Felix Guattari’s and Michel Foucault’s works on the production of
subjectivity investigate the transversal relations of social, political, and
ecological bodies in their biopolitical constitution. Both authors, most
prominently in their late works after 1980, write in opposition to the
conservative backlash that has come to dominate institutionalizing
forms of enclosure and impositions of legitimized and impoverished
forms of subjectivity.1 For them, the production of subjectivity becomes
the very existential territory on which social, ethical, and aesthetic
transformations must be negotiated. The subject—or rather a processual
subjectivity—becomes the machinic foyer out of which new and more
transversal accounts of the socius can be developed. These processes rely
on practices of self-governance, forms of practices of the self, and modes
of constitution of the subject which are recurrent features of Foucault’s
late writings on the care for the self and Guattari’s deliberations on a
“new aesthetic paradigm.”