Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities - Book Review

Aug 23, 2026

Review of Félix Guattari’s Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities, an early but newly translated text contributing to his wider project of thinking through social spaces, structures, and processes, especially the political role of groups. Written during his collaboration with Gilles Deleuze on A Thousand Plateaus, the work is presented as challenging yet energizing for addressing contemporary tensions. The review highlights the “baroque” style, the politics of normalized expression, and key ideas such as the social fabrication of the individual, the social unconscious, and the complexity of contexts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages3

Reading Time5 min

AccessFree to download

Review Overview

Translation, Style, and Political Stakes

Contexts, Semiotics, and Collective Equipment

Practical Intent and Key Concepts

Lines of Flight for Further Thinkers

Book Review: Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities by Félix Guattari [blogs.lse.ac.uk](blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/09/book-review-lines-of-fl)[/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/09/book-review-lines-of-fl](blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/09/book-review-lines-of-fl)ight-for-another-world-of-possibilities-by-felix-guattari/ Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities offers an early but newly-translated text by Félix Guattari that contributes to his wider project of thinking through social spaces, structures and processes, in particular the political role of groups. Written when Guattari was collaborating with Gilles Deleuze on A Thousand Plateaus, this is a challenging read, but one that invigoratingly suggests ‘another world of possibilities ’ when it comes to considering the most pressing issues and growing tensions facing us today, writes Jodie Matthews . Lines ofFlight: For Another World of Possibilities . Félix Guattari. Bloomsbury. 2016. Find this book: Félix Guattari’s translator, Andrew Goffey, has described the theorist’s style of work as ‘intractably baroque’. It is an apt description of the analysis of the spaces , structures and processes of society to be found in this early but newly-translated text by the French philosopher. The difficult nature of Guattari’s prose seems a superficial place to start a review of this exploration of the social unconscious , and yet it must surely dominate every reading experience of Lines ofFlight: For Another World of Possibilities, apart from perhaps that of the practised Guattari specialist. His writing features eighty-word sentences , some that aren’t grammatically complete and so don’t seem to go anywhere and instances of abstraction masquerading as specificity. And yet, this style can be forgiven , for it has a purpose. Goffey has elsewhere described Guattari’s interest in the ‘disruption of the surfaces of sense’ and the political implications of ‘ normalized forms of expression’. Indeed , in Lines of Flight, Guattari points to universities and their modes of communication becoming part of the ‘equipment of normalisation’, dampening their potential as sites of ‘revolutionary effervescence’. To write as he does is to demand that we revisit language and meaning. And , to its credit, Lines of Flight is also cut through with brilliantly provocative section titles , such as ‘Bureaucratic Socialism , The Highest Stage of Capitalism’. Goffey’s introduction to Lines of Flight helps to locate the work , particularly useful for those wanting to place it in a genealogy of twentieth-century European thought. The text is part of Guattari’s larger project of thinking through the political role of groups. It was originally titled ‘Collective Equipment and Semiotic Subjugation’, and was written around the time that Guattari was collaborating on A Thousand Plateaus with Gilles Deleuze , feeding directly into that landmark text. As well as being a philosophical piece , Lines of Flight was supposed to be practical: it was written as a report for the Ministère de l’équipement (created under the Georges Pompidou government in 1960) , which was concerned with such things as transport, public works and construction. It is astonishing to think quite what the staff of the Ministry would have made of it. Image Credit: Crowded London Skies (Alexander Baxevanis CC 2.0) In a section headed ‘The Myth of Human Nature’, Guattari asserts that ‘the individual is entirely fabricated by society, in particular by its collective equipment’, undermining humanist ideologies with that assertion. That‘collective equipment’ is not just the walls , offices and circulations that might primarily have concerned the Ministry, but also ‘rituals of submission’ : all the ways in which we are shaped by our existence in groups. As a whole , the work explains that ‘the unconscious is neither individual nor collective , it is everywhere that a labour of signs bears on r

FAQs

What is the book’s significance according to the review?

It is an early but newly translated text that broadens Guattari’s project of thinking through social spaces, structures, and political roles of groups, while resonating with current tensions.

Why is the prose described as difficult, and how is that addressed?

The review notes “intractably baroque” writing, including long or incomplete sentences and abstraction, but argues the style serves a purpose by forcing renewed attention to language and meaning.

What core idea does the review emphasize about the unconscious and contexts?

The review explains that the unconscious is neither purely individual nor collective but “everywhere,” tied to how signs shape reality; universal master keys are rejected in favor of understanding specific contexts.

Aug 23, 2026

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