Félix Guattari as photographed by Olivier Garros
Regularly, I evoke my will to make this blog, non only a (not-so) daily (anymore) platform of expression for my reflective peregrinations, but also an archive of documents which constitute as many tools for my readers in their work. In this spirit today, I would like to publish the totality of the the short essay To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body written by Félix Guattari yet published anonymously for the journal Recherches no. 12, 1973 for who he was the director of publications. Entitled “Three Billion Perverts: Great Encyclopedia of Homosexuals.” , this issue of the journal was destroyed by the French government presided by Georges Pompidou. It is accessible to us thanks to Sylvère Lotringer and his collection of Guattari’s writings published in Chaosophy (semiotext(e), 2007). The transcript version published here is coming from the great database 1,000 Little Hammers which undertake to formalize a useful library of politically subversive documents.
This text (that I was already quoting in my essay about Antonin Artaud) constitutes a powerful inspiration for the series of articles I wrote about the dangerous notion of ideal normative body. Through it, Félix Guattari expresses a violent diatribe about capitalism’s mechanisms of capture of the body. The profound disorder – let’s recall that Guattari was a psychotherapist – felt within this system is produced by the dichotomy between the extremely subjective nature of desire and the narrow and oppressive characteristics of the norms issued from ideology (and religion) but also from the essence of a system which actively profits from a uniformization of desire. F.Guattari therefore argues for a resistance through what he calls micropolitics, a continuous ethical and creative production of desire at a small scale in an attempt for an immanent subversion within the system.
To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body
by Félix Guattari
