| dcterms.abstract | This dissertation maps Félix Guattari’s concept and practice of transversality through its politico-therapeutic functions and across its institutional locations—from the movement, to the university, to the clinic—while tending to the mad materialities that haunt each. Transversality is a quality, or what Guattari would call a coefficient, he cultivated in his therapeutic relationships at the La Borde psychiatric clinic and then turned towards more strictly intellectual tasks in his own writing and collaborations with Gilles Deleuze. Scholars note, however, that Guattari’s work and the collaborative work of Guattari and Deleuze is so often taken up in the milieu of Deleuze’s philosophic writings rather than situated in Guattarian contexts of psychiatric practice and activism. While recent recuperations of Guattari have been valuable in pressuring the political function in his work, I examine why the therapeutic—and the relation of the political to the therapeutic via transversality in particular—remains underexamined. After “A Brief Prehistory of Mad Organizing”, I track Guattari’s thickly personal backgrounds across three institutional locations in “The Movement: The Therapeutic is Politics by Other Means,” “The University: Academic Attachments, Transversal Departures,” and “The Clinic: Listening to Madness with Institutional Analysis,” before moving forward in time to “Transversalities Present.” I consider transversality as key to a practice of institutional analysis that elevates affect and affective labor, and track its affinities—as a reflexive practice sensitized to positionality and suspicious of a theory of the subject based in independence and agency—with queer, feminist, and critical disability critique. Transversality emerges as a practice of solidarity between minoritized groups and academic knowledge projects. Listening to Madness thus develops transversality as a politico-therapeutic orientation indebted to the madness, and mad persons, with whom Guattari lived at La Borde, and as a method with which to dismantle appropriations of mad organizing, knowledges, and care. In looking to Guattari and La Borde, I offer a history of the present that takes up not only the relationship between intellectual and social movements, but the dynamics between those movements and the lives and living of the people on which they rely. | |
