Introduction: Guattari and Ecology

The chapter argues that of the many Guattaris – the psychoanalyst, the philosopher, the scholar of the arts, the cultural critic, and the activist – the most lasting one will be the ecologist, and it places Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies at the conceptual centre of a schizoecological tryptich that consists of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. It then traces some conceptual origins of and inspirations for what Guattari, borrowing a term from deep ecologist Arne Naess, calls his ecosophy. Other such borrowings come from the works of James E. Lovelock, Ilja Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Lucretius, Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson. By way of Guattari’s notion of the machinic, it then positions Guattari’s work in relation to various forms of constructivism. After delineating his own version of a schizoecologic and machinic constructivism, it shows how this schizoecology informs the schizoanalytic practices at La Borde clinic.