ABSTRACT
The importance of maps and cartography, under the initial influence of Fernand Deligny and his lignes d’erre (wandering lines), is clear in Deleuze and Guattari’s works. Their primary role is explained in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, in which the two authors invite us to “make a map, not a tracing”. The argument developed in this chapter is that the new version of analysis that Deleuze and Guattari propose under the very enigmatic name of ‘schizoanalysis’ can also be interpreted as an activity of mapping the unconscious. This is done through a re-reading of Guattari’s The Machinic Unconscious. Against the traditions of psychoanalysis inspired by structuralism – such as Freud, Jung, or Reich – Guattari propose his own version of an unconscious bricoleur. The ‘machinic unconscious’ is also a deterritorialised one, because it’s not located only in the interior world of individuals, but equally in the exteriority of their connections to bodies, territories (existential or spatialised), school, work, society, etc. The Guattarian unconscious has a new orientation in time: it is not concerned only with crystallisations of the past, but focuses on the future. It is for this reason that the unconscious can never be interpreted but only mapped; schizoanalysis is therefore a form of cartography.
