Happy New Year! I wrote so much about writer’s block in 2023 that I hesitate to begin 2024 with yet another tale of a stuck writer—but I like where this one leads, so please bear with me. Oh, and if you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become one here:
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992)
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: A philosopher and a psychoanalyst meet at the philosopher’s house in the French countryside. The psychoanalyst confesses to a terrible case of writer’s block. The philosopher says he knows just the solution…
Only—it’s not a joke, and after their initial meeting, in June 1969, the philosopher and the psychoanalyst began an unlikely intellectual collaboration that continued for more than twenty years and yielded several startlingly original, hugely influential, and controversial books, starting with the jointly authored Anti-Oedipus, published three years after that first meeting.
So what was the philosopher’s solution to the psychoanalyst’s block? First, some background: The psychoanalyst was Félix Guattari, who was then helping to run the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde in the Loire Valley. He was also an activist, a bit of a troublemaker, and a man of great energy—perhaps too much energy. “He needed something like Ritalin, which we give to hyperactive children today,” a colleague recalled. “We had to find a way to calm him down. Although he claimed that he wanted to write, he never wrote.”
Gilles Deleuze, meanwhile, was one of France’s leading philosophers, who was then fascinated by mental illness and especially psychosis—but he had no first-hand experience with psychiatric patients, like Guattari did. So he created a system for working together, described by François Dosse in his 2007 book Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives:
Their first book was written primarily through letters. This approach to writing completely upset Guattari’s daily life, because it forced him to work alone, which was not his habit, as he had been used to directing his groups [at La Borde]. Deleuze expected Guattari to wake up and get to his desk right away, to outline his ideas on paper (he had three ideas per minute), and, without rereading or reworking what he had written, to mail his daily draft. He imposed what he considered to be a necessary process for getting over writer’s block. Guattari followed the rules faithfully and withdrew into his office, where he worked slavishly until four o’clock in the afternoon every day, after which he went to La Borde to quickly make his rounds before returning to Dhuizon [where he lived], generally around six o’clock.
This sounds rather tough on Guattari, but it worked! The psychoanalyst’s idea-packed daily letters—three ideas per minute?!—gave Deleuze a wealth of material to interpret, build upon, refine, and otherwise mold into a new text. (“Deleuze said that Félix was the diamond miner and he was the polisher,” Guattari’s then-partner noted.) Apparently their vastly different professional backgrounds—and very different personalities—clashed in just the right way. Dosse writes: “The success of their common intellectual work depended on mobilizing and using everything that made them different, rather than pretending that they worked in osmosis.” For his part, Deleuze emphasized how their partnership embraced not knowing: “It’s not that we know something, it’s first a certain state of ourselves,” he explained. “It’s easier when there are two of you ‘to put yourself in this state.’”
I think I know what he means. This state is free-associative, non-judgmental, accumulative—a kind of intellectual riffing. But it’s also a state where individual selves dissolve. Deleuze said: “We didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us.” In another context, he referred to their process as “the flux.”
The flux! I love this idea, and I’ve been thinking about how I might try to create more flux in my own work this year. I don’t think you necessarily need two people to get there—and in the next issue, I’m going to unpack one possible method of creating “the flux” in an individual practice. Hope to see you then.
THE REAL SOLUTION TO WRITER’S BLOCK?
I started reading about Deleuze and Guattari because of a reader comment on my last post, relating an irresistible bit of philosophy-history trivia: Supposedly Deleuze would tie Guattari to a chair in order to get him to meet their shared writing deadlines. But when I got my hands on Intersecting Lives, the apparent source of this anecdote, I couldn’t actually find any mention of anyone tying anyone else to a chair. I’m now wondering if it’s—perhaps—possible that the tying-Guattari-to-a-chair anecdote appears in Dosse’s original French text but not in the English translation, from 2010. If anyone out there happens to know more, by all means please let me know in the comments or by replying to this email.
(Special thanks to reader Kate for sending me down this fascinating rabbit hole in the first place!)
HOW TO MAKE WRITING DISAPPEAR
Speaking of intellectuals who have trouble writing: Deleuze’s collaborative method reminds me of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s trick for forcing himself to write, which I described in 2021:
(Just a quick reminder that new issues of the newsletter are free for all, but I paywall the web versions after a couple months. Paid subscribers get access to the full archive of 130+ past issues, plus my sincere gratitude—this newsletter wouldn’t be possible without reader support!)
HBD, HAYAO MIYAZAKI
Finally, last Friday was the Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s 83rd birthday, which gives me an excuse to repost another back issue from the archive, one of my favorites. This one’s not paywalled—please enjoy.
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In visual art terms, to ‘flux’ means to use paint to blot out or ‘erase’/cover areas of an art piece that aren’t working. You can flux with white or any colour - you keep what is working and flux the rest
You’ve now inspired me to officially call our group the “Foursome Flux”! 😆