ABSTRACT
A central focus of Guattari’s engagement with politics in both his writing and activism was the problem of the liberation of desire from dominant regimes of signification. This chapter explores the role that cinema can play in the struggle for what Guattari calls a micropolitics of desire that creatively experiments with preindividual forces that exceed the conventional images we have of ourselves and of our relations to others. The chapter thus highlights the stakes of Guattari’s philosophy for traditional understandings of a cinematic politics by tracing two key theoretical shifts: from a thought of the cinematic encounter as a structural repetition of the same (psychoanalysis) to the encounter as a machinic event of difference; and from an interpretative politics of signification (linguistics) to an experimental micropolitics of a-signifying forces. At stake in Guattari’s thought, I claim, is a more transformative sense of cinema as a desiring-machine, generating a-signifying intensities that disrupt existing forms of representational coding and open thinking to new collective arrangements of desire. I explore this potential through an engagement with Satoshi Kon’s 2006 anime, Paprika, a film which forcefully highlights cinema’s capacity to think desire as a machinic process of individuation and becoming.
