Chaosophy - autonomous learning

promotion of such a subjectivity of difference, of the atypical, of
utopia, our epoch could topple into atrocious conflicts of identity,
like those which the people of ex-Yugoslavia have undergone."52
The disastrous implosion which ex-Yugoslavia experienced, as
well as the dangers of generalized warlike violence on a planetary
scale seen in the war against Iraq, led Guattari in the '90s to oppose
such logics of vicious oppositions with the greatest rigor and to
debate this topic further with Paul Virilio. Guattari was radically
opposed to the first war against Iraq in the early '90s, and saw it as
the manifestation of an American hegemony bent on imposing
its own solutions on the international community: "The conflict
against Iraq is beginning under the worst possible conditions. The
United States above all defends its interest as a great power: since
the beginning of the crisis, it had never stopped manipulating the
United Nations. "53 Without denying the major role assumed by the
Iraqi dictator in the beginning of the war, Guattari invoked the
perversion of the international order which has led to this disastrous
situation: the complicity among the great powers in the
Iraq-Iran conflict, the nonresolution of the questions of Lebanon
and the Palestinians, the politics of large oil companies, and "more
generally, the relationship between the North and, the South which
never stops evolving in a catastrophic way."54 This war against Iraq
was rejected by Guattari at least as violently as Deleuze, who signed
with his colleague at Paris VIII, Rene Scherer, a strongly worded
text: "La guerre immonde"55 ("The Abject War"). In it the two
denounced the destruction of a nation, the Iraqi nation, under the
pretext of the liberation of Kuwait, by a Pentagon presented as the
"organ of a State terrorism busy trying out its weapons."56 They also
condemned what they considered a simple alignment of the French
government: "Our government never stops disavowing its own
declarations and increasingly throws itself into a war which it had
the power oppose. Bush congratulates us as one thanks a servant."5
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