Transversal Polyphonies: A Reflection

with Miguel D. Norambuena on Félix

Guattari’s Trip to Chile

Paulina E. Varas Universidad Andrés Bello

Translated by Vicente Durán

Abstract
This article is based on a series of conversations with the social
psychologist Miguel D. Norambuena regarding Félix Guattari’s visit to
Chile in 1991. The conversation deals with different events, ranging
from the process of dictatorial repression in Chile with the political exile
of Miguel D., experiences of intersection between Chilean revolutionary
processes and the experiences of May 1968, as well as forms of
production of subjectivity in the neoliberal scenario of the 1980s.
Different tools for practical reflection take place in this dialogue, from
the collective listening that David Cooper developed on the outskirts of
Paris, Guattari’s seminars at his home or the visits to the La Borde clinic,
Guattari’s trip to Chile and the publication of the books Cartografías del
deseo (1989) and El devenir de la subjetividad (1998) in Chile. Finally,
the experience of the Daily Life Clinic currently being developed by
Miguel D. in Geneva is addressed as part of a process of subjective
ecosophic creation.

Keywords: Félix Guattari, Chile, Miguel D. Norambuena,

schizoanalysis, Daily Life Clinic

Miguel Denis Norambuena is a Chilean who has resided in Geneva

since 1973, owing to his political exile imposed by the Chilean military
dictatorship, which brought him to this city and which saved his life.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13.3 (2019): 377–394

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2019.0363
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
378 Paulina E. Varas

His intellectual, professional and artistic practice cannot be defined

monolithically, since he has dedicated himself mainly to the area of what
is commonly called mental health, but from a transversal perspective,
is linked to diverse creation processes. His care or healing proposal is
based on his life experience, first with the psychiatrist David Cooper,
who, together with Ronald Laing, founded the term ‘anti-psychiatry’
during the 1970s in Paris, and later with Félix Guattari in the field of
schizoanalysis during the 1980s. His proposal also draws on readings
and connections with Gilles Deleuze, Fernand Deligny, Carmelo Bene,
Paul Virilio, François Jullien, Hartmut Rosa and Isabel Stengers, as well
as the revolutionary experience he had with Mapuche communities in
southern Chile during the early 1970s, in the resistance and struggle
for the liberation of territories that were seized and exploited by
corporations. All this occurred a few years before Pinochet’s military
coup intervened and crushed the new forms of solidarity, thinking and
feeling that were being created at that time. His practice and thought
draw from various sources that have been shaped into a powerful and
radical position in favour of life, of observing differences, of desire and
pleasure itself.
In 2017, I visited Miguel and we began a nomadic dialogue in
Geneva that we continue rigorously to this day through our weekly
meetings, taking advantage of current technologies. We have a kind
of open, polyphonic dialogue which is both intensive and reflective. In
Geneva, we spoke of his experience as I myself was living a subjective
experience as I walked through the Swiss city, which is kept clean and
orderly, oblivious to our steps as we strolled down its streets. As we
talk, we stop, look, speak or fall silent. We let some weeds grow in
those spaces – Invented Spaces, Miguel would say – where we allow our
dialogical framework to position itself and emerge, a possible future in
the midst of our memories, being there, present, that weaves an open and
shared present, a transtemporal and transversal polyphony. We visited
the Dracar Centre in Geneva, a place that Miguel has created based on
the notion of ‘ecosophic Daily Life Clinic’, and I saw right there how
these ideas that he has been collecting and experiencing during these
years were developed. In principle, I am interested in learning about the
psychotherapy circles of David Cooper in Paris before his death in 1986,
and also about Félix Guattari’s visit to Chile in 1991, but particularly
about Miguel’s experience in his current formulations. This meeting of
two continents that occurs at this time that we share, requires us to face
the challenge of thinking about the problems affecting us and cry out to
us for different forms of the production of subjectivity.
 Transversal Polyphonies 379

Figure 1. Paulina E. Varas and Miguel D. Norambuena in Geneva, 2017.

© Miguel D. Norambuena. Reproduced with kind permission.

A transversal polyphony, in this article, is a process of connections, an

experiment of relationships generated between the author of the text and
the interviewee, as a chance to elude traditional objectivity. To compose
the text, hours of face-to-face, email and online call conversations
have been edited. This proposal is based on making galaxies resonate
which, in themselves, have nothing to do with each other and are each
unique, creating bridges, ties and connections between heterogeneities.
An experience that is situated in a permanent ecosophic laboratory,
whose rhizomatic connections foster possible worlds.
In 1989, the book Cartografías del deseo by Félix Guattari was
presented in Santiago, Chile. This book includes an open, discontinuous
group of compiled texts, translated by Miguel D. Norambuena and a few
collaborators. The book was edited and published by Chilean artist and
entrepreneur Francisco Zegers, who, in his role as editor, inserted some
footnotes that provided context for the book in Chile, which generated
a dialogue with the footnotes inserted by the translator to clarify some
concepts for Chilean readers. Initially, the texts were taken exclusively
from the book Molecular Revolution, which were brought to Chile
evoking other possible revolutions such as those that had emerged during
the entire liberation process that had been taking place in many parts
380 Paulina E. Varas

of the world since the 1960s, and specifically in Chile with the broad
popular political and cultural process expressed by the Popular Unity
government and President Salvador Allende. For this reason, one of the
goals of bringing these texts to Chile was to signal a healing process of
subversive movements that, in many cases, ended in pain. Guattari gave
Miguel several texts in French for him to do with them ‘whatever he
thought appropriate’. Between dialogues and translations, the selection
of texts resulted in a mix of situations and ideas that sought to connect
dialogically with the place where they were translated. The contents of
these texts ranged from politics to psychoanalysis, from psychoanalysis
to philosophy, from philosophy to ethics, from ethics to aesthetics, and
the curve of their micropolitical and dissonant phylum developed until
it crossed paths with ecology and politics. The Guattarian molecular
revolutions situated in Chile, coexisting with the democratic transition
process, allowed for leaks, resistances, and also empty spaces.
One of the texts in this book that serves as a link to heterogeneous
situations is the glossary that psychiatrist David Cooper compiled on
schizoanalysis. The way it appears is related to a link with Miguel,
since they both had a previous connection in the therapeutic listening
groups in Paris during the 1970s that David organised and Miguel
attended. ‘I went to David’s house for two or three years to work with
listening groups, where his figure was powerful, suprasensible! During
the same period I was going to David’s house, one day, in the middle
of a group session, he answers the phone and suggests that we join
him for a meeting Guattari had invited him to,’ he recalls. Guattari
and Cooper had ties in Paris that led to different collaborations; one
example of this is the glossary written for the English edition of the book
Molecular Revolution, which Miguel translated for the book published
in Chile.
As part of the process that began with the translation and publication
of his texts, Guattari visited Chile in 1991, thanks to the work of
people such as Francisco Zegers and Miguel D. Norambuena. It is the
connection between Félix and Miguel, a connection nurtured by sensitive
ways of building relationships, the result of a process of years of a
‘schizoanalytic’, friendly and micropolitical relationship, which made
this trip possible to a large degree, but also the desire to visit the country
motivated by the experience of the Popular Unity, the coup d’état and the
emerging post-dictatorship democracy that was beginning a transition
period. Miguel and Félix maintained a friendship and did schizoanalytic
work together in Paris, an analytical work that lasted seven years, until
Félix died on 29 August 1992, at the age of sixty-two.
 Transversal Polyphonies 381

Guattari had made previous trips to South America, especially to

Brazil through his relationship with the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely
Rolnik and with other Brazilian psychoanalysts, thinkers, philosophers,
educators, community leaders and politicians. Some of those meetings
were described in the book Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo by
Suely (2013), which narrates trips, meetings and conversations through
the sensitive geography of Brazil, recording that micropolitical vitality
with the force that can be seen in subjectivity, in relationships with the
other.
For Miguel, it was beyond evident that bringing Félix to Chile after
having published Cartografías del deseo with Francisco Zegers was a
restorative and healing gesture, allowing him to become unnoticeable,
a form of adjacent healing that works hand in hand with other devices
at the same time. For all exiles who left ‘without permission’, without
saying goodbye, without feeling ‘authorised’, because there was no time
to celebrate a farewell, as is customary for those who leave in search of
new horizons, it feels like part of an unplanned, crooked trip. He often
says that he departed in debt to those he left behind. Not to mention the
debt that the ‘politically departed’ experience to those who died or to
the family pain caused by their departure. To be able to share in Chile,
fraternally, all the experience of friendship and generosity that Félix had
with Chilean and Latin American exiles and that he himself had received
during Guattari’s seminars and in his visits to the La Borde clinic.
It is these intensive experiences that are summarised in the following
conversation.
Paulina E. Varas (PEV): Miguel, in order to understand your practice
today, I think we have to go back to when you were forced to leave Chile
to save your life before Pinochet’s coup. Can you tell me a little about
that moment, and the type of militancy you were involved in during
that social, institutional and cultural vibrancy and agitation experienced
under the Popular Unity government? I understand that we must situate
ourselves in the city of Temuco and its surroundings in the Region of La
Araucanía, in southern Chile, where you lived at that time with the MIR
groups linked to the Mapuche resistance.

Miguel D. Norambuena (MDN): Immediately after Pinochet’s military

coup, and given the geopolitics of the Chilean idiosyncrasy, the military
in that region had a certain degree of distrust towards anyone from the
capital, towards that ‘outsider’ who by Chilean nature is conceited. At
the time of my arrest, I benefited during the interrogations from that
clemency, being from the capital or, in any case, having that look:
382 Paulina E. Varas

Figure 2. Félix Guattari and Miguel D. Norambuena in Cour-Cheverny, Blois,

La Borde Clinic, 1991. © Miguel D. Norambuena. Reproduced with kind
permission.

white, rather tall, well-spoken and standing straight up. Long before the
coup, the intelligence services of the military and the DINA had already
infiltrated all the social, political or institutional organisations that
existed, thanks to the complicity of the well-paid informers and the local
political right wing. Even more so because these organisations had the
reputation of being irreverent to the existing system of exploitation by
the bosses. Following the social change beliefs of the time, I campaigned
for the Mapuche cause in the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement),
supporting the Mapuche community members’ struggle to recover their
lands usurped or purchased fraudulently by the owners of the large
latifundia of the region. It is a robbery that has endured from that period
to the present day, along with the ‘Made in Chile’ racism, and the social,
institutional and police violence of Chileans and their State towards
the Mapuche. My social change beliefs, and my militant commitment,
was born and developed from the shame I feel to be part of that white
Chilean community that blatantly humiliates and mistreats that people,
the Mapuche people. That ‘fracture’ of experiences in the apprehension
of the world, especially towards peoples or ethnic minorities, in time
 Transversal Polyphonies 383

became a way of being for me, a sensibility for perceiving and standing
up in the world from my own wound.
In Temuco I was not the only one, obviously, to live that shame.
Before the coup d’état, during the thousand days of Salvador Allende’s
Popular Unity government, the whole country was experiencing a
massive carnival of ideas of subjective and popular emancipation.
For many people, those thousand days of the Popular Unity were a
qualitative leap forward for human dignity. The Chilean political right
wing, Christian and/or neoliberal, with the support of the United States’
CIA, boycotted the popular measures of Allende’s government from
the very first day. The social change beliefs of the MIR believed that
united – workers, settlers, Mapuche and students – we would be able to
wrest away the power of the country’s fascist government from the right
wing. By occupying the streets, the factories, the universities, the schools;
by arming the people. The military coup of 1973 radically confirmed the
opposite, and turned all of us, the opponents to the emerging ‘criollo’
fascism, into simple and irreversible losers. Betrayals, arrests, prison,
torture, job dismissals, disappearances, expatriation, exile. We now
know not only that the fascist ‘criollo’ government of Pinochet and the
military transformed the economic landscape, but also that it was a true
revolution of mentalities. A revolution of neoliberal mentalities that to
this day promotes ‘intensive consumerism’ as the paradigm and purpose
of life.

PEV: When you arrive in Europe as a result of exile, there is a new

scenario that you face: in addition to your entire process as a political
refugee, connections emerge first with David Cooper and later with
Félix Guattari. How do those two moments operate? Is there a rhythm
in how these forms of care and self-care are intertwined? And, above
all, I wonder how we may extract from this a current echo that may
update this type of subjective production process that sustains ways of
life whose politics of desire is urgent?

MDN: My arrival in Europe coincides with a historicity of ruptures, of

tears; mine is one of thousands of neighbouring stories of exiles. Mine,
my ‘history’, is situated within the pains, breaks and guilt of exile. The
guilt of being alive, of being ‘free’, of not being one of the ‘disappeared’
for my family. What Chilean exiles brought from the Popular Unity to
Europe fits and intersects, it somehow metamorphoses with that living
memory, which still survived after May ’68. In Europe at that time,
the remnants of that French process, as well as those that occurred
in other cities of the world, were still alive, although this movement
384 Paulina E. Varas

was also becoming institutionalised; it was becoming confined and

joining the dominant representational logic. It went from a performance
to an open and creative knowledge, a nomadic knowledge, it slowly
became a redundant sedentary institution. All the creative flows were
re-codified little by little, almost unnoticed, in order to enter the world
of dominant and conformist representations. This is how anomalous
flows are stabilised. While at the same time, the desire, the coefficients of
freedom, the enjoyment of life, the Nietzschean ‘Yes’ are all restricted,
dulled, sterilised. All nomadic and creative thinking suffers different
degrees of lobotomisation.
In the city of Temuco, where I lived half of the week with the
Mapuche communities, I had found a copy of the book published by
David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation, a book that I read at a very
significant and difficult moment for me. I was going through a separation
with my partner at the time, Frida Laschan, who was later killed during
torture in Buenos Aires.
In Geneva, someone told me that David lived on the outskirts of
Paris and that he directed and facilitated ‘listening’ groups without any
formalities. So I took a phone book and I found his name. I called him
and he immediately called me to his house. I went to David’s house
for two or three years to work with listening groups, where his figure
was powerful, suprasensible! During the same period I was going to
David’s house, one day, in the middle of a group session, he answers
the phone and suggests that we join him for a meeting Guattari had
invited him to. They already had an old collaborative relationship. A
‘dissenting’ relationship, with a great respect for each other’s positions
on psychotherapies and politics. After the meeting, by chance I sat down
at a table next to Félix, who listened to my story and then said, ‘Come
and see me at my house.’
PEV: It is very powerful how these two experiences of yours are
articulated, on the one hand being part of these groups created around
David that were welcoming those who needed it, but also connecting
with some Parisian sectors in which the political and artistic implications
(encoded in the aesthetic paradigm proposed by Guattari) were also
tied to subjective movements. I am wondering how you started working
with Félix. I suppose there were clearly two different ways of accessing
healing processes, but perhaps they were connected with a way of
accessing vulnerability, a shared kindness in that space where both types
of care converge.
MDN: All this involves the flows of abstract machines, a notion
proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, which have neither form nor content,
 Transversal Polyphonies 385

nor structure nor language. But they can be there as virtualities, as pure
a-signifiers, pre-semiotic processes. These virtualities are updated – or
not – prior to encounters, peculiar synaptic connections, thus generating
Invented Spaces of creation, of possibilities, of subjective and social
innovation. David and Félix knew how to create a space for dissent
between them: a peculiar and co-creative rhizome for their divergent
positions. Being able to reach that intersection of dissent is truly an art!
In the first sessions with Félix, I understood very little of the language
he used, even though I already spoke French. It was a language full
of neologisms, which appealed to concepts that I did not understand.
I often got home and looked them up in the dictionary. For a year
I kept going to see David at his house, participating in his ‘de-
psychiatrised’ group: about twenty people sitting on the floor, sharing,
crying, laughing, conceptualising experiences. At the same time, I was
seeing Félix Guattari in his home, lying on the sofa, apparently following
a rather classic psychoanalytic mode; I was attending the groups with
David Cooper, who was always accompanied by his companion and
tireless collaborator, the sociologist and psychologist Marina Zecca.
After a while I told David that I would continue with Félix. If I remember
correctly, I even think it was Marina who suggested it to me. The
schedules of my stay in Paris did not coincide. Transversality was not just
a concept among them. An abstraction. It was above all an experience.
Therefore, just going to the sessions with Félix was not a problem. This
experienced transversality was also clearly seen in the relationship of
friendship and work that Félix had with Gilles Deleuze. In my case,
the condition of exile, of ‘defeated’, of ‘loser’, which is the condition
in my view of the exile, or the refugee, prevented me from walking
freely with both feet in the new – old! – world. That was a common
thread that was always present in our sessions. In our conversations,
schizoanalysis appeared when the rigour of the terms was situated, but
on other occasions these were also free conversation sessions. Our bond
was based on a deep ‘friendship of solidarity’. A friendship committed to
facing the harsh world and the desire to erect new scaffolding to reinvent
the ‘being here’, far from oppressive, redundant capitalist equilibrium
that castrates desire. This requires learning an entire new fabric of
alliances. Every fortnight or so I went and inserted myself and lived in
that environment, his home or the clinic in La Borde, for two or three
days.
Félix was a heretic and unusual psychoanalyst. His aesthetic paradigm
in a permanent conceptual wandering, allergic to any oppressive
transfer, forced one to constantly seek – as a work in progress – one’s
386 Paulina E. Varas

Figure 3. Félix Guattari in the Mapuche Folil Che Aflaiai in Santiago de Chile,
1991. © Miguel D. Norambuena. Reproduced with kind permission.

own centrality, one’s own singularity, power, escape route. The terms,
places and territories were slippery. I can tell you that there was an
urgency to create ‘adjacencies’, to manufacture Invented Spaces, to
build new subjective scaffolding from that peculiar Guattarian ‘healing
process’, to create a positive alterity, in order to avoid being sucked
into the melancholy and depressive paradigm of the exile. To establish a
political, experiential and existential coalescence, where new life desires
can be processed; and, therefore, to invent new micro-policies, all this
being situated ‘in the middle’, as Deleuze would say, and from the heart
of the oppressive capitalistic beast.
Over the years, I came up with the idea of paying off the debt of
enjoying this healing material in Europe. So first I accompanied David
Cooper in Geneva to deliver a book project that he had developed with
Marina Zecca (CNRS), to the WHO, but I never heard of that text again.
Later, with Félix, I translated some of the texts that he gave me, and then
came the trip to Chile with Félix, where my job was to go unnoticed with
him in Santiago. This allowed me to re-focus on my own experience, my
own story of rupture and suffering.
PEV: On the one hand, there was the publication of Cartografías del
deseo in 1989 by Francisco Zegers in Santiago, for which you were
the main translator; then came his 1991 visit, when he held a series
of conferences and meetings in the cities of Santiago, Valparaíso and
 Transversal Polyphonies 387

Villa Alemana; and finally, the 1998 publication of the book El devenir
de la subjetividad (Dolmen), edited by Cristóbal Santa Cruz with your
collaboration, which became a powerful record of those visits and paths
in Chile, situated reflections that show ways of accessing that critical
legacy as a sensitive cartography. Going back to those experiences and
contrasting them with your own existence in Geneva, I wanted to ask
you about establishing the foundations on which you created Racard in
the 1980s and Dracar in 2015, those two spaces of caring and life.
The Racard Centre was established in 1981. It was the result of
the work on memory with students at the School of Social Work in
Geneva, IES (now called Haute École de Travail Social, or HETS). Our
first experience lasted two years. The issue of the residents surpassed
the management capacity of these young professionals, who believed
that their motivation and dedication were enough to provide a ‘daily
institutional life’ to individuals who experience and suffer serious
personality dysfunctions. The centre closed its doors. But the demand
for this type of ‘living space’ motivated the Municipality of Geneva
to open a public contest and that is how I was named as coordinator
of that second experience. Thanks to the testimony of a colleague
who had participated in the first experience, I gradually created, along
with an initial psychosocial team (clinical psychologists and social
workers), the foundations of what over the years I started calling the
‘Daily Life Clinic’. The Racard Centre was created as a result of the
institutionalisation of an entire ‘oppositional’ movement. It was in
those years that, in Europe and in Geneva, a series of alternative or
private associations with financial support from the municipalities or
the State began to emerge. These alternative associations were actively
opposed to the authoritarian State and systemic paradigm in effect, and
proposed new forms of psychological, psychiatric, prison, educational,
university, economic and ecological care. The late 1970s and the
1980s was a time when people were experimenting and laying the
foundations for ecological, anti-militarist, anti-fascist, anti-conformist,
anti-consumerism, and politically autonomous ideas and practices.
It could be said that, at Racard, the first ten years of development
of what I called ‘psychosocial animation’ – a care paradigm created
specifically for people who do not adhere to ordinary treatments and
care positions – was protected by this vast social context of energy and
beliefs in favour of social and institutional change. At the same time, it
was supported and sustained by the work I had undertaken with Félix
Guattari, either personally or in his seminars, where, during each of my
trips to Paris, I visited and participated in meetings with David Cooper,
388 Paulina E. Varas

Marina Zecca, Gilles Deleuze, Fernand Deligny or at the La Borde clinic.

Those years helped me forge concepts and practices that were, shall we
say, ‘adjacent’ or ‘coalescent’ to the existing ones, with these people as
living and permanent ‘analysers’. As I reflect on this situation now, it
was at least a privilege, if not a luxury!
Psychosocial animation, such as the Daily Life Clinic, although it
enjoys a great deal of academic interest – for example, both the Racard
Centre and the Dracar Centre receive interns every year, and both
are also admired by other social health centres – I believe that it is a
different question to assume this proposal as a professional. Because
living this proposal in flesh and blood, day in and day out, demands
a tremendous effort in terms of the discipline and rigorous reflection
required of all performance or theatrical work. Because the residents
of the Racard Centre are chronic and/or temporary users or patients of
the Geneva Psychiatric Hospital, as well as local ambulatory psychiatric
centres (extra-hospital, daytime units), in one way or another, Racard
is integrated into the city’s existing psychosocial care ‘network’. This
integration is fundamentally due to the fact that outside of Racard,
and later the Dracar Centre, there is no other ‘living space’ in Geneva
designed for people who do not adhere to the usual psychosocial
rehabilitation treatments, follow-ups or initiatives.
In 2015, I left the address of the Racard Centre. That same year,
months before leaving, I received from the Municipality the news I had
been awaiting for some years. I had even forgotten about that request: a
villa with land to accommodate eight residents who were equally wary
of current care initiatives. That is how I founded the Dracar Centre.
This time, it was a house with land for gardening, a chicken coop and
an orchard. The professionals, four clinical psychologists, unlike at the
Racard Centre, did not sleep at the centre. Here, are half-timers that
take turns with irregular visits during the morning, at noon and in the
afternoon until 9:00 p.m. At Dracar, the work of the Daily Life Clinic
is distinctly more difficult than at the Racard Centre, since owing to the
professionals’ not living there, the residents are the ones who must shape
daily life.
Both the Racard Centre and the Dracar Centre were born from a
socio-political need of Geneva’s institutional society, to offer individuals
who do not adhere to psychotherapeutic programmes, or ordinary social
insertion programmes, a welcoming and ad hoc place for living and
for clinical monitoring, characterised by high levels of freedom. The
proposal is to offer these individuals, who suffer from significant, and
often chronic, social exclusion and personality disorders, a clinical,
 Transversal Polyphonies 389

psychosocial initiative that does not reproduce what they cannot access.
The proposal includes two basic ideas:
1. The idea of the programme. An ordinary psychotherapeutic or
social insertion programme implies being able to adhere to an irreducible
logical monitoring such as: to achieve C, one must first achieve B (A + B
= C). In this case, and for different reasons, these individuals – affected
by a psychic pain, a deep feeling of loneliness and social or family
failure, with delusional and/or paranoid presences – cannot, nor can
they build, nor can they positively resolve B, such as, for example,
to set an appointment for the next day, to maintain a minimum
regularity by taking their medicines, as well as their meals. To insist
on a programme, believing that it is a problem of ill will – which is
what generally happens – does nothing but enhance the feelings of failure
and exclusion, which these people ultimately internalise. For them, this
implies a significant amount of self-destructive and social violence.
2. Ordinary residential psychotherapeutic instruments, such as homes
or others, by not ‘accepting’ the asocial behaviours of these people, such
as marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, self-medication and deficient hygiene,
quickly exclude them. This implies that a significant number of these
people are quickly living on the streets or, given the conflicts they
cause, moved from one shelter to another – places that have no human,
relational or professional support.
The Daily Life Clinic is a notion based on the idea of ‘being on the
patient’s side’ and ‘taking care of the production of social relationships’,
which seeks to create a social and subjective space. It is an Invented
Space, where these people can be recognised and accepted in their
‘radical otherness’. In other words, that the proposal, as well as the daily
accompaniment offered to them, integrates these a-social behaviours,
such as non-adherence to the idea of a programme, considering this other
social clinical paradigm. This implies that the professionals working
there, clinical psychologists or from other compatible social science
disciplines, must accept this ‘critical threshold’ as a reciprocal field
of research that may de-stigmatise the clinic. Which means accepting
that the goal here, and the foundation of the ‘healing process’, is the
production of relations, the building of relationships, accepting that
people are as they are, and not as one would like them to be.
In this context, both the individual and group activities that
professionals propose, such as gardening, masonry, working with clay,
drawing, music, preparing meals and walks (or doing nothing), are
not ends in themselves, but rather that they constitute a means, an
390 Paulina E. Varas

Figure 4. Diagram of ‘Daily Life Clinic’ of Miguel D. Norambuena. © Miguel

D. Norambuena. Reproduced with kind permission.

interface, a conjunctive space, a bridge, or an ecosophic, multi-material,

heterogeneous and open agency, so that these people may, thanks to
mutual trust, work in progress, develop, put into motion their life
stories. Experiential stories that they rarely have the chance to practise.
In this sense, the goal of the Daily Life Clinic and of the healing
processes is to allow these people to move from one day to another
and, according to the possibilities of each person, towards a minimum
grammatical commitment to activities: transformation of materials,
creation of reference points, and procedural transfers. All voluntary
activities that each professional initiates with the first movement and
develops. Here, the activity is not for the other person. It is so that the
professional, in the task itself, can produce and experience connections,
as well as a social and subjective relationship that is adjacent and
de-stigmatised.
 Transversal Polyphonies 391

The development of the operative ‘clinical or institutional character’

is very difficult, because the issue of the pragmatic efficiency of a non-
representative clinical authority, beyond the usual clichés, is constructed
and dismantled, or is normalised, or is stigmatised, day in and day
out in the concrete relationship developed with the residents. This
entire process of domiciliation and de-institutionalisation, as well as
de-stigmatisation of the insane and insanity, is nothing less than the
creation of what I called Invented Spaces, which, over time and through
my experiences alongside professionals and students, I have realised is
harder to appropriate and reinvent for itself than I thought.
It is as if this pragmatic dimension, adjacent and non-parallel to the
ordinary care instruments, was like onstage theatrical work. A work
that claims a strong and generous truth in itself! Today, the Dracar
Centre, like the Racard Centre, continues that attempt, to use the
expression of Fernand Deligny, following its own path. Both centres
reinvent themselves and, in their own ways, shape that Daily Life Clinic
that is only sustained by practice and in the present.
PVE: When I visited Dracar, I saw how you situated this place as part
of a trajectory of relationships with other experiences of institutional
analysis, specifically in a diagram that was displayed in the meeting
room, which identified each person’s tasks. I would like to ask you about
the grid they have at Dracar. What do you remember about the grid at
the La Borde clinic where Guattari worked? What connections can you
make between these two spaces?
MDN: Gilles Deleuze always said that all these postures and
developments, which are minor, minority, molecular, nomadic and
adjacent, enjoy a fragile and precarious health. And this is due to
the fact that they are permanently receiving requests, either from the
inside or the outside, from a multiplicity of normalisation vectors. They
are all more or less fascist, castrators of desire, of imagination, of
innovation and of creation. Here, it matters very little whether one is
on the political right or the left, alternative or environmentalist. These
vectors of normalisation and micro-fascist and/or conformist subjective
remodelling include all these identities and desires. The brief history of
the Guattarian grid at the La Borde clinic is one of the many examples
of how, even within an adjacent institutional, clinical agency, it may be
broken down from within.
The Guattarian grid was nothing more than allowing the entire staff
of the clinic – nurses, social workers, cooks, doctors, psychologists – to
shift, to move from one activity to another, depending on their interest.
392 Paulina E. Varas

The grid was an instrument of visibility regarding the insertion and

rotation of each person in this or that activity, without prejudice
to their position or their place within the institutional hierarchy. It
was precisely by touching the professional and institutional status of
some professionals – the hierarchy, in any case – that the resistance to
change began to operate and to rot the initiative from within. Some,
for example, did not understand; they did not want to be hired as
psychologists or doctors and then work as gardeners, when the whole
point was to reposition themselves subjectively in another territorial
context or agency, in order to give them a wider range of resonance
fields and spaces for building human relations with the patients.
At Dracar, Lola Nadel, a psychosocial animator and logopedist,
tried to reinvent a grid based on the Guattarian paradigm for the
Daily Life Clinic. The Dracardian grid did not reach beyond the
wall chart that she created. I believe that, in today’s institutional
work scheme, pandemic neo-conformism, the environmental paranoia
that characterises it, subsumes any desire for change and subjective
creativity. Because this can be seen as an instrument of ‘control’ and of
statutory devaluation, instead of being seen as an operative synergistic
cartography of the subjective and institutional insertion of each person,
and as a vector of ‘healing kinetics’, in which this mobility of work
can operate among patients or residents. This does not mean that,
at Dracar, each professional has no mobility between such and such
activity: that exists and is developed, but without a grid to serve as an
nomadic-cartographic-analyser, nor evolution, nor the healing benefit of
ecosophic agency: resident-professional-activity or that of each person
with the activities proposed to the residents.

PVE: I think it’s important to reflect on how these legacies can be reused
today, to give them, in their use value, a practical meaning for our
present life. Your experience in Geneva is an example of how joint
lessons bore fruit and led to something unexpected. I am interested
in building bridges so that these radical experiences and concepts
developed and situated in Europe in the 1970s, may be related to
present-day movements that are located outside the European axis and in
dialogue with other knowledge from the Global South. It is interesting
to imagine how these concepts that help us think today, in the sense
that Isabelle Stengers proposes of ‘learning what is necessary to inhabit
once again what was destroyed’, have a use value beyond their specific
time and space and can be resignified to the extent that we are using
them today.
 Transversal Polyphonies 393

MDN: Today, the validity of the Integrated World Capitalism, and

wherever we are located on the planet, has reduced the spaces of
freedom and creation, of Chaosmosis, of singularity, of immanence
or desiring, individual and collective transversality, to their minimal
expression. In many cases, the cancellation of this power implies putting
everything aside, surrendering to a micropolitical struggle because the
tools to escape it are increasingly scarce, the spaces of care and
regeneration require great efforts. The social, political, intellectual
and institutional repression of anthropological vocation wins over
subjectivities everywhere, for the benefit of a growing and infantile,
widespread, trans-humanist paradigm that is cathodic, numerical and
computational. Thus, and thanks to the current capitalist, algorithmic
and numerical social integration, the consumerist valuation in vogue has
become massive and transcontinental. This transformed endemic and
chronic consumerism into the only horizon of meaning and existence
of the human genus.
Faced with this gigantic tsunami of redundant and invalidating
semiotics of desire, solidarity and social creativity, being able to escape
this regime and its reductive nature is to support and create, wherever
one may be, a heterogeneous multiplicity of machines of creation and
emancipation of subjectivities, of social, political, aesthetic, nomadic and
minor creations. To develop an entire micro-policy of care, of Invented
Spaces, in order to overcome social and mental alienation, misogyny,
racism, ghettoisation and gentrification. Therefore, this revision of
concepts and latitudes represents, for us, no more than a modest
but intense and enthusiastic rhizomatic act of resistance. The erratic,
unthinkable flow of a desire, of a sharing, of a life that is worth living,
in spite of the current infamy and the impunity of power.
Everything that is no longer, is this. From the ashes is born this other
thing that is difference, power, creativity, desire. As Isabelle Stengers
says, ‘To inhabit devastated zones of experience once again.’ The point
of connection with the other, as a singular molecule that communicates
with its adjacency, is powerful but minimal. A thousand and one forms
of the molecular revolution, from the most visible to the most invisible.
Text-flows, flows of texts that are recorded in time, are inventing their
own time, but are always requested by non-construction and their
equilibrium is quite precarious, they reappear elsewhere, there is a power
to persevere in their existence. Precarious as life itself. Text-flows in
transition, in transit, nomads. Flows of texts, suffering from a fragile
health, like all minority developments: a transductive instrument, ‘what
394 Paulina E. Varas

is manufactured by two’, coalescently and at the same time, other people,

like others, a thousand and one more, pluricosmic.

References
Guattari, Félix (1989) Cartografías del deseo, Santiago: Francisco Zegers Editor.
Guattari, Félix (1998) El devenir de la subjetividad, Santiago: Dolmen Ediciones.
Rolnik, Suely (2013) Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo, Buenos Aires: Tinta
Limón Ediciones.