Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 02:57:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: Truce



Subject: Guattari speaks:
        Orpheus got tired of all this loose talk about fascism and g&d
called Mona who said call Jill who said send this interview of Charles
Stivale and Felix.
        Orpheus thought some parts were really related to what was
happening on the list. A sudden press of the button and it flew off into
ether space.
 > > 4. Deleuze-Guattari and psychoanalysis
> > 5. The Americanization of Europe
> > 6. Left and right readings of Deleuze-Guattari
> >
>   with no tomorrow.
>       Today [1985], everything seems to have
> >     returned to order, and it's now the era of the new conservatism,
> >     something that you know quite well in the United States.
> >       But, people like me who continue to think that, on the
> >     contrary, this movement continues, whatever the difficulties and
> >     uncertainties might be, we are taken either for visionaries or
> >     completely retro and unhinged. Well, I willingly accept this
> >     aspect, much more willingly than many other things, because
> >     basically . . . I think that, in '68, not much happened. It was
> >     a great awakening, a huge thunderclap, but not much happened.
> >     What has been important is what occurred afterward, and what
> >     hasn't ceased occurring ever since. Thus, the molecular
> >     revolutions on the order of the liberation of women have been
> >     very important in their scope and results, and they are
> >     continuing across the entire planet. I am thinking to some
> >     extent of what I encountered in Brazil, of the immense struggles
> >     of liberation of women that must be undertaken in the Third
> >     World.
> >       There is at present a very profound upheaval of subjectivity
> >     in France developing around the questions of immigrants and of
> >     the emergence of new cultures, of migrant cultures connected to
> >     the second generations of immigrants. This is something that is
> >     manifested in paradoxical ways, such as the most reactionary
> >     racism we see developing in France around the movement of
> >     Jean-Marie Le Pen,\8 but also, quite the contrary, manifested
> >     through styles, through young people opening up to another
> >     sensitivity, another relationship with the body, particularly in
> >     dance and music. These also belong to molecular revolutions.
> >     There is also a considerable development, which, in my opinion,
> >     has an important future, around the Green, alternative,
> >     ecological, pacifist movements. This is very evident in Germany,
> >     but these movements are developing now in France, Belgium,
> >     Spain, etc.
> >       So, you'll say to me: but really, what is this catch-all, this
> >     huge washtub in which you are putting these very different and
> >     often violent movements, for example the movements of
> >     nationalistic struggles (the Basques, the Irish, the Corsicans),
> >     and then women's, pacifist movements, non-violent movements?
> >     Isn't all that a bit incoherent? Well, I don't think so because,
> >     once again, the molecular revolution is not something that will
> >     constitute a program. It's something that develops precisely in
> >     the direction of diversity, of a multiplicity of perspectives,
> >     of creating the conditions for the maximum impetus of processes
> >     of singularization. It's not a question of creating agreement;
> >     on the contrary, the less we agree, the more we create an area,
> >     a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of
> >     molecular revolution, and the more we reinforce this area. It's
> >     a completely different logic from the organizational,
> >     arborescent logic that we know in political or union movements.
> >       OK, I persist in thinking that there is indeed a development
> >     in the molecular revolution. But then if we don't want to make
> >     of it a vague global label, there are several questions that
> >     arise; there are two, I'm not going to develop them, I'll simply
> >     point them out. There is a theoretical question and a practical
> >     question:
> >       1) The theoretical question is that, in order to account for
> >     these correspondences, the "elective affinities" (to use a title
> >     from Goethe) between diverse, sometimes contradictory, even
> >     antagonistic movements, we must forge new analytical
> >     instruments, new concepts, because it's not the shared trait
> >     that counts there, but rather the transversality, the crossing
> >     of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and that are
> >     incarnated, that live in very different regions and domains and,
> >     I repeat, that can be contradictory and antagonistic. That is
> >     therefore an entire problematic, an entire analytic, of
> >     subjectivity which must be developed in order to understand, to
> >     account for, to plot the map of (_cartographier_) what these
> >     molecular revolutions are.
> >       2) That brings us to the second aspect which is that we cannot
> >     be content with these analogies and affinities; we must also try
> >     to construct a social practice, to construct new modes of
> >     intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar
> >     relationships, in political and social power relations, in order
> >     to avoid watching the systematic, recurring defeat that we knew
> >     during the '70s, particularly in Italy with the enormous rise of
> >     repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was
> >     the rise of terrorism. Through its methods, its violence, and
> >     its dogmatism, terrorism gives aid to the State repression which
> >     it is fighting. There is a sort of complicity, there again
> >     transversal. So, in this case, we are no longer only on the
> >     theoretical plane, but on the plane of experimentation, of new
> >     forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects
> >     the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of
> >     interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting
> >     antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power
> >     relations.
> >       I really can't develop much for you on that; this is simply to
> >     tell you that there is at least a beginning of such an
> >     experimentation showiing that this is not entirely a dream, not
> >     only mere formulae like I tossed them out ten, fifteen years
> >     ago; and this movement, I believe that it's the German Greens
> >     who are giving us not its model, but its direction, since the
> >     German model is of course not transposable. But it's true that
> >     the German Greens not only are people whose activity is quite in
> >     touch with daily life, who are concerned with problems relating
> >     to children, education, psychiatry, etc., who are concerned with
> >     the environment and with struggles for peace. They are also
> >     people who are now capable of establishing very important power
> >     relations at the heart of German politics, and who intervene on
> >     the Third World front, for example, having intervened in
> >     solidarity with the French Canaques,\9 or who intervene in
> >     Europe to develop similar movements. That interests me greatly,
> >     the multi-functionality of this movement, this departure from
> >     something that is a central apparatus with its program, its
> >     political bureau, with its secretariat. You see, I've returned
> >     again to the same terms I used when we were talking about the
> >     College de Philosophie.
> >
> > CS: That is, the Greens seem to work on all strata, on both molar
> >     and molecular strata, of the Third World . . .
> >
> > FG: Right, and on artistic strata and philosophical strata.
> >
> > 3. French Politics under Mitterand
> >
> > CS: I'd like to continue the discussion in this political direction.
> >     Yonu wrote an article last year entitled, "The Left as Processual
> >     Passion,"\10 and you spoke about several aspects of the current
> >     political scene. I'd like to know how you see this scene, not
> >     only from a political perspective, but from an intellectual one
> >     as well. For example, in this article, you spoke of Mitterand's
> >     government, and you said, "The socialist politicos settled into
> >     the sites of power without any re-examination of the existing
> >     institutions"; that Mitterand, "at first, let the different
> >     dogmatic tendencies in his government pull in opposing
> >     directions, then resigned himself to installing a tumultuous
> >     management team whose terminological differences from Reagan's
> >     'Chicago Boys' must not mask the fact that this team is leading
> >     us toward the same kinds of aberrations." Could you develop
> >     these comments by explaining the resemblance that you see
> >     between Mitterand's and Reagan's politics?
> >
> > FG: It is not exactly a resemblance. There is, let's say, a
> >     methodological resemblance which is that these are people,
> >     whatever their origins, their education, who have come to think
> >     that there was only one possible political and economic
> >     approach, which they deduced from economic indices, etc., the
> >     idea that they could govern on the basis of the existing and
> >     functioning economic axiomatic.
> >        But, very schematically, here is how I see things: current
> >     world capitalism has taken control of the entirety of productive
> >     activities and activities of social life on the whole planet by
> >     succeeding in a double operation, an operation permeating
> >     world-wide (_de mondialisation_) that consisted in rendering
> >     homogeneous the Eastern State capitalistic countries and then a
> >     totally peripheral Third World capitalism in an identical system
> >     of economic markets, thus of economic semiotizations. This
> >     operation has completely reduced the possibilities; i.e. at the
> >     limit, we no longer have the dual relationship between
> >     imperialistic countries and colonized countries. All are at once
> >     colonized and imperialistic in a multi-centering of imperialism.
> >     This is quite an operation, that is, it's a new alliance between
> >     the deep-rooted capitalism of Western countries and the new
> >     capitalisms constituted by the "nomenclatura" of the Eastern
> >     countries and the kinds of aristocracies in Third World
> >     countries. One incident that I'll point out to you, which in
> >     fact would be entirely superficial, in my opinion, is lumping
> >     together Japanese capitalism with American and European
> >     capitalisms. For I have the impression that we have yet to
> >     understand that it's a completely different capitalism from the
> >     others, that Japanese capitalism does not function at all on the
> >     same bases. I don't want to develop this point, but it would be
> >     quite interesting to do so.
> >       The other operation of this capitalism is an operation of
> >     integration, i.e. its objective is not an immediate profit, a
> >     direct power, but rather to capture subjectivities from within,
> >     if I can use this term.\11 And to do so, what better technique
> >     is there to capture subjectivities than to produce them oneself?
> >     It's like those old science fiction films with invader themes,
> >     the body snatchers; integrated world capitalism takes the place
> >     of the subjectivity, it doesn't have to mess around with class
> >     struggles, with conflicts: it expropriates the subjectivity
> >     directly because it produces subjectivity itself. It's quite
> >     relaxed about it; let's say that this is an ideal which this
> >     capitalism partially attains. How does it do it? By producing
> >     subjectivity, i.e. it produces quite precisely the semiotic
> >     chains, the ways of representing the world to oneself, the forms
> >     of sensitivity, the forms of curriculum, of education, of
> >     evolution; it furnishes different age groups, different
> >     categories of the population, with a mode of functioning in the
> >     same way that it would put computer chips in cars, to guarantee
> >     their semiotic functioning.
> >        Yet, with this in mind, this subjectivity is not necessarily
> >     uniform, but rather very differentiated. It is differentiated as
> >     a function of the requirements of production, as a function of
> >     racial segregations, as a function of sexual segregations, as a
> >     function of _x_ differences, because the objective is not to
> >     create a universal subjectivity, but to continue to reproduce
> >     something that guarantees power with a certain number of
> >     capitalistic elites that are totally traditional, as we can
> >     witness quite well with Thatcherism and Reaganism. They aren't
> >     in the process of creating a renewed and universal humanity, not
> >     at all; they want to continue the traditions of American,
> >     Japanese, Russian, etc., aristocracies.
> >       Thus, there is a double movement, of deterritorialization of
> >     subjectivities in an informational and cybernetic direction of
> >     adjacencies of subjectivity in matters of production, but a
> >     movement of reterritorialization of subjectivities in order to
> >     assign them to a place, and especially to keep them in this
> >     place and to control them well, to place them under house
> >     arrest, to block their circulation, their flows. This is the
> >     meaning of all the measures leading to unemployment, to the
> >     segregation of entire economic spaces, to racism, etc.: to keep
> >     the population in place. One of the best ways of keeping them in
> >     place would have been to develop politics of guilt such as those
> >     in the great universalist religious communities. But that didn't
> >     work too well, these politics of interiorization and guilt,
> >     which explains the collapse of theories like psychoanalysis. Now
> >     it's much more a systemic thought that asserts itself: it's a
> >     matter of creating systemic poles that guarantee that the
> >     functions of desire, functions of rupture of balance will
> >     manifest themselves the least possible. What is the best
> >     procedure? Much better than guilt is systematic endangering:
> >     you're sitting in a place, you might have a tiny functionary's
> >     job, you might be a top-level manager; that's not important.
> >     It's absolutely necessary that you are convinced that, at any
> >     moment, you could be thrown out of this job. That concerns the
> >     non-guarantees of welfare as well as the super-guarantees of the
> >     salaried professions, with their contracts, perquisites, dachas,
> >     etc. From this point of view, it's the same in Russia as in the
> >     United States. You are not guaranteed; you are not guaranteed by
> >     a connection, by a territory, by a profession, by a corporation;
> >     you are essentially endangered because you depend on this system
> >     which, from one day to the next, as a function of some
> >     requirement of production or simply some requirement of power or
> >     social control, might say to you: now, it's over. You might have
> >     been the biggest TV star with tens of millions of fans crazy
> >     about you, but in the next instant, all that could end
> >     immediately if there were any dissension that suddenly resulted
> >     in your no longer functioning in the register of functions we
> >     agree to promote for the production of subjectivity. So it's
> >     that kind of instrument, I believe, that gives this power to
> >     integrated world capitalism.
> >       And so, in that case, what does a socialist government do when
> >     it comes to power in France? At the beginning, it thinks that it
> >     will be able to change all of that, it thinks that it will be
> >     able to change television, hierarchical relationships,
> >     relationships with immigrants, etc. And there is astonishment
> >     for six months during the grace period. And then, since it has
> >     no antagonistic instrument, no different social practice, no
> >     specific production of subjectivity, since the government is
> >     itself moulded by bureaucratization, by hierarchical spirit, by
> >     the segregation formed by the integrated model of capitalism,
> >     necessarily it discovers with astonishment that it can do
> >     nothing, that it is completely the prisoner of inflation, of
> >     mechanisms that render impossible the development of a
> >     production and a social life in such a country subjugated by the
> >     overall machinery of world capitalism. A guy I know well, sort
> >     of a friend, Jack Lang (the Minister of Culture), discovered
> >     this immediately: he made a few harmless statements, that might
> >     have passed totally without notice, at the UNESCO convention
> >     that I attended. Then he found that he had set off an explosion
> >     because he had dared to touch a tiny wire, a tiny wheel of this
> >     mechanism of subjectivation. He dared to say: after all, this
> >     American cinema is something that has taken much too great an
> >     importance vis-?-vis the potential Third World productions.
> >     There was a frightening scandal! He had to beat a retreat
> >     because he questioned, like during the Inquisition, he
> >     questioned fundamental dogma relating to this production of
> >     subjectivity.
> >
> > CS: You have said about the socialist government that by committing
> >     itself to "an absurd one-upsmanship with the right in the area
> >     of security, of austerity and of conservatism," the left has not
> >     contributed "to the assemblage of new collective modes of
> >     enunciation." What collective modes of enunciation did you
> >     foresee?
> >
> > FG: Listen, from 1977 to 1981, a group of friends and I organized a
> >     movement, that wasn't very powerful, but wasn't entirely
> >     negligible either, whose images I have here [FG indicates the
> >     different posters on his living room walls], that was called
> >     the Free Radio Movement.\12  We developed about a hundred free
> >     radio stations, an experimentation, a new mode of expression
> >     somewhat similar to what happened in Italy. Before 1981, the
> >     Socialists supported us; Francois Mitterand even came to some of
> >     our stations, and there was a lawsuit (I lost it, by the way, I
> >     lost quite a few). When they came to power, they created a
> >     committee on free radios; they undertook the most incredible
> >     machinations with their socialist militants, people who aren't
> >     directly venal in terms of money, but who are part of the
> >     venality of power, an administrative venality. To speak bluntly,
> >     they appointed their buddies, people who knew absolutely nothing
> >     about free radios. The result: at the end of two years, all the
> >     stations were dead, and all had been invaded, just like the
> >     invaders we were talking about, by municipal interests, by
> >     private capitalists, by the large newspapers who already had all
> >     the power, by other stations, that resulted in their quite
> >     simply killing the Free Radio Movement. I think that if a
> >     rightist government had remained in place, we would have
> >     continued to struggle and to achieve things. It sufficed that
> >     the socialists came to power in order to liquidate all that.
> >       I've given you the example of free radios, but I can give you
> >     the example of attempts at pedagogical and educational
> >     renovations. They liquidated it all; no, not everything, since
> >     there are nonetheless some experimental high schools like
> >     Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's, one of my friends.\13 But after all, one
> >     sees clearly today, and I said this directly to Laurent Fabius
> >     [then Mitterand's Prime Minister], that Chevenement is the most
> >     conservative Minister of National Education that we have seen
> >     during the Fifth Republic. I could go on and on: in the domain
> >     of alternatives to psychiatry, there was an _incredible_
> >     offensive of calumny, of destruction of the alternative network
> >     through the lawsuit undertaken against Claude Cigala, claiming
> >     that he had raped little boys, I don't know what else.
> >       I could make a complete enumeration for all the
> >     potentialities; they weren't enormous, it wasn't May '68, but
> >     some beginnings, some new kinds of practices, compositions of
> >     new attitudes, of new assemblages, of all that have been
> >     systematically crushed. Not that the socialists did this
> >     voluntarily; they didn't realize what they were doing, that's
> >     the worst part! They didn't realize what they were doing!
> >
> > CS: So, this failure of the left from a political perspective could
> >     be extended undoubtedly to the intellectual domain.
> >
> > FG: Well, there, the failure has been total.
> >
> > CS: You also said in this article, "A whole soup of supposed 'new
> >     philosophy,' of 'post-modernism,' of 'social implosion,' and I
> >     could go on, finally ended up by poisoning the atmosphere and by
> >     contributing to the discouragement of attempts at political
> >     commitment at the heart of the intellectual milieu."
> >
> > FG: Well, the socialists weren't responsible for that; it had begun
> >     well before. But it's true that despite the sometimes
> >     considerable efforts by the Ministry of Culture, the result is
> >     quite nil in all domains. For example, in the domain of cinema,
> >     French cinema is alive from an economic point of view, but it
> >     doesn't at all have the richness of German cinema or other kinds
> >     because in this domain as well, the assemblages of enunciations
> >     remained entirely traditional, in the publishing houses, in the
> >     classical systems of production, etc.
> >
> > CS: And your work in _change International_?\14
> >
> > FG: They helped us a bit, at the beginning, and then they dropped
> >     us. This was, in my opinion, a very interesting and very
> >     promising undertaking, but we didn't have the resources, and as
> >     you know, for a journal with that kind of ambition, one has to
> >     have resources.
> >
> > CS: So it no longer exists?
> >
> > FG: No. Well, there is an issue coming out, we're still going to put
> >     out one or two issues, but what we wanted to create was a
> >     powerful monthly, international journal. Instead, the socialists
> >     spent billions to support stupidities like the _Nouvelles
> >     litt?raires_ journal. And I mean billions! It's shameful.
> >
> > 4. Deleuze-Guattari and Psychoanalysis
> >
> > CS: Regarding the current intellectual scene, in a recent issue of
> >     _Magazine litte'raire_ (June 1983), D.A. Grisoni claimed that
> >     _Mille plateaux_ proves that "the desiring vein" has disappeared
> >     . . .
> >
> > FG: Yeh, I saw that! (Laughter)
> >
> > CS: . . . and he called Deleuze "dried up".\15 What do you think of
> >     this? What is your conception of the schizoanalytic enterprise
> >     right now, and what aspects of the two volumes of _Capitalism
> >     and Schizophrenia_ appear to you as the most valid?
> >
> > FG: They're not valid at all! Me, I don't know, I don't care! It's
> >     not my problem! It's however you want it, whatever use you want
> >     to make of it. Right now, I'm working, Deleuze is working a lot.
> >     I'm working with a group of friends on the possible directions
> >     of schizoanalysis; yes, I'm theorizing in my own way. If people
> >     don't care about it, that's their business; but I don't care
> >     either, so that works out well.
> >
> > CS: That's precisely what Deleuze said yesterday evening: I
> >     understand quite well that people don't care about my work
> >     because I don't care about theirs either.
> >
> > FG: Right, so there's no problem. You see, we didn't even discuss
> >     it, but we had the same answer! (Laughter)
> >
> > CS: Deleuze and I spoke briefly about the book by Jean-Paul Aron,
> >     _Les Modernes_.\16 What astounded me was that despite his way of
> >     presenting things, he really liked _Anti-Oedipus_. What
> >     particularly struck me in his statement about _Anti-Oedipus_ was
> >     that "despite a few bites, the doctor (Lacan) is the sacred
> >     precursor of schizoanalysis and of the hyper-sophisticated
> >     industry of desiring machines" (285). A question that one asks
> >     in reading _Anti-Oedipus_ is what is the place of Lacanian
> >     psychoanalysis in the schizoanalytic project. One gets the
> >     impression that you distance yourselves from most of the
> >     thinkers presented, but that Lacan has a rather privileged place
> >     to the extent that there is no rupture.
> >
> > FG: In my opinion, what you are saying is not completely accurate
> >     because it's true in the beginning of _Anti-Oedipus_, and then
> >     if you look, en route, it's less and less true because,
> >     obviously, we didn't write at the end the same way as we did in
> >     the beginning, and then it's not true at all throughout _A
> >     Thousand Plateaus_, there, it's all over. This means the
> >     following: Deleuze never took Lacan seriously at all, but for
> >     me, that was very important. It's true that I've gone through a
> >     whole process of clarification, which didn't occur quickly, and
> >     I haven't finally measured, dare I say it, the superficial
> >     character of Lacan. That will seem funny, but in the end, I
> >     think that's how Deleuze and Foucault ... I remember certain
> >     conversations of that period, and I realize that they considered
> >     all that as rather simplistic, superficial. That seems funny
> >     because it's such a sophisticated, complicated language.?
> >       So, I'm nearly forced to make personal confidences about this
> >     because, if I don't, this won't be clear. What was important for
> >     me with Lacan is that it was an event in my life, an event to
> >     meet this totally bizarre, extraordinary guy with extraordinary,
> >     crazy even, acting talent, with an astounding cultural
> >     background. I was a student at the Sorbonne, I was bored
> >     shitless in courses with Lagache, Szazo, I don't remember who,
> >     and then I went to Lacan's seminar. I have to say that it
> >     represented an entirely unforeseen richness and inventiveness in
> >     the university. That's what Lacan was; he was above all a guy
> >     with guts; you can say all you want about Lacan, but you can't
> >     say the contrary, he had no lack of guts. He possessed a depth
> >     of freedom that he inherited from a rather blessed period, I
> >     have to say, the period before the war, the period of
> >     surrealism, a period with a kind of gratuitous violence. One
> >     thinks of Gide's Lafcadio. He had a dadaist humor, a violence at
> >     the same time, a cruelty; he was a very cruel guy, Lacan, very
> >     harsh.
> >       As for Deleuze, it wasn't the same because he acquired this
> >     freedom vis-a-vis concepts, this kind of sovereign distance in
> >     his work. Deleuze was never a follower of anyone, it seems to
> >     me, or of nearly anyone. I wasn't in the same kind of work, and
> >     it was important for me to have a model of rupture, if I can
> >     call it that, all the more so since I was involved in extreme
> >     leftist organizations, but still traditionalist from many
> >     perspectives. There was all the weight of Sartre's thought, of
> >     Marxist thought, creating a whole environment that it wasn't
> >     easy to eliminate. So, I think that's what Lacan was. Moreover,
> >     it's certain that his reading of Freud opened possibilities for
> >     me to cross through and into different ways of thinking. It's
> >     only recently that I have discovered to what extent he read
> >     Freud entirely in bad faith. In other words, he really just made
> >     anything he wanted out of Freud because, if one really reads
> >     Freud, one realizes that it has very little to do with Lacanism.
> >     (Laughter)
> >
> > CS: Could you specify in which writings or essays Lacan seems to
> >     read this way?
> >
> > FG: The whole Lacanian extrapolation about the signifier, in my
> >     opinion, is absolutely un-Freudian, because Freud's way of
> >     constructing categories relating to the primary processes was
> >     also a way of making their cartography that, in my opinion, was
> >     much closer to schizoanalysis, i.e. much closer to a sometimes
> >     nearly delirious development -- why not? -- in order to account
> >     for how the dream and how phobia function, etc. There is a
> >     Freudian creativity that is much closer to theater, to myth, to
> >     the dream, and which has little to do with this structuralist,
> >     systemic, mathematizing, I don't know how to say it, this
> >     mathemic thought of Lacan. First of all, the greatest
> >     difference, there as well, is at the level of the enunciation
> >     considered in its globality. Freud and his Freudian
> >     contemporaries wrote something, wrote monographies. Then, in the
> >     history of psychoanalysis, and notably in this kind of
> >     structuralist vacillation, there are no monographies. It's a
> >     meta-meta-meta-theorization; they speak about textual exegesis
> >     in the _n_th degree, and one always returns to the original
> >     monography, little Hans, Schreber, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man.\17
> >     So all that is ridiculous. It's as if we had the Bible, the
> >     Bible according to Schreber, the Bible according to Dora. This
> >     is interesting, this comparison could be pushed quite far. I
> >     think that there is the invention of the modelization of
> >     subjectivity, an order of this invention of subjectivity that
> >     was that of the apostles: it comes, it goes, but I mean that
> >     it's moving much more quickly now than at that time, i.e. we
> >     won't have to wait two thousand years to put that religion in
> >     question, it seems to me.
> >
> > CS: It also seems to me that there are many more apostles who have
> >     betrayed their master than apostles who betrayed Jesus.
> >
> > FG: I was thinking more of the apostles, I see them more as Freud's
> >     first psychoanalyses; then, it's the Church fathers who are the
> >     traitors. Understand, with the apostles, there is something
> >     magnificent in Freud, he's like a guy who has fallen hopelessly
> >     in love with his patients, without realizing it, more or less; a
> >     guy who introduced some very heterodoxical practices, nearly
> >     incestuous when you think of what was the spirit of medicine at
> >     that period. So, he had an emotion, there was a Freudian event
> >     of creation, an entirely original Freudian scene, and all that
>  >     has been completely buried by exegesis, by the Freudian
> >     religions.
> >
> > CS: A few minutes ago, you mentioned Foucault. I asked Deleuze this
> >     question about Foucault yesterday evening: what are your
> >     thoughts on Foucault nearly a year after his death? How do you
> >     react to this absence, and can we yet judge the importance of
> >     Foucault's work?
> >
> > FG: It's difficult for me to respond because, quite the contrary to
> >     Deleuze, I was never influenced by Foucault's work. It
> >     interested me, of course, but it was never of great importance.
> >     I can't judge it. Quite possibly, it will have a great impact in
> >     different fields.\18
> >
> > CS: Deleuze told me something very interesting: he said that
> >     Foucault's presence kept imbeciles from speaking too loudly, and
> >     that if Foucault didn't exactly block all aberrations, he
> >     nonetheless blocked imbeciles, and now the imbeciles will be
> >     unleashed. And, in terms of Aron's book, _Les Modernes_, he said
> >     that this book wouldn't have been possible while Foucault was
> >     alive, that no one would have dared publish it.
> >
> > FG: Oh, you think so?
> >
> > CS: I really don't know, but in any case, when it's a matter of
> >     machinations on the right . . .
> >
> > FG: It's certain that Foucault had a very important authority and
> >     impact.
> >
> > 5. The Americanization of Europe
> >
> > CS: There's another question I want to return to. In terms of
> >     capitalism in the world, I'd like to consider the question of
> >     the Americanization that penetrates everywhere, for example,
> >     the "Dallas" effect. There is even a French "Dallas",
> >     "Chateauvallon" . . .
> >
> > FG: It's not bad either. It's better than "Dallas," I find.
> >
> > CS: Of course, for the French. But when you like J.R. . . .
> >
> > FG: That's true. J.R. is a great character, quite formidable.
> >
> > CS: But what strikes me in your writing, especially in _Rhizome_,\19
> >     is the impression of a kind of romanticism about America,
> >     references to the American nomadism, the country of continuous
> >     displacement, deterritorialization . . .
> >
> > FG: Burroughs, Ginsberg . . .
> >
> > CS: Right, and one gets the impression of a special America, and we
> >     Americans who read your texts, we know our America, and here in
> >     France, as a tourist this time, I see the changes, the
> >     penetration of our culture that has occurred over the last few
> >     years, the plastification, the fast food restaurants everywhere
> >     . . .
> >
> > FG: Ah, it's incredible. And in the popular social strata, among the
> >     youth, they babble this kind of slang, they've completely
> >     identified with it, it's incredible. It's all over Europe,
> >     everywhere, the linguistic phenomenon of the incorporation of
> >     American rock. It's really surprising.
> >
> > CS: So there are two conceptions of America: this nomadic conception
> >     which you present in your works, but that is finally a romantic
> >     conception in light of the practice of Americanization, the
> >     penetration of America and, of course, of capitalism. It seems
> >     that one does not go with the other, so how do you explain this
> >     difference? It's not really a contradiction, but simply a
> >     distance between two conceptions of America.
> >
> > FG: Well, that's complicated. I'm not very clear about that because
> >     . . . I went to America occasionally, especially during the
> >     '70s, and then afterwards, during the '80s, I've gone to Japan,
> >     to Brazil, and to Mexico a lot, and I've no longer wanted to go
> >     to the United States. I haven't considered it well, I haven't
> >     understood why.
> >       You know, it's not certain that this is a romantic vision.
> >     Americans are often jerks; they have a pragmatic relationship
> >     with things; they are dumb, and sometimes, this is great because
> >     they don't have any background as compared to Europeans,
> >     Italians, but there is an American functionalism that makes us
> >     pass into this a-signifying register, that transports a
> >     fabulous creationism, fabulous anyhow in the
> >     technical-scientific domain, because they are really a
> >     scientific people; they don't look for complications, it works
> >     or it doesn't, they move on to something else.
> >       I met an American last summer, I was in California, at
> >     Stanford, I don't know where. I was on a tour to study the
> >     problems of mental health, a mission for the Ministry of
> >     Exterior Affairs. Americans are people who receive you very
> >     well, who take time to talk, which isn't the case here, not the
> >     same kind of welcome. So, each person that I met gave me an hour
> >     for discussion, and there, this young psychiatrist explained
> >     what had happened after the Kennedy Act, the liquidation of the
> >     big psychiatric hospitals and the establishment in his sector of
> >     half-way houses, a kind of day hospital to replace the big
> >     hospitals. He made a diagram chart, I remember, there was a
> >     graph with double entries, there were all the dimensions of
> >     these establishments, a remarkable organization of what had been
> >     developed. So, he finished presenting all that to me, and then
> >     the conversation finally ended, but there still remained ten
> >     minutes because we had an hour for our discussion, so there was
> >     no reason to leave. And I asked him a final question: "And so,
> >     how did all that work? What was the result?" He broke out
> >     laughing: "Nil. Zero. It didn't work at all!" I said: "Oh,
> >     really?" He said: "Yes, it's just a program we made, but it
> >     didn't work at all!" That was like a thunderbolt for me that
> >     this guy had made this entire development, and then it didn't
> >     work, so let's do something else. We see this well in Bateson's
> >     work: he makes a program on something, it works, but that
> >     doesn't matter, they move on to something else because they were
> >     on contract.\20 That's what I find to be the marvelous
> >     a-signifying freedom, going on to something else, going on to
> >     something else. They massacre Vietnamese for years, then
> >     afterwards, oh, well, no, that was stupid, let's go on to
> >     something else.
> >       So I wonder if that isn't the rather invading, yankee side of
> >     Americans that makes us ask what they're up to, what they're
> >     looking for. But one shouldn't try too hard to discover what
> >     they're looking for or what they're up to. It's the same for the
> >     Japanese, but with an entire background of mysticism, of
> >     religiosity, that also exists in the United States, but without
> >     being structured the same way.
> >
> > CS: But where could we insert this question of nomadism? We have
> >     this "go on to something else" nomadism, so perhaps that's it,
> >     Kerouac, going on to something else . . .
> >
> > FG: And next, and next, and next, constantly, constantly, and now,
> >     and now.