FÉLIX GUATTARI AND THE HIGHWAYS OF MEMORY

Abstract

One of the last major works of “French Theory,” Félix Guattari’s notoriously dense 1989 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (SC) has only recently been made available to English-speaking audiences by Andrew Goffey’s 2013 translation. This sudden displacement of Guattari’s treatise into the present day provides the ideal opportunity for its place within Guattari’s thought, and also within the wider field of post-humanist critical discourse that has developed since its publication, to be reconsidered. I contend that the thread of memory – the storing, recalling, and forgetting of memory-data – serves as both a privileged means of navigating this text’s hyper-complexity and of articulating its critical utility. SC offers itself as a framework for thinking through the subject-in-production’s complex imbrication in the “age of planetary computerization,” one in which there is always a revolving door between the “data” of subjectivity and the “memory” of technical machines.