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Meeting
Felix: Guattari and the Italian
Autonomists from Franco Berardi Bifo to Wu Ming
by Giuseppina
Mecchia [University of Pittsburgh]
Summary: In the
mid- to late 1970s the new leftist groups active in Italy in the wake of
the "long 1968" movement found in the thought of the Anti-Oedipus an
important point of reference in their re-thinking of political subjectivity and
revolutionary struggle. Anti-Oedipus, of course, was authored by
both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but it is specifically the political,
clinical, philosophical and existential contribution of Felix Guattari that resonated with the
Italian political landscape.
Historically, I
will allude to some key events that have marked this encounter and point to
their conceptual developments: the contacts established between Felix
Guattari and the Italian institutional
psychiatrists (Basaglia, Jervis, etc.); the visit of Guattari to Radio
Alice in Bologna in 1977, the incrimination of Franco Berardi and his escape to
Paris under the protection of Guattari in late 1977, the juridical vicissitudes
that led to Antonio Negri's exile to Paris in 1981 and his intellectual
cooperation with Guattari; Bifo's continued involvement with Guattarian
theories of subjectivities in the late 80s; the reflections on "cognitive
labor" by Maurizio Lazzarato; the creation of the new collective,
narrative "war machine" invented by the group formerly known as
Luther Blissett, now Wu Ming; Bifo's publication of the only monograph
completely devoted to Guattari, his book Félix, dating from 2001. Excerpts from
this book, as well as from an interview I conducted with Bifo in the summer of
2005, will be used as a launching pad for my argument.
In this context, I
will concentrate on how Guattari's conception of subjectivity and his
analysis of late capitalist development in books such as Molecular
Revolutions, Communists Like Us (with Antonio Negri), The Three
Ecologies and Chaosmosis are an essential reference when trying to
understand the philosophical foundations of Italian autonomous thought.
Both Guattari and
the Italian autonomists developed the first oppositional response to what is
now called "cognitive capitalism".
CV:
Giuseppina Mecchia
is Assistant Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh,
USA. She has pursued French Studies both in Rome and in the United States
(Ph.D, Princeton, 1997). She is publishing a book on Maurice Blanchot and
politics with Rodopì (2006), and has written on the political implications
of Proust's treatment of temporal
categories in the Recherche (in Marcel
Proust Aujourd'hui, 3, 2005). One of her essays, about teaching
Empire in the United States, is
forthcoming in Multitudes 23, (Jan.2006). She is translating into
English essays by Franco Berardi Bifo, Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato
for a forthcoming issue of Sub-Stance.
She is now writing her second book, entitled Re?inventing the Left: Adventures
of thought between France and Italy, from the mid?60s to the 21st Century, for
which substantial parts, on Franco Basaglia and institutional psychiatry, the
collaboration between Guattari and Negri in the late 80s, the prison writings
of the Italian leftist extremist Giuliano Naria have been already presented at
international conferences. She will deliver a paper on the coverage of
Aldo Moro's kidnapping by Leonardo Sciascia and Jean Baudrillard at the conference organized in the UK by Ruth Glynn,
in November 2006.
At the University
of Pittsburgh, she teaches courses on the crossing between politics, philosophy and literature in 20th-Century
France and Italy.
E-mail: [email protected]