The Paris Review has published on its website an excerpt from Felix Guattari’s journals written while he and Gille Deleuze were working on Anti-Oedipus. The cryptic journal entries hint at the frustration and difficulty of their collaborative writing process:
Have to be accountable. Yield to arguments. What I feel like is just fucking around. Publish this diary for example. Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it. Now that I’m turning into a salable name I can find an editor for sure […] Work the feed-back; write right into the real. But not just the professional readers’ real, “Quinzaine polemical” style. The close, hostile real. People around. Fuck shit up. The stakes greater than the oeuvre or they don’t attain it…
I tell myself I can’t take the plunge and leave this shit for publication because that would inconvenience Gilles. But really, though? I just need to cross out the passages he’s directly involved in. I’m hiding behind this argument so that I can let myself go again and just fucking float along. Even though when it comes to writing an article, I start over like twenty-five times!!
Visit the Paris Review’s website for more excerpts from Guattari’s journals.
Above image: Deleuze (left) and Guattari. Via critical-theory.com.