Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #352813 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Customer Reviews

XXI century thought
This is one of the most important books in XX century, but it doesn't look like one. Even if Guattari really tries to deliver his ideas in the easiest way he can (read: more reader oriented than his books with Deleuze) he probably looks quite esoteric to anybody not used with structuralism and post-structuralism (especially Lacan, Hjesmelev, Levy Strauss... but also more contemporary investigators, like Varela and Stern, which he clearly prefer). Once you are used with this "continental" mind set this is a lightning book, explaining in a very easy way his ethico-esthetic new paradigm (to which he makes an incisive statement).
If all the developments of the concept of machine vs structure, of machinc assemblages and abstract machines, sum up with the central importance of "autopoiesis" in all systems (and not only living systems like Varela sugests), wouldn't be enough to make this a very important and useful book, his matrix where we see very clearly how Actual is related to the Virtual, how the Real is related to the Possible, and how we can find a Real and a Possible "Actual" (Flux and Phylum) and, also, a Real and a Possible Virtual (existencial territories and reference Universes), would make this a very useful book.
And, suddenly, it makes light to ALL Deleuze and Guattari thought... oh... and it helps a lot when you approach Perry Levy, Hardt, Aliez, etc.
If you are interested in D&G thought you have to read this book ;) trust me...

you are a collective
Great for artists; Guttari basically says art is an aesthetical production of new forms of subjectivity, and subjectivity is always pre-individual. the Subject is always a collective, an interesting thought. Although you feel dumped in that post structuralist wordclog world, a good book for current artists.

worth reading but cavalier and abtruse
Guattari is an important and rich thinker, but he seems to succumb to the poststructuralist illusion that one must make use of obscure writing in order to produce creative thinking. There are many thinkers who have explicated complex issues without resorting to this sort of writing: Freud, Marx, de Man, Kant, Aristotle, come to mind. It is unfortunate that Guattari feels that he must write in a way that makes the issues he grapples with more difficult, rather than less difficult, for us to grasp. This is the reason poststructuralist thought will, unfortunately, NEVER initiate any kind of social change: these thinkers are more interested in aggrandizing themselves through arcane writing directed towards an intellectual elite than they are in creating a dialogue with the rest of us. Guattari is a great theorist and should be read, but he creates an extremely hierachized, stratified space of readers (between the knowers and those who don't know), and this confining structure needs to be explored and called into question.