Félix Guattari — Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992, trans. 1995)
Guattari’s final major work, developing the concept of chaosmosis — an osmotic, productive relationship with chaos as the source of new existential territories and modes of being. Against both the romantic glorification of chaos and the modernist drive to impose order, Guattari proposes that the threshold between chaos and complexity is where genuine creativity and subjectification occur.
The book proposes an “aesthetic paradigm” as the successor to both scientific and political paradigms in ethics: rather than applying universal laws (scientific paradigm) or pursuing predefined goals (political paradigm), emancipatory practice is fundamentally about the creation of new possible worlds — new ways of feeling, perceiving, and existing. This is not individualist aestheticism but a theory of collective subjectification through the creation of shared aesthetic territories.
Key concepts:
- Chaosmosis: productive passage through chaos into new existential territories
- Existential territories: the lived, affective spaces within which subjectification occurs
- Heterogenesis: the production of difference through the encounter with chaos — opposed to homogenization
- Transversality: connections across heterogeneous series that produce new assemblages without unifying them
For OM: Chaosmosis provides the philosophical basis for treating aesthetic practices (free parties, underground scenes, participatory art) as genuinely political — not metaphorically but as primary sites of the production of new forms of life and subjectification.