Maurizio Lazzarato

Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism

Angela Melitopoulos, Maurizio Lazzarato

A visual research project reexamining the ideas of the philosopher and psychiatrist Félix Guattari on animismic culture as a form of collective subjectivity (collective assemblages of enunciation), as well as the time in his life when he tried to lay a foundation for a fundamental critique of modernist concepts. In an interview recorded during the Gulf War (1991), Guattari spoke of the emergence of a geography of resistance that arises especially where postcolonial systems are declining. A new de-centered, animistic subjectivity is central for rethinking “the Object, the Other as a potential bearer of dimensions of partial subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena."