Between Ethnography and Psychoanalysis: Guattari vis-à-vis Clastres and Sebag

From 1980 onwards, the concept of existential territories becomes one of Guattari’s key ideas. This entails a complete reassessment of the very notion of territory which, prior to that date, he had interpreted in negative terms. I contend that, among other factors, Guattari’s discovery of Barbara Glowczewski’s work on Australian Aboriginal totemic spaces played a key role in that conceptual shift, which added to Guattari’s growing interest in the concept of determinability. Additionally, and based on it, I analyse Guattari’s relation with structuralism.