On the Origins of Guattari's Ecosophy

THE LIFE AND the work of Pierre-Felix Guattari – who was born on 30 April 1930 in Colombes and died on 29 August 1992 in his room at La Borde, the experimental psychiatric clinic near Cour-Cheverny in the Loire Valley that formed his life's professional and institutional spine from 1955 to his death – might be said to fall into three interrelated phases. The early Guattari is predominantly a psychoanalyst, although he never separated psychoanalysis from political theory and political practice. In his first collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, whom he met at the University of Vincennes in 1969, these psychopolitics are Guattari's main contribution. While the question of psychoanalysis pertains in particular to Anti-Oedipus (1972), Guattari's presence in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) concerns predominantly politics and political theory. The latter also define his early collections Molecular Revolutions (1977) and The Machinic Unconscious (1979), and find their most sustained expression in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), his third collaboration with Deleuze.

Guattari's middle years, which span roughly the period from the early to the late 1980s, are dedicated to practising psychoanalysis at La Borde, to cultural criticism, and to political activism. Often refered to as the winter years that followed the interminable spring of the 1960s – Les Années d’hiver: 1980–1985 is the title of a collection of magazine and newspaper articles, interviews and conference papers published in 1986 – these years were overshadowed by Guattari's struggle with the depression that Franco Berardi chronicles in the chapter ‘La depressione Felix’ of Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008), and that Gary Genosko writes about in ‘Happy Depression: Franco Berardi and the Unpaid Bills of Desire’ (2015).