Concept

Félix Guattari

Summary
Pierre-Félix Guattari (ɡwəˈtɑːri , pjɛʁ feliks ɡwataʁi; 30 April 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of northwest Paris, France. His father was a factory manager and he was engaged in Trotskyist political activism as a teenager, before studying and training under (and was analyzed by) the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s. Subsequently, he worked all his life at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde under the direction of Lacan's pupil, the psychiatrist Jean Oury. He first met Oury at a private psychiatric clinic in Saumery in the Loire region at the suggestion of Oury's brother Fernand, who had been Guattari's high school teacher. Guattari followed Oury to La Borde in 1955, two years after it had been established. La Borde was a venue for conversation among many students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and social work. One particularly novel orientation developed at La Borde consisted of the suspension of the classical analyst/analysand pair in favour of an open confrontation in group therapy. In contrast to the Freudian school's individualistic style of analysis, this practice studied the dynamics of several subjects in complex interaction. It led Guattari into a broader philosophical exploration of, and political engagement with, a vast array of intellectual and cultural domains (philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, architecture, etc.). From 1955 to 1965, Guattari edited and contributed to La Voie Communiste (Communist Way), a Trotskyist newspaper. He supported anti-colonialist struggles as well as the Italian Autonomists.
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