Nota do autor:
[NB, 2002: The link for this essay at the journal Works and Days having gone dormant, I provide the 1985 text here. Many of the essays to which I refer by Guattari have since appeared in translation, and I provide the three main collections (noted with ***) in the Works Cited. Also, portions of this same essay appear in my book, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York: Guilford Publications, 1998)].

In 1972, the Parisian intellectual scene was jolted by the publication of a rather arcane and lengthy manifesto of sorts entitled L'Anti-Oedipe, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I (Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia [AO]. Of the two authors, only Gilles Deleuze was familiar to the French intelligentsia as a renowned university philosopher who had published works on Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Proust, among others. The co-author of _Anti-Oedipus_, Felix Guattari, while less widely known, was prominent both in the French political domain and in the psychoanalytic arena, yet was neither in lockstep with orthodox Freudian practice, nor entirely in synch with the reigning Lacanian alternative to orthodoxy. And while the subsequent collective and individual works of Deleuze and Guattari have received recognition in France, only the translation of selected works by Deleuze have attracted any attention in the American intellectual market place. \1 Thus, the [then] recent translation of essays from Guattari's political and psychiatric activities, \2 while unsatisfactory from several perspectives, is a welcome complement to the better-known Deleuzian corpus already available in English. In this essay, I propose to situate Guattari's contribution to contemporary French thought in light of this [new] edition of translated essays.

As noted in the book's introduction, Guattari worked since the early 1950s as a psychotherapist at the Clinique de La Borde founded by Jean Oury. Given that Guattari's orientation to psychoanalysis was initially practical, his theoretical essays in this domain were inspired by a decade of clinical psychiatry; likewise, Guattari political practice, particularly his participation in the events of May 1968, gave rise to his extensive political writing. Thus, the first obstacle which this edition presents to readers is its overall division into three thematic sections: 1. Institutional Psychotherapy"; '2. Towards a New Vocabulary"; 3. Politics and Desire."

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