or Between 1

Part I Folds: Parallel Biographies

1 Felix Guattari: The Psychopolitical Itinerary, 1930-1964 21

2 La Borde: Between Myth and Reality 40

3 Daily Life at La Borde 55

4 Testing Critical Research Empirically 76

5 Gilles Deleuze: The Hero's Brother 88

6 The Art of the Portrait 108

7 Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza: A Trio for a Vitalist Philosophy 129

8 An Ontology of Difference 150

9 The Founding Rupture: May 1968 170

Part II Unfolding: Intersecting Lives

10 "Psychoanalysm" Under Attack 183

11 Anti-Oedipus 206

12 Machine Against Structure 223

13 "Minor" Literature as Seen Guattari 241

14 A Thousand Plateaus: A Geophilosophy of Politics 249

15 The CERFI at Work 267

16 The "Molecular Revolution": Italy, Germany, France 284

17 Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical Friendship 306

18 An Alternative to Psychiatry? 331

19 Deleuze at Vincennes 344

20 The Year of Combat: 1977 362

Part III Surplices: 1980-2007

21 Guattari Between Culture and Ecology 383

22 Deleuze Goes to the Movies 397

23 Guattari and Aesthetics: Consolation During the Winter Years 423

24 Deleuze Dialogues with Creation 434

25 An Artist Philosophy 456

26 Winning Over the West 465

27 Around the World 479

28 Two Deaths 492

29 Their Work at Work 502

30 Conclusion 519

Notes 525

Index 617