Customer Reviews

Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (Transversals: New Directions In Philosophy)

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I recommend this book highly primarily because it provides a sound grounding in the thought and politics of Pierre-Felix Guattari, without overwhelming his individual position with the Deleuze and Guattarian Construct. This is an important because Guattari brought significant differences to the table throughout his life, and those differences manifest themselves as a separate authorial personae than D&G.

Guattari's work as exemplified and analyzed in some detail in this book covered significant ground during his life. Everything from psychiatry to social phenomena was covered and he misses very few points in between. This book is good in relating that to a reader, providing context to Guattari's work. The one place I would ask for more is in dealing specifically with Guattari's political economic perspective. While Genesko does explain and diagram the systematic though of Guattari's psycho-social-aesthetico-political models, and the explainations of transversals, etc. are significant works in themselves, I find that without the tie to integrated world capitalism some things are lost.

However, even without that, this book manages to bring Guattari back to the fore in social theory and political theory, so buy it, read it, and find out more about one of the most interesting minds of the last century.

Published in a series of philosophical works titled "Transversals" that includes theorist Manuel DeLanda. Genosko has done more here for Guattari than he already did for Baudrillard, providing a very scholarly summary of Guattari's theoretical output, contrasting it with his sources and competitors, showing the shifts from early to later thought, contextualizing his work in the times. As the first major study of Guattari in English, and one done so thoroughly, including archival research, that it is a kind of benchmark for any later effort. If any single book could begin to correct the "problem of the reception of Deleuze's work as a way of erasing Guattari", then this is it.