Lines of Flight

Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a French psychoanalyst, philosopher, social theorist and radical activist. He is best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze.Andrew Goffey is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communications at Middlesex University, UK.

As an analyst, philosopher and militant, Félix Guattari anticipated decentralized forms of political activism that have become increasingly evident around the world since the events of Seattle in 1999. Lines of Flight offers an exciting introduction to the sometimes difficult and dense thinking of an increasingly important 20th century thinker. An editorial introduction by Andrew Goffey links the text to Guattari's long-standing involvement with institutional analysis, his writings with Deleuze, and his consistent emphasis on the importance of group practice - his work with CERFI in the early 1970s in particular. Considering CERFI's work on the 'genealogy of capital' it also points towards the ways in which Lines of Flight anticipates Guattari's later work on Integrated World Capitalism and on ecosophy. Providing a detailed and clearly documented account of his micropolitical critique of psychoanalytic, semiological and linguistic accounts of meaning and subjectivity, this work offers an astonishingly fresh set of conceptual tools for imaginative and engaged thinking about capitalism and effective forms of resistance to it.

A comprehensive and accessible account of Guattari's explorations of different forms of semiotic process and their relationship to the politics of the production of subjectivity.

In-depth exploration of the autonomous operation of components of semiotic regimes

Introduction by the Translator Foreword Part I: Semiotic Subjection and Collective Facilities 1. The Unconscious is not structured like a language 2. Where do collective facilities start, and where do they end? 3. The capitalist revolution 4. The bourgeoisie and capitalist flows 5. A semiotic optional matter 6. The apparatus of power and the facades of politics 7. A molecular revolution 8. The rhizome of collective assemblages 9. Microfascism 10. Self-management and the politics of desire Part II: The Pragmatic Analysis of the Social Unconscious 11. Introduction of the principal themes 12. Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics 13. Pragmatics as the micropolitics of linguistic formations Part III: An Example of a Pragmatic Component: Faciality Traits 14. On faciality 15. The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal 16. The semiotics of a blade of grass 17. The little phrase in Vinteuil's sonata