Molecular Revolution in BrazilFélix Guattari and Suely Rolniktranslated by KarelClapshow and Brian HolmesYes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, apeople of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, andmusical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterlyfabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution:it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I feel, that I live....--from MolecularRevolution in (...) BrazilFollowing Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of militarydictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilianpsychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of itsnew republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimesand founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents theconversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue betweenGuattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorialcandidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalizationgone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.Assembled and edited by Rolnik, MolecularRevolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known,more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 asMicropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movementsin Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluablepicture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil. Félix Guattari, post-'68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of Anti-Oedipus, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 2006), and other books. Semiotext haspublished the first two volumes of his complete essays, Chaosophy and Soft Subversions, and will publish the final volume, Chaos and Complexity, in 2008. Suely Rolnik is apsychoanalyst, cultural critic, and curator who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She was aclose collaborator of Guattari during her exile in Paris from the military dictatorship inBrazil. (shrink)

The work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark occupies a singular position in the movement of institutional critique that began in the 1960s and 70s. The center of her research consists in a mobilization of the two capacities of perception and sensation that alllow us to grasp the otherness of the world, respectively as a map of forms on which we project representations or as a diagram of forces that affect the senses in their capacity for resonance. In 1976, with (...) the Structuring of the Self, she abandoned the field of art and opted for therapy. The forms of critique that she brought into play over the following decade only found a resonance among the generation that began to assert itself in the mid-1990s. Noting this resonance, Suely Rolnik decided to develop a project for the reactivation of memory around the work of Lygia Clark. The idea was to use filmed interviews to produce a living recording of the effects of the body constituted by Lygia during her exile from art, in her cultural and political environment in Brazil and in France. With the exhibition, the pulsation of this body had a chance of contaminating the territory of art. (shrink)