Félix Guattari - Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan

Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan
by Flix Guattari

Edited by Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick

First Edition
Minneapolis 2015, Univocal Publishing

Pathic Transferences and Contemporary Japanese Art Gary Genosko
Toward a Critical Nomadism? Flix Guattari in Japan Jay Hetrick

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Thanks to Les Enfants Guattari, Keiichi Tahara, Imec,
Tetsuo Kogawa, Toshiya Ueno, Iloe Ariss

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ISBN 978-1-937561-83-3
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Table of Contents

Writings on Japan by Flix Guattari

Critical Essays

By Gary Genosko

By Jay Hetrick

Original Publication Data

For permission to reprint and/or translate material, the editors and publisher are grateful to the following:

Tokyo, the Proud
trans. Gary Genosko and Tim Adams
Bruno, Emmanuelle, Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Deleuze Studies 1.2 (December 2007), pp. 96-99.

Translocal: Tetsuo Kogawa Interviews Flix Guattari
trans. Adam Colin Chambers, revised by Jay Hetrick
Tetsuo Kogawa / Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Partially published in Hype_Text #1(Autumn 2000), pp. 1-12. Interviews conducted on 18 and 24 October 1980 and 22 May 1981 (Tokyo, Japan).

Butoh
trans. Gary Genosko
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Flix Guattari, Les Annes dHiver: 1980-1985 (Paris: Les prairies ordinaires, 2009), p. 266. Presentation of a Butoh dance program by Min Tanaka, 1984.

Body-Assemblage: Flix Guattari and Min Tanaka in Dialogue
trans. Toshiya Ueno and Toulouse-Antonin Roy
Min Tanaka / Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Min Tanaka and Flix Guattari, Velocity of Light, Fire of Zen: Assemblage 85 , Shuukanbon Weekly Book 35 (June 1985), pp. 9-33.

Keiichi Taharas Faciality Machines
trans. Andrew Goffey
Bruno, Emmanuelle et Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Flix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 247-252.

The always never seen of Keiichi Tahara
trans. Jay Hetrick
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Flix Guattari, Les Annes dHiver: 1980-1985 (Paris: Les prairies ordinaires, 2009), pp. 267-69. Bulletin of the French Book published by the Embassy of France in Tokyo, 1st quarter 1985.

Imai: Painter of Chaosmosis
trans. Jay Hetrick
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Toshimitsu Imai, Imai: Hiroshima
(Tokyo: Gallery Gan, 1997), pp. 16-17.

The Rich Affects of Madam Yayoi Kusama
trans. Gary Genosko
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
IMEC ET 06-19 Fonds Guattari. Typescript, 2 pages, no date.

The Architectural Machines of Shin Takamatsu
trans. Tim Adams and Catherine Howell, revised by Jay Hetrick
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published in Chimres 21 (Winter 1994), pp. 127-41.

Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Flix Guattari
trans. Wayne Lawrence and Elizabeth Cheng
Bruno, Emmanuelle, and Stephen Guattari -Fonds Imec
Originally published in Parallax 7.4 (2001), pp. 131-137.

Ecosophical Practices and the Restoration of the Subjective City
trans. Kuniichi Uno et al., revised by Gary Genosko
Japan Institute of Architects / Bruno, Emmanuelle, Stephen Guattari - Fonds Imec
Originally published as Restoration of the Urban Landscape in Riichi Miyake, ed., Proposal from Nagoya (Nagoya: Japan Institute of Architects, 1989), pp. 85-95. The conference talk was augmented for publication by Guattari. This translation by Gary Genosko follows, with some of Guattaris interpolations from his talk in Nagoya remaining, the longer version published in Chimres 17 (1992), pp. 1-18.

Part I

Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan by Flix Guattari

Tokyo, the Proud

Luminous cubes on top of the skyscrapers. To blaze a trail across the sky? To interpellate the gods? Certainly, out of pride, like the medieval towers of Bologna.

That inimitable attentiveness of your Japanese interlocutor who suddenly makes you feel worthy of consideration and induces you into the mimetic temptation irresistible, though hopeless of understanding the other from a viewpoint imbued with a new sensitivity.

An imperceptible transgression is then followed by rejection and abandonment on the shores of a final void. Pride, gentleness and violence mingle in the fleeting exchange of glances [ fleur de regard ].

Paradoxically, female and maternal values are omnipresent yet so rigorously circumscribed and inhibited; this makes their repression ostentatious.

Three-tiered concrete highways span the mosaic city, legs wide apart like the heroes of the Kabuki theater, crushing all in their path. Each day thousands of additional inhabitants and hundreds of conquering companies are parachuted in; the absurd lamination of the urban patrimony.

I dont know how many mountaineers risk their lives climbing the most inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas each year, I only recall that more than half of them are Japanese.

What is it that drives the Japanese? Is it the attraction of wealth and luxury, the consequences of the marked lack of iron affecting their memories? Or, perhaps it is primarily the desire to be in the thick of things [ tre dans le coup ], what I call machinic eros!

Becoming a child of Japan; becoming Japanese of our future childhoods.

Certainly do not confuse these becomings with capitalistic infantilism and its vibrating zones of collective hysteria, such as the syndrome of puerile cute culture ( kawaii ), the reading-drug of Manga comics, or the intrusiveness of loukoum music; the latter is, to my taste, the worst kind of pollution.

All the trends of the West have arrived on the shores of these islands without resistance. But the wave of Judeo-Christian guilt that feeds our spirit of capitalism has never managed to swamp them. Might Japanese capitalism be a mutation resulting from the monstrous crossing of animist powers inherited from feudalism during the Baku-han and the machinic powers of modernity to which it appears everything here must revert?

Externalized interiorities and rebellious exteriorities with univocal signifying reductions populate the surfaces and engender new depths of the sort where inside and outside no longer maintain the mutually exclusive relationship of opposition to which Westerners are accustomed. The signalizing [ signaltiques ] matters characteristic of the texture of subjectivity are found to be inextricably related to the energetico-spatio-temporal components of the urban fabric.

Despite the cancerous tumors that threaten to suffocate it at any moment, Tokyo in many ways reveals its ancient existential territories and ancestral affinities between microcosm and macrocosm. This is apparent at the level of its primary configurations, whose admirable oneiric explorations have been presented to us by Kobo Abes novel The Ruined Map , as well as in the molecular behavior of its crowds that appear to treat public spaces as so many private domains.