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Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism

Today, it seems interesting to me to go back to what I would call an animist conception of subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena. How does subjectivity locate on the side of the subject and on the side of the object? How can it simultaneously singularize an individual, a group of individuals, and also be assembled to space, architecture and all other cosmic assemblages?

—Félix Guattari

Jean Claude Polack: A body, whatever it is, can defend its limit; it can refuse a particle from the outside, whatever it is.

Among psychotic people, and notably among schizophrenics, this practically daily commerce with particles of the self or perhaps with non-living bodies, or bodies outside the self, does not pose a problem at all. It’s like a natural exercise. And if you don’t understand it, a schizophrenic might think of you as a bonehead: “Oh really, you don’t get it?”

Maurizio Lazzarato: That is what you prove in your work in the clinic.

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