ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a cartographic experiment with Félix Guattari’s materialism. While his primary concern was always the production of subjectivity, nevertheless, Guattari frequently reminded his readers that such a task would also require a radically different understanding of the material world. In contrast to the Kantian tradition, Guattari’s account of subjectivity is not based upon an a-priori distinction between subject and object, which is to say, between self-conscious individuals and lifeless matter. This chapter shows how, for Guattari, the possibility of approaching subjectivity as a process of material production demands a much ‘wilder’ variety of materialism, one that refuses to separate matter from the germs of subjective life. The chapter addresses this question of Guattari’s materialism in greater detail and emphasises the significance of incorporeal individuations (or ‘haecceities’) in his ground-breaking account of the material production of subjectivity. To conclude, the chapter explores the relationship between these incorporeal individuations and Guattari’s frequent appeals to an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ paradigm. This relationship is crucial, the chapter contends, in distinguishing Guattari’s cosmic cartographies from a phenomenology of lived experience.
