The Concept of Heterogenesis in Félix Guattari: a genealogy through literature

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to promote a genealogy of the concept of heterogenesis in the works of Felix Guattari, taking as main reference its explicitation in Chaosmosis. We will be paying attention to the origins of this concept in the critical and clinical reflections on psychoanalysis made by the author, and also his formulations about the literary experience, especially the works of Franz Kafka. The effort will be made to show that the clinical experience allowed Guattari propositions and reformulations of the experience of the inconscient from the model of schizophrenia, from a critical point of view of psychoanalysis, allowing to investigate what he called "subjective mutations" or "continual ressingularization processes" that can be manifested in their productive and creative aspect, approaching artistic literary creation. Just as Freud formulated that the artists discovered the unconscious before him, we will investigate in which way the artistic creation exhibits in Guattari's work the mechanisms that culminate in the form of a heterogenesis. To do so, we will analyze Kafka's work in special, including his diaries, all of which appear in multiple moments in the works of Guattari - and also of his work with Gilles Deleuze - so as to unravel how Kafka intercedes as a model of production of "subjective otherness", or even, in a subjective heterogenetic transformation; in the context of french philosophy at the time, these were no ordinary questions, and the works of Kafka, together with psychoanalysis, was central to de investigations being held at the time.