ABSTRACT
Guattari is widely known for his activism in the anti-psychiatry movement at La Borde1 and for his critique of psychoanalysis, but what is often forgotten in the architects’ readings of Guattari and Deleuze is Guattari’s Lacanian backgroundthe years of analysis with Lacan, his practice as a Lacanian psychiatrist, and the late-Lacanism that endures in his subsequent work. From the psychoanalytic polemic of the 1970s-undertaken with Deleuze, via Anti-Oedipus-to Guattari’s involvement at La Borde and the individual writings, Psychanalyse et transversalité and La révolution moléculaire, Guattari’s engagement with architecture is necessarily inflected by structuralist-inspired psychoanalytical theory. Nonetheless, the Anglo-American reception of Guattari and Deleuze can be said to have effectively side-stepped psychoanalysis and the problem of subjectivity-eliding the productive Freudian and Lacanian material within Deleuze and Guattari’s project, in what stands as a corrupted reading of Deleuze’s ‘rejoinder’ to Lacan and of Guattari and Deleuze’s ‘anti-Freudianism.’
