Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Félix Guattari
Introduction
Félix Guattari visited Japan on a number of occasions during the 1980s.
These visits consisted of invited lectures and a series of conversations
and collaborations with Japanese intellectuals, artists, and architects.
His collaborative writings with Deleuze, particularly the Kafka and
Rhizome books, began to appear in Japanese translation in the late
1970s. By the mid-eighties, however, Anti-Oedipus was available for
Japanese readers.1
The year 1985 saw the publication of Guattari’s conversations and
co-authored papers with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka collected under
the title of Velocity of Light, Fire of Zen: Assemblage 1985. This was fol-
lowed in 1986 with the translation of Guattari’s jointly authored volume
with Antonio Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. In the same year,
the colourful volume Tokyo Theatre: Guattari in Tokyo appeared. This
volume includes the present translation. It also contains multiple con-
tributions by leading Japanese intellectuals, especially ‘neo-academicist’
types like Akira Asada who were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy in the first two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.2
A distinction needs to be made between the translations of French
publications and the original Japanese editions of writings by, about and
with ‘Ferikkusu Gatari’. Guattari’s main translator, Masaaki Sugimura
from Ryuukoku University in Kyoto, is less-well known within the
global Deleuzian scene in comparison to Kuniichi Uno from the
University of Tokyo who was lead translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s
Mille Plateaux.3 Some of the Japanese Guattari books are cobbled
together collections of short papers, interviews, translations of older
materials, similar to the Semiotext(e) style of presentation of fragments,
out of chronological order, thematically linked, but decontextualized.
94 Félix Guattari
Acknowledgements
‘Tokyo l’orgueilleuse’. Fonds Félix Guattari ET02-12. 5 pps. Typescript
(French). Published in Japanese in F. Guattari, Hiraï Gen, Asada Akira,
Takeda Kenichi, Radio Homerun, et alia, Tokyo Gekijou: Gatari, Tokyo
wo yuku, UPU, 1986.
English translation by Gary Genosko and Tim Adams.
Used with the kind permission of Enfants Guattari.
Special thanks to Monsieur Jose Ruiz-Funes at Institut mémoires de
l’édition contemporaine, and to Barbara Godard (York University).
Notes
1. Rhizome, trans. K. Toyosaki (1977); Kafka, trans. A. Unami and K. Iwata
(1978); Anti-Oedipus, trans. H. Ichikura (1986) and then Guattari’s La
révolution moléculaire, trans. M. Sugimura (1988). I am grateful for the
assistance of Hiroshi Kobayashi for information concerning Japanese titles.
2. Guattari and co-author Min Tanaka, Kousoku to zen-en: agencement 85
(Shuukanbon [Weekly Book] #35 June 1985; Guattari and Negri, Jiyuu no
Tokyo, the Proud 99
DOI: 10.3366/E1750224108000020